Today’s guest post is by Adam Blitzer, COO and Co-founder of Pardot, a marketing and email automation system.  

The key to sales and marketing in a small business is efficiency. Marketing automation technology can help tremendously by eliminating manual effort and nurturing leads.

Small companies often have a seat-of-your-pants approach to marketing, simply because they can’t afford to hire a full-time marketing director.  Those companies lucky enough to have one, may have her handling sales or customer service responsibilities as well. If your business has invested in online marketing, through your website and/or social media, it requires considerable manual effort to send and track campaigns, measure results, and to separate the wheat from the chaff in those online-generated leads. Without distinct processes and technology to help manage all this, online marketing could be a big waste of time and money, yielding lackluster results.

If you are using the Web to generate leads, and you have a long and complex sales cycle typical of many B2B companies, you’ll want to automate as many marketing processes as possible. Not only does this simplify your efforts and free up more time for sales and business development, but it can also result in a greater return on your marketing efforts. Here’s a checklist to get started on marketing automation:

1. Build the online marketing foundation

To start, you’ll need a clean, easy-to-use and sales-ready website. Since most small companies don’t have in-house technical expertise in this area, outsourcing is your best bet. It’s possible to find a local web designer within your budget — someone who can not only design and develop the site but maintain it and add new features as needed. This might be one or two people, depending upon their skills, since web development and web design are two different practices. Don’t rush through the process. Your website is the cornerstone of your online marketing strategy.

Critical to your website strategy is the content. High-quality content drives traffic, attracts prospects, and retains customers. Most e-mail marketing campaigns link to landing pages where prospects can register to receive a white paper or attend a webinar. Visitors will want to learn something substantial about your product or space, not just receive a marketing spiel. Outsourcing that content development is a smart idea. There are plenty of freelance writers with subject matter expertise, and willing to lend a hand without the Madison Avenue price tag. To get the most bang for your buck, develop content that can be used in multiple ways: Blog posts that can expand into a white paper, or a webinar that contains quotes for a Q&A, for instance. Ideally, you will have a content management system (CMS) that is simple enough for any employee to use, so that you don’t have to call the Web team every time you want to update content on your site.

2. Choose strategic yet simple marketing technology

Many small businesses use free and low-cost tools such as Google Analytics for metrics, Constant Contact for e-mail marketing and Wufoo for online forms. Beyond campaign creation and tracking, consider how you will manage the leads generated by those campaigns. Manually sorting those leads, qualifying them, and then following up with e-mails is time-consuming especially if many of those leads are still “cool.” Marketing automation software allows you to set up a nurturing program that kicks out e-mails and new offers as the prospect progresses up the ladder of engagement.

Marketing automation software also includes many of those point solutions, such as e-mail marketing, forms and metrics. That way, you can reduce the number of tools that your staff needs to learn and use (which lowers complexity and long-term costs) and also realize other efficiencies related to lead management. Marketing automation software comes in all flavors, depending upon your business size and needs. Look for solutions that are extremely simple to use and learn and require minimal IT support. Fortunately, cloud-based service offerings are prevalent today.

3. Qualify your leads

This is the bread-and-butter of online marketing.  Companies that are adept at qualifying prospects and understanding their level of interest can get ahead quickly.  Scoring leads allows you to see which leads are hot, and which are not, and which leads just need a bit more time. The lead that comes to your site every week, spends time on your pages and clicks on campaign content will naturally have a higher score than someone who occasionally reads your blog. Marketing automation systems automatically supply a score to each lead, based on the rules that you set up in the beginning. Your company now has a clear indication of a visitor’s level of interest in your products or services, based on their activity. You can also set up filters to ensure leads meet certain “ideal prospect” factors – such as job title or industry – that can help determine if they are a good fit for your company. What about my CRM system, you may ask? CRM software is excellent for organizing contacts and storing information about them, but it can’t qualify leads. Google Analytics provides metrics on an aggregate level by telling you how many visitors you have monthly on your site, and where they spend their time. Only marketing automation can give you detailed information about an individual lead’s behavior, which is critical for B2B companies. Scoring tells the sales team exactly who to call first.

