Bouts with Success.  Comedian Drew Hastings as success guru Jack Freeman talking about performance and success.

It’s that time of year again when a lot of companies take time to reflect on their marketing and sales achievements and start planning for the new year.

One of the best tips we can offer is let your metrics do the work for you.  Relying on metrics from your Google Analytics program, Salesforce.com reports, social media stats will allow you to paint a picture for yourself and your colleagues as to the effectiveness of your Calendar 2010 marketing and sales efforts.

Your metrics will also allow you to develop a tactical plan for:

1. Required areas for improvement. I.e. Reducing Bounce rates on key pages of your website.
2. Decreasing lead “fall off” and improving conversion through better lead management techniques.
3. Increasing website traffic and traffic quality.
4. Leveraging B2B social media such as LinkedIn to generate leads more effectively
5. The list goes on…

Really, what we’re saying is that taking the time to review your metrics, you will see true value behind the numbers which will help you to develop a path to even greater success in 2011.

What 4 star hotels are saying about value when they offer steep discounts through travel websites - Comedians Greg Warren and Henry Phillips do a great job of saying buyer beware!

Who hasn’t seen this in real life!

Google Analytics will tell you who’s visited your site, how long they were there and what pages they visited. It’s pretty basic but it does work for companies with limited marketing budgets.

It takes a bit of additional digging but your marketing folks need to be mining analytics to get more value out of your website.

Don’t let the technology dictate your value proposition!

Hard at work at drive2

Virtually all of drive2’s customers are complex sales that can run anywhere from 6 months to 24 months before closing a sale, so perhaps my perspective is somewhat different, however my post here speaks directly to most small companies (which make up 80% of the economy) and the challenges you deal with every day.

Back when I was in a purely sales role, a lead would come in and it was almost instantly transitioned to a sales person for follow-up (most small business even savvy tech marketers still works this way). The sales person was often (and lucky) to be equipped with some boiler plate corporate marketing materials and if really lucky a bunch of self-serving industry stats to show why there “stuff” is better than the other companies’ stuff.

Now the successful sales person was always looking to gain advantage over the competitor. What we did was research and mine third party content (magazine articles, research reports etc) that was relevant to the lead’s industry or purchasing considerations to demonstrate that we could provide additional value and actually cared enough to understand their business and industry.

Simplistic? - YES
Did it work? - Not a 100% of the time but I won way more than I lost.

Why? Because I took the time to provide relevant content that mattered to the prospect and that activity supported building a relationship that closed business. It didn’t have to be something customized, all it needed to do was demonstrate that we were willing to bring more value to get the business.

Yes, you still need to provide case studies, white papers, customer references etc. However, I think we all need to remember that as valuable as these collateral pieces are to managing prospects through the funnel, most of the time, People still buy from People and “person buying” has to like the “person selling” in order for sales to close business. Just because it’s now on marketing to nuture the relationship doesn’t mean the sales game has changed.

I.e. If I’m selling to a couple of current prospects and have a good data mining program that skims data from sources like LinkedIn - I might just be savvy enough to send Owen (family guy who likes to travel and jet ski) an article we’ve found on the “Best Jetskiing Destinations for Family Vacations” or Baxter (a triathlete) an article on “10 Ways You can Improve your Running Performance at your Desk”.

Now would any of these articles be relevant to the sale or my company? Absolutely not - but would they differentiate and build personal relationship? YES. If we can do this level of nurturing at a personal level, it’s easy to do the same at a much higher level based on the prospect’s industry and the product or service you’re selling.

The point is that you don’t need customized content and most companies don’t have the time or resources to develop a customized library of content. You need to maintain focus on content that will facilitate building the relationship and help close more sales.

Everyone asks me; how can we start to build demand.

Well, here’s the answer. Content is King

If you want to drive interest in your products and services here’s the quick checklist of what you need to be doing online and offline to create qualified opportunities.

1. Develop Case Studies – Nothing builds relevance and demonstrates your experience better than real world examples of Problem, Solution, Result as it applies to your customer experience.
2. Cut out the marketing blah blah blah. If your favourite terms are “enables our customers” or “empowers users” you probably suffer from Verbose Marketing Disorder (VMD). Eliminate VMD from your life and your marketing. Focus on real facts and demonstrate your value without the gobbly gook.
3. Don’t Bait and Switch – Don’t promise relevant content and then switch out content with a sales pitch disguised as content. It’s the quickest way to turn off an interested potential customer.
4. Engage in user forums. Tools like LinkedIn Groups www.linkedin.com are excellent for engaging your relevant target audiences (provided you don’t use it as a spam fest). If you have opinions or thoughts, put them out to the group, you can network online with like minded peers and demonstrate your value and knowledge easily with a simple investment of time.
   
   Realign your Value Proposition – Instead of telling potential customers what your products or services can do, tell them about what problems your company’s products or services can solve. Decision makers want to know the real business impact of the solution you are offering, tell them exactly what it is.
   
   That’s it, That’s all. Relevant Content and an easy to explain (and validate) value proposition just makes sense. Simple.