Category: Sales and Marketing

We recently started the process of researching outsourced appointment setting to get a feel for the options and how it might help us accelerate our growth. After a few meetings I’ve developed a grasp of the different options and strategies. Here are a few notes so far:

• Dials per day per rep is typically 80-100 using an automated dialer technology
• Success percentages are in the 3-7% (e.g. call on 1,000 companies and get 50 appointments for a 5% success percentage over a comprehensive campaign)
• Pricing styles include per call costs (~$2), per hour costs ($30 – $50), and per completed appointment costs ($500 – $1,000) or a hybrid of these
• Training typically takes 4-6 weeks to get started
• Reviews weekly of recorded successful calls is a best practice

I can readily see the value these organizations provide and we should be making a decision shortly. I’m looking forward to learning more about what does and doesn’t work.

What else? Have you tried outsourced appointment setting and what did you learn?

This afternoon I had the chance to do my monthly EO Accelerator Accountability Group mentoring with six Atlanta entrepreneurs working hard to scale their business. After doing individual business updates and a lightning round of quick Q&A, we jumped into discussion topics around sales, marketing, and prospect nurturing (part of marketing).

After a couple entrepreneurs talked I was quickly reminded that the biggest hurdle for most entrepreneurs to reach $1 million in revenue is a reproducible sales process not limited to referrals. Yes, referrals are great, and should not be ignored, but most startups are going to have a hard time to scaling to $1 million in revenue within three years without a reproducible sales process. Here are some factors in a reproducible sales process:

• Ability to generate leads or talk to prospects in a reliable manner
• Capability to perform a set of sales steps and actions that produce results
• Consistent sales cycle, approachable buyers, and known tactics

Again, this isn’t required to be a successful startup, but the ones I’ve seen scale have these components. My recommendation is to work hard to find and build a reproducible sales process.

What else? What other factors go into a reproducible sales process?

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a true revolution for marketers. They’re the main reason Google is on a $30 billion/year revenue run rate. For B2B marketers, PPC can be a bit daunting, and get expensive quickly. In many cases, to get sufficient clicks from potential prospects you have to bid much higher than you might normally, otherwise it isn’t worth your time to use it for lead gen. Here are a few tools to consider to help to get more value from your PPC spend:

• SearchIgnite – for marketers with big budgets
• WordStream – for SMB marketers
• Clickable – for SMB marketers
• Keyword Discovery – more for finding SEO and SEM keywords
• Wordtracker – focused on keywords as well

My recommendation is for B2B marketers to experiment with these tools to better understand their strengths and weaknesses as well as help with marketing efforts.

What else? What are some other PPC tools you like?

Web analytics tools, especially the industry standard Google Analytics platform, are powerful tools more commonly used on a regular basis by B2C marketers as opposed to B2B marketers. For B2B marketers the number of hits and visitors, entry and exit pages, geographic and demographic, and other forms of data don’t always translate into productive information. B2C marketers, often generating revenue from advertising, get immediate value from those types of stats.

For B2B marketers, the real value comes from understanding qualified prospect behavior, something a marketing automation system provides. In addition to using micro web analytics tools provided by marketing automation systems, B2B marketers should take advantage of goals in Google Analytics to understand activities that add value. Here are some examples goals from a recent Search Engine Watch article:

• Set 1: Contact actions
  • Contact form complete
  • Newsletter sign-up
  • Email link clicked
  • Etc.
• Set 2: Site engagement
  • Blog comment
  • Feedback/poll widget completed
  • Etc.
• Set 3: Downloads
  • White papers, brochures, etc.
• Set 4: Micro-conversions
  • Contact page viewed
  • Product pages viewed
  • Etc.
• Set 5: Engagement metrics
  • Time spent on site
  • Pages per visit

Notice that the focus is on items directly related to lead generation and nurturing. My recommendation is for B2B marketers to use goals and work to improve those results when using macro web analytics tools.