4. Automate follow-up

What a prospect isn’t ready to buy right away, salespeople don’t want to waste time with a phone call or personalized e-mail. This is where nurturing programs come in to play. Marketing automation allows you to “set and forget” rules and processes for nurturing so that your team jumps in only when the prospect has progressed to a certain level of interest. It’s best to start out with one basic nurturing program, and add additional nurturing tracks later when there is a need. A basic program might look something like this: a visitor who fills out a Web form for the first time will receive a thank you e-mail with a link to a white paper. In two weeks, the system will send him another e-mail with a link to a webcast. If he registers for that, the following week he may receive an invitation for a sales demo. If he doesn’t respond to the webcast invitation, he will receive a different type of content — and so on.

Marketing automation software also includes real-time alerts. Let’s say a prospect tracked in your system is on your site downloading product collateral. A sales rep assigned to that prospect can get instant alerts when one of their assigned prospects visits the website or requests additional collateral, and choose to call the prospect right then. Studies from Harvard and other institutions have shown that following up on hot leads when they are engaged has more success than waiting a few hours or days.

Automating marketing activities doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s always best to start slowly and keep it simple, so that you and your team don’t get overwhelmed by a product’s features and capabilities. Begin by scoring your leads and setting up a simple nurturing program. As with many functions in business today, automate the repetitive processes so that your people can focus on growth activities, such as developing relationships with high-value prospects and customers. This is where technology can truly provide ROI to a small company’s sales and marketing efforts.

About the Author: Adam Blitzer Is COO and Co-founder of Pardot. Adam is responsible for product management, marketing, and operations. Adam was previously a senior email marketing consultant for InterContinental Hotels Group, a consultant at Moxie Interactive, and spent four years in Japan at an advertising agency

The holy grail of “marketing automation” continues to be the reining “shiny object” within the marketing industry.  First reserved for B2C, then for large enterprise B2B, marketing automation has now expanded into the small business market.  But too often companies think they need marketing automation and implement a full system right off the bat. Before you buy, creating a detailed plan of your goals, resources and expectations can save you thousands of dollars in the long run.  It is important to evaluate the problem you’re trying to solve and set clear goals for what you are trying to achieve before shopping for a system.

Here are four steps for building your Marketing Automation plan:

Step 1: Determine your goals/objectives.

This will help you stay focused on your particular needs and not get caught up in extra features and functionality that may not prove useful to your business now or in the near term. In a recent study of businesses that have implemented marketing automation, nearly 50% use fewer than half of the features for the first year of ownership. It is common for companies to over-buy, based on the assumption that they will eventually grow into the system.  Truth is most companies’ move from email marketing platforms to marketing automation platforms because they simply want to be better at email marketing. This makes sense in theory, but if all you want to be able to do, is better target prospects, based on behavior and hand off interested leads to your sales team, based on prospect interest, you don’t need the full feature set that most marketing automation systems offer. The key is to find a system that can meet your needs today, but grow with you as your needs increase. So ask yourself these questions before jumping in:

-      Do you want to be better at email marketing?

-      Do you want to be able to behaviorally target customers?

-      Do you need to get more qualified leads to your sales team?

-      Do you have a complex product and are your sales cycles are too long?

-      Have heard that marketing automation is great, so you must need one?

Step 2: What functions do you expect to get out of the system?

The capabilities vary from vendor to vendor. Some solutions tout themselves as being the jack of all trades (master of none), while others pride them on being very good at a core set of features. For instance, some systems will run all of your sales and marketing processes in one place, including CRM, e-commerce, email marketing and drip marketing. While others are more focused on B2B businesses, where they have very robust marketing automation and email marketing capabilities, but integrate with your existing CRM and other systems, instead of providing them. Most small businesses would opt for the former, but would be upset as rapidly discovered the limitations of the system. Others might go for the latter, but would get overwhelmed by the richness of the features set. Evaluate your current systems, what and how you will need to integrate and how advanced you want your systems to operate.

