• Do Your PDFs Have Embedded Sharing Options?, Galen De Young on MarketingProfs

Promote Your Content via Press Releases

• Lumension Security Launches eBook, Lumension Security

Offer Competitive Comparisons

• Novell Teaming vs. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Novell
• Intel I/O Acceleration Technology vs. TCP Offload Engine, Intel

Shake Up Your Case Studies

• HealthPro Medical Billing uses case studies to overcome objections
• IBM podcast transcript: Baptist Health Systems case study
• SAP Business Transformation Study
  

Deliver Third-Party Content

• Femto Hub destination site
• HiveFire content curation solution
  

Consider Microsites

• Fujitsu RUS/ARRA Resource Site
• Microsoft Channel 9 microsite 

Collect incremental information

I'm a proponent of collecting incremental information during each successive interaction with a prospect. Think of your relationship with the prospect like a dating scenario. On the first date, you wouldn’t expect the other person to tell you everything about his or her self. Instead, you’d expect to learn more and more over time. That’s the same mindset you should have with your prospects.

How it works

Let's say a prospect's first interaction with you is to download something valuable, such as a white paper, eBook, or how-to guide from your Web site. You could request the prospect's name and email address in exchange for the download.You could send an email asking if the person would like to receive useful information from time to time (i.e., would grant permission to be added to your database). Plus, at the end of the paper, eBook, or guide, you could point the person to another asset in your library – whatever makes sense in relation to moving the prospect through the buying process in a logical sequence.

Let's assume that you encourage the reader to sign up for the next paper in a series. When the person requests the download, you could ask for his or her company name and role. At the end of that paper, you could point the prospect to a one-hour webinar. Upon signup, you could ask for the person's company size, timeframe to purchase, and phone number.

The key is to ask for a bit more information with each contact so you can build the information up over time. (Equally important, you should only ask for information that you will use.) That way you take the burden off the prospect while gathering the information you need. By using cookies, you can pre-populate your forms with the information you’ve captured to date. The prospect can see you’re asking for just a bit of additional information with each interaction.

What it looks like

In a recent Webinar presented by Target Marketing magazine, Adam Needles of SilverPop showed what progressive profiling looks like.

If you're not using a marketing automation tool, you'll need to do the following to put this into play. Map your content assets to the prospect's role and place in the buying stage, and work with your Web or IT group to make sure your registration database pre-populates Web forms appropriately. While it might seem like a lot of work, mapping your content assets will serve you well in many ways. Plus, your prospects will appreciate not being hounded from the get-go by phone calls from overzealous telesales reps.

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What Marketers Can Learn from Top-Performing Sales Reps

In its 7-part training series, Basho Technologies of Cambridge, MA outlines the skills that set sales professionals apart from their peers when it comes to closing deals. Top-performing sales reps:

• Understand prospects' needs and objectives
• Make the most of sales tools
• Quantify each sales activity and interaction
• Negotiate at every turn

By studying these best practices, marketers can improve their own processes for connecting with prospects and guiding them down the path to purchase.

Understand prospects' needs and objectives

The best sales reps don't begin an interaction with a prospect by talking about their own company and its offerings. Instead, they do a lot of listening to understand what the prospect is up against or is trying to accomplish. Only then can they determine whether or not their products or services will fit the bill.

Likewise, the best marketers develop buyer personas to gain a deep understanding of their ideal prospects. Doing so enables them to align their content with the prospects' concerns and needs.

If you're a technology marketer, you may be interested in advice from Adelle Revella, who has been using buyer personas to market technology products for more than 20 years. She recommends thinking of your buyer personas in three categories:

• Economic buyers – Those concerned about the cost of the solution.
• Technology buyers – Those responsible for integrating or managing the solution.
• User buyers – Those who will use the solution on a day-to-day basis (or are responsible for the satisfaction of those using the solution).