With all the talk about inbound marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), one topic isn’t talked about enough: the dead weight of old web content. That’s right, having old, stale content that isn’t adding value should be removed. Too often companies are in such a rush to get as many pieces of content out on their site that they don’t take the time to prune unnecessary content.

How many times have you done a search on a site only to get back several results that were unrelated to what you wanted, and often out-of-date? Here are a few tips when thinking about old web content:

• Is there content on your site that is out-of-date?
• Do you have higher priority content with similar terms that shows up below old content in search results?
• Do you remove one piece of content for every five or 10 pieces of content you add?
• Are there sections of your site, or separate sub-domains that aren’t in the same content management system and reduce the overall user experience?

Old web content detracts from the web experience and should be pruned whenever possible.

What else? What other tips do you have related to old web content?

Continuing yesterday’s post titled Thoughts on Inbound Marketing, I want to highlight the power of driving traffic to blogs by way of examples from previous posts on this blog. Inbound links, social media, search engines, RSS subscribers, and email subscribers drive the vast majority of traffic.

Some numbers and details on traffic to this blog:

• A typical weekday has 160 visitors and a typical weekend day has 80 visitors, almost all from subscribers (RSS + email) and social media
• Search engines drove 230 visitors to the blog last week
• Traffic for last week was 1,535 page views
• Busiest day ever was Sunday, June 6, 2010 with 1,204 page views due to Reddit driving traffic to the Post Mortem on a Failed Product
• Most tweeted post with 239 was 50 Things Every Startup Should Know
• HBS Prof Tom Eisenman’s post yesterday Launching Tech Ventures: Part IV, Readings has driven 37 visitors so far

The morale of the story: high quality inbound links drive the most one-off jumps in traffic, which slowly grows repeat visitors over time.

Inbound marketing is hot. The idea behind inbound marketing is to pull prospects in and have them raise their hand for more information as opposed to outbound marketing that interrupts them. Now, I’m a huge proponent of outbound marketing including cold calls and other targeted messaging but inbound marketing is a major force rapidly growing in popularity. In addition, educating prospects is the best form of marketing.

Here are a few notes about inbound marketing:

• Content is king
• The idea is to create unique, valuable content to educate site visitors and turn them into prospects
• Quality, fresh content will generate inbound links from other sites increasing search engine rankings, more web traffic, and thus more leads
• It encompasses content (blogs, videos, etc), SEO (search marketing), and social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc)

My recommendation is to pay attention to inbound marketing and include it as part of your sales and marketing strategy.

How often do you get emails from your cable or phone company saying they just lowered your monthly price? I’ve never seen it. In fact, I can’t think of any technology services, or regular services, that have lowered their price once, let alone continually.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) lowers prices on a regular basis (see today’s notice here and another notice from a few months ago here). What that says to me as a customer of theirs is that they are committed to improving their infrastructure and economies of scale with the goal of passing some of that costs savings onto their users. That makes me a more loyal customer. We use AWS for a variety of functions from cloud instances with EC2 to cloud storage with S3. AWS is an impressive offering that keeps getting better, more comprehensive, and more cost effective.

What can you do for your customers to make them more loyal? What’s your tradeoff between pricing and volume of customers?

As part of the EO Accelerator quarterly education day that I helped host at my office yesterday, we spent the day talking about people. On one of the tangents talking about sales reps the topic of best time to call came up. Turns out there was a report done by InsideSales.com in 2009 that’s available over at the The Lead Response Management Study site.

Here are a few of the nuggets from the survey which was based on data from a CRM for calls made to leads generated from the web:

• Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call
• 4-6PM is the best time to make contact with a lead
• It is best to call within 20 hours of the lead coming in

I’m a big proponent of striking while the iron is hot. My recommendation is always to follow-up with a lead immediately when they come in, if only to say that we’re hear to help. Most people assume they can’t get a quality sales rep on the phone and this is a way to differentiate and start establishing rapport. Head on over to the study to learn more.