Step 3: Determine your capabilities and limitations:  This will give you a guideline for which solutions meet your needs.  If you don’t have the staff to manage a complex system then all of the added benefits it might provide will be for naught.

-      How many people can you commit to managing a system?

-      A full automation implementation requires a significant amount of unique content for drip campains and lead form pages.  Do you have the resources to create the content to make full marketing automation successful?

-      How much IT expertise or support do you have in house?

-      What is your budget?

-      Is this B2B, B2C, person-to-person or web-based?

-      Do you have a CRM system? Does it need to integrate with your marketing system?

Step 4: Identify your organization’s marketing needs to understand the level of automation you require.

-      How many segments will you be addressing?

-      How long and complex is your buying process?

-      Do you intend for salespeople to use it?

-      Are you looking to track marketing revenue?

-      Do you need predictive analytics?

-      What kinds of programs are you looking to run?

-      Do you need automated nurturing, or will you be running manual drip campaigns?

-      Do you need to include social media in your content marketing programs?

-      Will you be using lead scoring?

Step 5: Invest in training from the on-set! Most failed implementations are due to a lack of investment in training and resource allocation. Engage those that will be using the product, make sure it is easy to use and intuitive because if no one is using the product then the investment was a waste.

At the end of the day, a successful marketing automation system can intelligently message to and nurture your prospects, reduce sales times and focus your sales efforts on only the most promising and interested prospects. Taking the time upfront to qualify these questions, determine your marketing objectives and find the solution that really meets your unique needs can make your marketing automation implementation a triumph.

About the Author: As CEO of Genius.com, Sam Weber is responsible for creating and executing on the company’s overall vision, overseeing all business operations and working closely with customers to grow the business. Weber brings over 15 years of extensive experience in enterprise software sales, pre-sales, support and professional services having worked with companies including: KnowNow; E.piphany; Clarify; Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

Tune Your Sales Management Engine for Peak Performance

In manufacturing, nothing is made until a sale is made. If a manufacturing business were anautomobile, the sales departments would be the engine, the driving force that moves the entire organization forward. So take care when you’re considering cuts. Cut too deeply and you maynot have enough horsepower left to take you through this recession.

In a global economy that’s being “reset”, changes in staff are unavoidable, and it seems reasonable to make those changes across the board.  But it’s when times are tough when you need the motive power of your sales department most.  These days, instead of stalling your entire business by dropping the revs on your sales engine,  it’s best to tune it with a redoubled emphasis on coaching your team.

Coach Your Salespeople to Maximize Performance

In the same way that not every manufacturer is suited to every market, not every salesperso npossesses the personal characteristics and skills needed to sell effectively in an economy like this one. That’s why so many salespeople who burned up the sales track just a few years ago are stalled out and directionless today. And it’s also why coaching your salespeople in the followingareas is more necessary now than ever:

• Desire: Salespeople with this quality don’t “have to”; they “want to.” Because they’re motivated by money, prestige, and an overwhelming urge to be the best, they do what’s necessary to reach their own goals – goals which are often loftier than yours.
• Commitment: There’s an old saying: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Desire, while necessary, is not sufficient. To succeed, salespeople must be committed to doing what others won’t. They must be willing to risk security for reward. They have to push hard enough that they risk hearing “no.”
• Accountability: I call this quality a “responsibility reflex,” an automatic willingness to beheld accountable for failure and expect recognition for success. In contrast to salespeople who blame outside factors in a knee-jerk fashion, salespeople with the responsibility reflex refuse to rationalize or externalize. They accept challenges and relish being held accountable for – and rewarded for – their efforts.
• Comfortable talking about money: When it comes right down to it, money’s what business is about, right? To sell in this economy, a salesperson has to be comfortable with that and able to bring up the subject in a forthright, confident, and timely fashion. The successful salesperson knows the value of what they sell and won’t beat around the bush when it comes to talking dollars and cents. And they’ve come to terms with the fact that their value to their own companies lies in the revenue they create.
• Little need for approval: I’ve yet to come across anyone who didn’t appreciate a pat on the back from time to time, but the best salespeople don’t let a need for approval get in the way of making the sale. They’ll ask the tough questions and won’t accept waffling answers. They will ask for the business and risk getting shot down. They won’t stand for put-offs, stall-outs, and unclosed sales.

