I.

Craig Rosenberg is generally a pretty smart and insightful guy. As the self-proclaimed “Funnelholic” and Focus.com VP of Products and Services, his extensive background in B2B sales and marketing gives his voice some weight in our space.

So when Craig (@funnelholic on Twitter) recently posted that “Being a B2B buyer sucks,” I snapped to attention.

All four of his points were excellent, so read the article, but I was particularly taken by Point #4:

The ‘contact us’ box sucks. I see that, and I just think black hole. The dropdown you provide doesn’t make me feel like I am going to go in the right direction. When you walk into a good store, someone asks, ‘How can I help you today?’ How about taking that methodology to the ‘front door’ of your buying process?”

Craig, you have no idea how true that is–and the Harvard Business Review proved it.

According to the HBR article, 26% of all online “Contact Us” Web form requests go completely unanswered (our own internal studies show the number can range from 25% to as high 40%). It’s as if the business believes you don’t exist.

Another 25% wait over 24 hours to get back with you, the real-world equivalent of walking into Nordstrom’s and having the cashier tell you, “Come back tomorrow when we feel like talking to you.” Another 6% wait between 12 and 24 hours to contact you.

Is it just me, or is the ridiculousness of this state of affairs beyond description?

Everyone—and I mean, EVERYONE—talks about paying more attention to the customer, treating clients and prospects like gold, because they’re getting harder win and keep. Yet if you’re the average company, nearly 60% of direct Web-generated inquiries—people who come to YOUR Web site and specifically ask to be contacted—have to wait at least 12 hours to hear back from you, assuming you get back to them at all.

I know I beat this nearly-dead horse on a regular basis. But for some odd reason, I keep finding opportunities to address the issue (wonder why).

II.

Loved this quote from Kevin Davis in his article, “Are You Selling Too Fast?” over on the American Express Open Forum:

I’ve been delivering sales seminars for 20+ years. When I ask salespeople to tell me how they sell, they rattle off the steps of their sales process. When I ask how their customers buy, they are stumped.

This disconnect between selling and buying is the root cause of many sales problems.”

It’s easy to park our rear ends in our office chairs and plot our pipelines for the month—but we’re not really thinking about what the prospect is going through to make their buying decision.

The best sales reps know how to get into the customer’s buying cycle, and engage with how the prospect’s decision will be made, not how the product will be delivered.

The marketing team created a compelling, targeted set of material that caught the attention of a potential buyer. They found your Web site and grabbed some information—a couple of white papers and a pricing list.

You followed up on the new lead quickly and effectively, using good lead management and nurturing tactics to make contact.

You feel like you’ve done your homework. You feel you understand their position in their industry. You’ve done a deep needs analysis, and feel you have a common ground with the prospect on how to address their pain. You get your best collateral and presentation material, tailored to the information you already have.

You wind up and give them your best 95-mile-an-hour fastball, the pitch that’s worked for you so many times in the past.

Yet contrary to evidence, against every sign you’ve seen to this point, you’re met with looks of confusion, or even worse, apathy.

The prospect doesn’t get it, or worse, doesn’t seem to care.

Now what do you do?

In baseball, the difference between a run-of-the-mill pitcher and an All-Star is rarely their “first pitch.” In the Big Leagues (and we’re assuming that’s where you want to be), everybody has a 90+ mile-per-hour fastball—but the best pitchers have a 2nd, a 3rd, sometimes even a 4th pitch that they can command.

While there are occasional exceptions to the rule (see Mariano Rivera and his un-duplicate-able cut fastball), in most cases the best pitchers win because when their primary pitch isn’t working, Plan B isn’t crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

Sales is no different.

When your initial, carefully-prepped pitch is a “miss,” the answer is almost never to keep “winding up” and tossing something out there.

Stop, and figure out what happened.

Typically it’s one of three things:

• You’re not actually a contender and you didn’t know it.
• You’re in the dark about something going on inside the prospect’s company.
• You’re talking to the wrong people for the value prop you’ve presented.

If you’re just a “sounding board” for a competitor’s RFP and they’ve already locked in to another vendor, stop wasting your time and move on. Maybe the prospect just realized that your solution will require an entire technology platform overhaul—one they had no intention of making. Maybe your solution forces them to change a licensing situation with another vendor, and they don’t want to upset their current arrangement.