The key to an effective buyer persona is to capture as much detail as possible about the target person's background, daily habits, activities, challenges, and problem-solving approaches. See this post by Michele Linn for a comprehensive list.

Make the most of sales tools

Successful reps will create a list of everything they can offer a prospect, such as white papers, tradeshow passes, and demos. They then list everything they want from the prospect, including budget confirmation and access to decision makers. This list serves as a basis for bargaining throughout the buying cycle. It also provides a template the sales rep can continually refer to rather than having to start from scratch with each deal.

Marketers should conduct a similar exercise by creating a content matrix – in fact, unless they do, their sales reps will struggle to bargain effectively with prospects. The matrix should lay out all the content assets available to prospects, along with how they align to the buying cycle. By viewing content assets in this way, you can determine if you have enough content to guide a prospect through a long buying cycle. You can also get the most from your content assets without having to recreate the wheel for each new initiative or campaign.

Quantify each sales activity and interaction

Salespeople are continually gauging a prospect’s level of commitment. Since commitments are critical to a successful negotiation, getting repeated buy-in from the prospect is indicative of a healthy opportunity. Similarly, marketers need to continually review a prospect's interaction with the company and its content assets to figure out the level of interest and the next logical step. Marketing automation tools such as those from Eloqua, Genius.com, and Marketo can provide this insight and deliver the right content to a prospect.

Negotiate at every turn

Successful salespeople make use of the law of reciprocity (as laid out by Robert B. Cialdini in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion) to ask prospects for reciprocal exchanges throughout the sales cycle. For example, the sales rep may ask for the prospect's mobile phone number after providing a datasheet or brochure. Further along in the engagement, the sales rep might request access to key decision makers after handing over a rate card.

Similarly, marketers need to request something of appropriate value from prospects with each interaction. While it's fair to request registration in exchange for something of unique value, such as a research report or how-to guide, I think it's out of line to request registration for a brochure or case study.

I'm a proponent of collecting incremental information during each successive interaction with a prospect. Think of your relationship with the prospect like a dating scenario. On the first date, you wouldn’t expect the other person to tell you everything about his or her self. Instead, you’d expect to learn more and more over time. That’s the same mindset you should have with your prospects. The key is to ask for small amounts of information with each interaction so you can build it up over time. That way you take the burden off the prospect while gathering the information you need.

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5 Ways to Wow Your Prospects

A recent Knowledge@Wharton article highlights a report titled "Discovering 'WOW' -- A Study of Great Retail Shopping Experiences in North America," pointing to five major areas that contribute to a great shopping experience:

• Engagement: being polite, genuinely caring and interested in helping, acknowledging and listening.
• Executional Excellence: patiently explaining and advising, checking stock, helping to find products, having product knowledge and providing unexpected product quality.
• Brand Experience: exciting store design and atmosphere, consistently great product quality, making customers feel they're special and that they always get a deal.
• Expediting: being sensitive to customers' time on long check-out lines, being proactive in helping speed the shopping process.
• Problem Recovery: helping resolve and compensate for problems, upgrading quality and ensuring complete satisfaction.

As I read the article, it struck me that B2B companies need to hit upon some of these same areas (which I've highlighted in red above) to impress their prospects. Here's how they can do just that.