When the economy is recovering from the reset– and it’s likely to be resetting for years to come– tuning your sales engine for peak performance takes precedence over cuts.  By developing your sales team in the qualities needed to succeed when the road is rocky, you’ll be giving yourself the green light for better sales now and record-beating performance when the market accelerates again.

About the Author:

Nationally recognized sales management and leadership expert Danita Bye built her reputation on building and inspiring process-oriented, no excuse, high-performance sales teams that deliver bottom line results. Danita can be reached at Danita@SalesGrowthSpecialists.com.

While it’s always great to grow the size of the pie with new customers buying new products — competitive selling something we all have to do.  If you’ve decided to dominate a specific market niche and the top customers within that niche are buying from someone else — you’re in a competitive selling situation.

I received this amazing no BS sales book called “Competitive Selling” from the author Landy Chase and just loved it.  You will see the book review on Small Business Trends but in the mean time, here is a little preview article I received from Landy on the topic of selling and keeping the competitive customer.

Selling to the Competitive User
By Landy Chase, Author of Competitive Selling : Out-Plan, Out-Think, and Out-Sell to Win Every Time

Nothing is more rewarding for any business than taking an account away from a competitor. Successfully persuading a competitive user to leave their existing vendor for you takes an enormous amount of patience, skill, and strategy. Unfortunately, most business people don’t approach the strategic issue of competitive loyalty properly, and they pay for it with limited success in their take-away efforts.

To be successful in taking accounts away from your competitors, you have to begin by looking objectively at the situation from the viewpoint of your potential client. Consider for a moment the implications to your prospect. By asking them to move their business to you, you are essentially asking them to:

• Tell the current supplier that they are fired;
• Go through the process of setting up an account with a new supplier, including all of the tedious, time-consuming paperwork;
• Get to know a whole new set of people to work with;
• Get to know a whole new set of different and unfamiliar procedures;
• Take the risk of making a bad business decision, and paying the consequences.

This collectively adds up to a sobering fact that you must accept and work with: Unless your prospective client is having a major problem with their vendor, trying to persuade them to abandon that relationship is an exercise in frustration and futility.

Does this mean that you should abandon your efforts to sell to the competitive user? Not at all. The key to success here is to abandon the notion that you can immediately replace the existing supplier. Instead, re-think your strategy for success. Look for ways to supplement the existing relationship without replacing it, by providing a product or service that meets a specific special need that the primary vendor is either not capable of addressing, or has chosen not to.

Unless your prospect is having a major problem with their vendor, trying to persuade them to abandon that relationship is an exercise in frustration and futility. This approach is much more productive, and gets you over the two major obstacles you face in selling to the competitive user:

1. You find a way to get your foot in the door and prove yourself.
2. You turn the prospect into a customer, opening the “pipeline” for additional opportunities if you deliver.

My biggest new client one year was a competitive user who told me initially that they were happy with the resource that they were using, and weren’t open at that time to new alternatives. Accepting this, I was able to persuade a decision-maker within the account to allow me the opportunity to supplement their existing relationship by delivering a specialized service that the current supplier was not addressing.

This initial program soon led to more opportunities, and before long I had successfully acquired a full business relationship that has proven to be one of the best I have ever had. This strategy worked because I requested — and received — a small opportunity to prove myself, without threatening the existing vendor relationship.

Look for ways to supplement, not replace, the needs of the competitive user. By delivering value on  a small scale now, you can position yourself to reap big rewards later.

Author Bio
Landy Chase, author of Competitive Selling: Out-Plan, Out-Think, and Out-Sell to Win Every Time, founded his own sales training and consulting firm in 1993 and has clients in more than sixty industries on five different continents. He has delivered more than two thousand paid presentations as a professional speaker and holds the Certified Speaking Professional (CPS) designation from the National Speakers Association, the highest earned level of excellence in the industry. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

For more information please visit www.LandyChase.com.