If you really are in contention, then clearly something has changed. There’s a management “realignment” on the horizon and your product/service is in the line of fire. A relocation is about to happen. A key budget or cashflow problem has reared its head.

Regardless, the solution is the same: dig back in. Who’s really in charge now, and who’s really going to make the decision?

Gather data, re-set your presentation, toe the rubber, and fire again.

Branding, connecting with the customer, sales approaches, creating demand, and so on, all have some crossover between the B2B and B2C worlds.

But I’ll admit I’ve had a hard time justifying investing lots of money into social media. In the B2B space, it just always seemed relatively unimportant in the scale of things, compared to other means of business development.

So I was interested to see a post on No More Cold Calling that affirmed my suspicions.

Author Joanne Black states,

“Social media is a powerful tool for three things and three things only:

1. Search engine optimization — use your key words and raise your presence on the web.
2. Find out who people are — learn about a person’s background and your connections.
3. Find out who people know — look for close connections that you can leverage.

Some salespeople tell me they actually get clients through social media. Well, maybe if you have a commodity business. Could it happen? Yes. Do I rely on it? Absolutely not. I only count on what I bring about-through a proactive, intentional, referral strategy with personal introductions.”

As Joanne says, are there absolutely zero direct marketing opportunities in B2B using social media? No, but the very nature of B2B demands working with multiple decision-makers, multiple levels of needs to address, and multiple tiers of implementation. The simple fact is, the “reach” necessary to make large scale B2B sales happen through social media is incredibly thin.

In Part 2, I want to take a closer look at this concept, because as sales and marketing teams continue to evolve, and move ever closer in alignment, at some point the “culture war” between the two will spill over into the corporate workroom.

In review: Sales “culture” is business- and results-oriented; marketing “culture” is connection- and human-interest driven.

The question becomes, when push comes to shove, which viewpoint takes precedence?

BNet Business guru Geoffrey James gives us the answer—and it’s based on a belief I’ve long held myself:

“In business-to-business (B2B) firms, the legendary conflict between sales and marketing stems from a difference of opinion about what marketing should be doing. Most marketing professionals believe that they should primarily be concerned with market research, building brand equity and creating marketing materials. Most sales professionals believe that marketing should be generating qualified sales leads.”

Very true. But the next part is where the article gets interesting:

“This is part of the blog where I’m supposed to be diplomatic and politically correct, and write some yada-yada-yada about teamwork and respecting differences, etc., etc.

Forget that. Here’s the honest truth: Marketing is dead wrong; Sales is dead right. In B2B environments, marketing is only useful insofar as it generates qualified sales leads. Period. The glamorous activities near and dear to the hearts of B2B marketers everywhere have almost no impact on selling, other than driving up the cost of sales . . . [Marketing should be compensated] based upon its ability to reduce cost of sales. Period.”

And as much is it will pain my own internal marketing team to hear it, Geoffrey James is right.

I don’t want to devalue the work, effort, and talent of marketers (especially my own), but in the B2B space, the best value a marketing team provides is in the ways it can get my sales team more qualified leads today.

The question for B2B sales and marketing managers then becomes, what does this mean from a corporate development standpoint? How can you align a marketing team to produce leads without hurting, or challenging marketers’ deeply held beliefs about the need to create an emotional connection between a buyer and a product, a person and a brand?

Stay tuned for Sales and Marketing “Cultural Alignment” Part 3

Laura has been studying what she calls the “Marketing Effectiveness Index” which are the most effective methods used by B2B businesses to generate leads since early in 2006.

She uses responses from surveys to give grades from 1 to 5, with 5 the highest, for different methods of lead generation. Click here to see a chart of her results for the last three years.

Another study for 2010 is coming out soon, but her most recent rankings in 2009 are as follows:

1. Inside Sales / Telemarketing
2. Executive Events
3. Trade Shows
4. Webinars
5. Email Marketing
6. Search Marketing
7. Direct Mail
8. Video, Podcasts, etc.
9. Blogs
10. Other Web 2.0

The big news in 2009 was that Inside Sales surpassed Executive Events and Email Marketing moved ahead of Search. Trade Shows hung strong even with significant cutbacks in corporate travel budgets.

The rankings for 2008 were:

1. Executive Events
2. Inside Sales
3. Search Marketing
4. Trade Shows
5. Webinars
6. Email Marketing
7. Direct Mail
8. Video, Podcasts, etc.
9. Blogs
10. Other Web 2.0