1. Understand their concerns – Get to know your prospects so you can engage them on a personal level. This requires some behind-the-scenes work to develop buyer personas. You can then create a library of content that addresses each persona's challenges or goals. TechTarget's 2009 Media Consumption Report provides insight into the types of content that technology buyers seek through the buying cycle; you can see the chart in this blog post. Instead of making this content product- or service-focused, produce useful – and entertaining – information that the prospect can use whether or not she chooses your solution. (See Problem Recovery below.)
2. Educate them – Make it easy for prospects to learn about your products or services by walking them through your Web site in a way that aligns with their role and place in the buying cycle. Offer product information in a variety of formats, such as via online content, downloadable materials, podcasts, and videos. And provide tools that help prospects visualize how your offering might help them. If you're promising lower costs, perhaps you offer an ROI calculator so the prospect can plug in her own numbers.
3. Focus on them – While the look and feel of your Web site, downloadable materials, and other content should be similar, your copy doesn't have to be all about your company and its offerings. One of the easiest ways for B2B companies to make a prospect feel special is by engaging with them in a one-to-one manner that shows a deep understanding of that person's concerns. When they arrive at your Web site, prospects should see language that reflects the way they think about their issues and should be guided down a path to the content that interests them. The content – no matter what the form – should continue speaking to the prospect in a way that mirrors that person's concerns and objectives.
4. Guide them – Make it easy for prospects to find information on your Web site that aligns with where they are in the buying cycle. This ties back to developing buyer personas. Once you understand your ideal prospects and what type of information they're seeking at each stage in the buying cycle, you can walk them through your Web site in a logical manner. On your home page, display the types of issues your prospects are grappling with. Once they've chosen the issue of most concern to them, they should be led to content that helps them better understand the issue and ways to address it. Put all relevant content in one place and present it in a logical fashion so the prospect knows the order in which it makes sense to consume it.
5. Solve their problems – In this area, B2B companies need to find ways to help prospects solve their problems. Resist the urge to hit prospects over the head with your pitch at every turn. Instead take the time to understand their issues and concerns – and then offer suggestions for resolving them. In addition to the datasheet describing your product's features and benefits, perhaps you create a matrix that helps prospects compare options for solving their problem. Rather than putting out another white paper that ends up discussing your offering, maybe you can produce a guide or eBook that focuses solely on how your prospects can tackle a pressing issue – and makes no mention whatsoever of your solution.

 

Dow Jones published an eBook called "The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: The Right Recipe for Organizing Enterprise Metadata" that walks information professionals through the ways that social tagging can help them manage content. It's an entertaining read for a complex topic, and last I heard, it had been downloaded over 1,600 times and resulted in more than 50 solid leads. Chances are, if you publish an informative, entertaining eBook or guide like this, your company will stick out in the prospect's mind when she's making a short list of potential vendors.

 

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How Do You Compare to the Best Content Marketers?

Recently Michele Linn posted about the importance of mapping content to the buying cycle. Right after that, I came across an interesting report released by the Aberdeen Group, which explains how industry leaders approach lead management and demand generation. B2B marketers can glean lots of great insights from this $399 report (being offered for free until October 2, 2009). Here are the ones that caught my eye (and relate to Michele's post):

• Best-in-class companies* are 5X more likely to maintain a library of collateral, copy, and messages that map to prospects' buying stages. If you're questioning the value of this, read this article by Ardath Albee that brilliantly illustrates the true pace at which a prospect interacts with your content and company.
• Of the top barriers to adopting a lead lifecycle management process, "resources to develop lead-nurturing content" tops the list across all company types. While 85% of best-in-class companies can develop and maintain content that maps to each stage of the buying cycle, only 22% of all other companies are able to do so. This is no surprise. Joe Pulizzi of Junta 42 lays out the reasons so many marketers don't do content marketing. If you're wondering how to create this content, another post from Junta42 provides a jumping-off point.
• Best-in-class companies are better able to map content buying cycle stages based on prospect behavior. Read the Aberdeen report to find out how WorkForce Software was able to capture prospects' behavioral information and nurture leads throughout the cycle. If you want to understand the different approaches to nurturing prospects, read thist post by Marketo. And if you're interested in some forward-thinking ideas around capturing information about prospects, check out this post by Blake Hinckley and this one by Chris Koch.

*Aberdeen defines best-in-class companies as those whose practices are the "best currently being employed and are significantly superior to Industry Average." 20% of enterprises fall into this category, while 50% are in the Industry Average range, and 30% are laggards.

Where does your company fall when it comes to creating and mapping content to the buying cycle?

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