This week’s book review on Small Business Trends is on “Creating Competitive Advantage” by Jaynie L. Smith.   You can see a summary of the book review as a feature video as well.  It’s one thing to read the book, get the principles and think that it’s a great idea, it’s quite another to sit yourself down and start comping up with a real competitive advantage that you can use to actually increase your sales.

I’ve got the book and will be pulling concepts from it while we go through this, but I would encourage you to get a copy for yourself – it’s stellar.  Rather than simply creating a list of what to do, we’re going to start actually doing it over a series of posts and let’s see what we come up with!

Getting Your Brain Around Competitive Advantage

A competitive advantage has three pre-requisites – otherwise it doesn’t count.

1. Must be objective.  This means that it’s a statement of fact; 3 locations, open 24 hours, etc.  If you think about it, it’s kind of like a “feature” of your business.
2. Must be quantitative. Specify how much, how many of anything you’ve got as a feature.  In the example above we made some specifics here are a few more: each service representative has at least 20 hours of training (specify what kind), your pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.
3. Not claimed by any other competitor.  This is where it gets tricky,  your competitive advantage could truly be something that no one else is doing OR it can be something that they are not claiming – or focusing on.  This gives you a lot of creativity.
4. No cliche. Stay away from empty phrases like “your solution provider.”

Start With a List

To get your brain bubbling take a moment and list as many “factual features” of your business.  Aim for a list of 49!

Here are a few areas to get you started:

• How would you respond to your customer when they ask “Why should I buy from you?”
• What’s most important to your customer when they are buying what you are selling?
• What features of your business give the customer what’s most important to them?
• In what ways does your business deliver what’s most important to your customer?

This is just a short list of thought starters – spend about 45 minutes on this exercise.

Stuck-Buster Ideas

Are you stuck on this?  That’s totally normal… here are a few brain-busters to get you started again.

• Draw a picture (stick figures are great) of your customer at the moment when their mind should be triggered to contact you.  What’s happening, where are they?  In what ways can you be “present” to remind them that there is a solution?
• Go outside for 10 minutes with a notebook.  Walk around and note the first thing you see.  Now make a list of all the ways that this item reminds you of the reason your customer chooses you.

Try this and let me know how you’re doing.

How did you discover or uncover your competitive advantage?

I just ran across an article that outlined the recent results of some studies that again show that more than 85% of our decision-making is EMOTIONAL and not rational. We’ve all known this to be true on a very basic level, but for whatever reason, we still cling to this notion that we need logical arguments to convince people of our point of view.

It’s no different when we are pulling together a sales and marketing strategy.  Even though we know that emotional triggers drive the decision, we continue to sometimes force our logic into the conversation.

Have you ever heard this phrase? “Most businesses sell things so that they can have customers.  We have customers so we can sell them things.” This is one of my favorite quotes (if you know who said it, let me know).  It speaks to the fact that selling more to existing customers is more profitable for your business, and for your customer because it reduces your marketing cost and their supplier complexity.

The best way to sell more to existing customers, is to build a relationship and a history with them.  And the best way to do THAT – is through direct marketing. Direct marketing doesn’t just mean Direct MAIL.  It can include personal visits, events, sales calls, social media as well as direct mail.

In this article I’m going to give you a task list that will get your customer audience started – so you can connect with them on an emotional level.

1. Get a list of existing customers.   This may seem obvious because “everyone has a customer list.”  This is a list I want you to start BY HAND.  Don’t just do a data dump.  Pull your team together and literally start listing people and companies that are top of mind for you. This should not be a HUGE list.  You might have 5 or 10 or maybe 50.  But not too many more than that.   This is the list of either great customers or crappy customers.  The great one’s you’ll want to create strategies for.  The crappy ones you’ll want to discuss and see if you want to make them great or refer them out.  Once you’re done with that, you can go to your database and pull down some more customers that might be in the “danger of losing” category.  And see what the deal is with that.  The question you’re asking here is – “Will building a connection with this person/company increase my sales and profitability?”
2. Segment and group these customers according to “benefit segments.”  These would be groupings that might include something like “Customers who like having stuff overnight, Customers who order in small quantities, Customers who use our product outside, etc….” Notice that these groupings are based more on how your customer experience and interact with your product or service and not just their demographics or location.  This kind of grouping or segmentation is KEY to increasing your profit margins and building great relationships and connections.
3. Develop a profile of these customer segments and the decision-makers in each one.  Think of this as literally developing a Facebook or LinkedIn profile for this personified customer.  Is it a man or a woman, what is their name, where do they live, what is their day like.  This is the best way to get into their world.  Start a list of what’s important to them in their personal and professional life.
4. For each group, make a connection between what’s important to them and what you actually provide that solves their problem or challenge.  Use index cards or sticky notes in two colors.  Use one color to list what’s important to these customers, then use the other color to list the offer that you provide that gives them that.

Whew – that was some work wasn’t it.  But it will be worth it when it comes to creating direct marketing campaigns that really connect.

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• 6 Ways to Increase Your Sales NOW (thecustomercollective.com)
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One of the things you can expect from DIYMarketers are periodic reviews of tools and resources that you’ll find helpful in selling to small businesses.

We all have a long list of blogs and articles we read every day – but I have to strongly recommend “Selling to Small Business.”  If you’re already an avid reader of Small Business Trends, then you might know about this one.  Both are online publications by Small Business Expert, Anita Campbell.

Anita truly has her pulse on what’s happening in the small business world.  In light of full disclosure, Anita is a client and a friend — but BOTH of these roles actually came years after I started following her work, reading her blog and relying on her online publications for my industry and trend information — heavily, I might add.  I only have one criticism of how Anita’s publications — I wish they had a portal that was all Anita Campbell small business stuff – all the time.  My biggest issue is that I have to hop from URL to URL and that they aren’t just a portal all their own.  But that’s just me and it goes to show how much I rely on her unique way of pulling information together in digestible bites and using the most credible resources on the web.

I’ll be reviewing several of her sites in the coming months, but I really want to start with “Selling to Small Business” first.

Who Should Read Selling to Small Business and Why?

Like the name implies, if you intend on SELLING to SMALL BUSINESS – you should read this blog.  But don’t even think about using this as “Chamber event” where you constantly pitch the audience on whatever your wares are.  It doesn’t work like that. Selling to Small Business is a resource to those of us who serve this market.  It will educate BOTH the large multi-national company like a Microsoft of an Intel on what’s important to small business, as well as the smaller provider of products and services.

How to Get the Most Out of Selling to Small Business?

Regardless of how you organize your blog reading, I recommend that you put all of Anita’s blogs very close together, so that you can take a quick glance and what topics she’s covering.  So put it on your reader.

It runs on a standard blog format, so the most recent stories are on the top and you can scroll your way down.  But remember – this is not so much a time driven source of information, as it is valuable category information – so be sure to look to your right where you’ll see the categories and the number of articles in each category.

Currently the categories tell you something about what’s happening in small business.  For example, she’s got one on Baby Boomers.  I never would have thought that as a category – but read the stories that are tagged and you’ll see that she’s thought this through – the stories aren’t just ABOUT baby boomers, some of them are stories baby boomers who are responsible for selling to small business should pay attention to.  Love that.

The next tab is “About” and you can learn more about what Anita was thinking when she started Selling to Small Business.

MY FAVORITE TAB – Small Business Lists!

Look you DIY Marketers — it’s all about the LIST.  It is so about the list and the community that you should not every kid yourself about this.  Here Anita gives you a wonderful resource ; calendars of small business events that you might find interesting to attend.

The other “list” she gives is the link to her SMBTrendwire podcasts.  These are weekly interviews that Anita and Steve Rucinski do with a variety of small business experts and authors.  There is so much to learn from these – you’ll have to put yourself on a daily budget of what to listen to and how much.

The last list resource is a directory of small business blogs. Againk you’ll have to look through these and identify the ones that are most useful to you.

Finally there is the archives section – which is what you’d expect it to be – archives of articles by category and month.

I highly encourage you to not only check this blog out, but I encourage you to become a subscriber and regular reader.  When you’re in dire need of quick, high quality info and data — this is your place.