What’s the not-so-secret but often neglected success factor in B2B direct marketing? Simply this: your in-house prospect list (house file) can be your most important asset in a successful direct marketing operation. And this is equally true whether you are communicating with prospects at their email addresses, physical addresses or telephone numbers. A house file can vastly decrease your cost of lead and new …
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Sales Lead Management: Are You a Victim of FTFU (Failure to Follow-Up)?
Posted: 27 Jul 2010 by cryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketer
This post involves one of my pet peeves in marketing: the tendency of marketers to spend money and time to generate inquiries and then fail to follow-up (FTFU) on these inquiries. This failure can be fatal to the success of your sales lead management program. Although it was for a low-ticket service, a recent personal example illustrates the point. I was looking for a guitar teacher to help take me to the next level. I jam with some very good musicians ...
B2B Marketing Lead Reactivation “Phoenix” Project by Christopher Ryan
Posted: 19 Jul 2010 by cryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
How to Generate Revenue from Your Dead Lead Pool Most companies have a database of contacts that have gone stale. We refer to these lists by different names, including the dead lead pool, lapsed customer list, or inactive database. But whatever we call it, this group of people/companies often have significant revenue potential. In other words, the dead leads are not so dead after all. Like the legendary Phoenix bird they can rise from the ashes to help make your revenue goals ...
The Pros and Cons of B2B Marketing Outsourcing – by Christopher Ryan
Posted: 9 Jul 2010 by cryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
As a CEO or business owner, you have some tough decisions to make about your marketing and sales operations. Traditionally, this has involved hiring one or more marketing personnel, and paying them a salary (sometimes with a bonus) as your in-house marketing department. I worked in this model for two decades, earlier as a marketing manager and later as the marketing (and sometimes sales) department head. In many ways the in-house model works well, but it does have its challenges. Fortunately, ...
Manic Depressive or Social Media Maniac? – by John Leavy
Posted: 29 Jun 2010 by jleavy on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
Clinically speaking, a manic depressive disorder is defined by the presence of one or more episodes of abnormally elevated mood. Some manic episodes include increased energy, activity, with rapid talking & thinking, followed by sustained periods of unusual, even bazaar behavior. That would describe some social media personalities. They don’t post to their blog or text to their friends or colleagues for weeks at a time. They don’t reply to messages sent to them nor do they participate in the ...
I Used to Be a Pusher – by Christopher Ryan
Posted: 25 Jun 2010 by cryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
Why You Need to Explore the Pull Marketing Model Imagine the next meeting of the local B2B marketing group, and you stand up and say. “‘I’m Chris R and I used to be a pusher.” Not a pusher of drugs of course, but a pusher of marketing. Most of us who have been in the B2B marketing world for any length of time cut our teeth on the “push marketing model.” We made a living by tracking down sources of suspects, ...
The Four Pillars of B2B Marketing Success by Christopher Ryan
Posted: 16 Jun 2010 by cryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
The Pareto Principle as Applied to B2B Marketing According to our friends at Wikipedia, the Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule and the law of the vital few) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Pareto observed that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods, and he went on to apply this formula to many other areas, ...
A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures by Christopher Ryan
Posted: 7 Jun 2010 by cryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in Content
It is said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” While this can be true, it is also true that a mere handful of words can have more power and impact than a thousand pictures. Words allow you to form pictures in your mind that are sometimes as real and vivid as the actual images they portray. This is why people often tell you the book was better than the movie. Words help you develop your imagination. Doubt the power of ...
Don’t Drop Your Drawers on the Web – by John Leavy
Posted: 3 Jun 2010 by jleavy on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in Marketing Strategy
The title “Don’t Drop Your Drawers on the Web” may seem harsh at first; the provoking title is really meant to get your attention. This post talks about not trusting every community site blindly with your personal information just because it’s popular or used by almost everyone you know. A little vigilance is in order. Keep in mind, telling someone or a community of people, your location also lets them know where you are not. Just because a community site profile ...
Bridge the Gap in B2B Marketing and Sales by Christopher Ryan
Posted: 24 May 2010 by cryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
Of all the talks and presentations I do about B2B marketing and sales, perhaps my favorite is called How to Bridge the Gap Between Sales and Marketing. This is a subject that resonates with both the marketing and sales audiences, as well as CEOs and business owners. We have some fun with the presentation but the message is deadly serious: marketing and sales need to be in alignment for the business to reach its potential. We talk ...
Getting Noticed – in a Good Way – by John Leavy
Posted: 14 May 2010 by jleavy on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
Let’s talk about being noticed in the social media community; being noticed without being obnoxious or looking desperate that is. Getting noticed in a good way is beneficial for business. Organizations work hard to position themselves as the experts in a certain field, the authorities, the go-to-guys, the ones-in-the-know. Here are some quick ways to begin to establish credibility in the social media stratosphere. Identify the influencers in your business sector and comment on their blog posts. Posts such as “Great post!” ...
Should You Use a Marketing Consulting Firm? by Christopher Ryan
I was doing a talk about branding and positioning to the Peak Venture Group last week and was asked an intriguing question from a technology start-up CEO: Should I hire an in-house chief marketing officer (CMO) or outsource this role? Here is a rough synopsis of the answer I gave this gentleman. Note that my …
Salespeople: Are they Dinosaurs or Something Else? – by Christopher Ryan
I read an interesting discussion on LinkedIn titled: How soon will the internet turn your salespeople into dinosaurs? Not surprisingly, this discussion generated a lot of comments – 132 to date. Some agreed that sales reps are an endangered species while others took the opposite approach, maintaining that sales professionals are essential to the success …
Do You Need a Coach to Be Successful in B2B Marketing? – by Christopher Ryan
I read a posting by Patrick McClure at the Sales Lead Management website titled The First Fundamental of Success: Get a Coach. McClure points out that every Olympic athlete has a coach and this is one of the reasons why they are able to obtain such high levels of performance. So how does coaching apply …
Push Marketing vs. Pull Marketing by Christopher Ryan
I am a marketer by trade but as a consumer, I get as annoyed as anyone by the persistent and unrelenting intrusiveness of push marketing techniques. As hard as we try to get away from unwanted promotions (TiVo, Sirius Radio, cable, etc.), marketers find new ways to track us down and share their messages with us, …
Is the B2B Marketing Services Industry Broken? – by Christopher Ryan
I just read an interesting article at Hubspot.com titled Is the Marketing Services Industry Broken? The article makes a rational case that services firms are failing to provide good value to their clients in many important ways. And while I believe many of these types of generalizations are tough to justify, there is indeed some truth in the …
Pricing Strategies in B2B Marketing
There is no magic bullet in pricing. However, we can all agree that maximizing our value to customers is a very good thing for both the top line and bottom line. I happened to attend a very good presentation on this subject at the Inverness Group meeting in Denver. The speaker was Jonathan Bein, Managing …
Nine Questions to Develop Your B2B Branding Strategy
The first step in developing a branding and positioning strategy is to determine your starting point through a series of nine questions. The first question is: What is the scope of your branding problem—is it to position an entire organization or simply to position a product or series of products?
Bridging the Gap Between B2B Marketing and Sales by Christopher Ryan
If you are a marketing manager at a company that uses direct sales representatives, these people can be either your best friends or worst nightmare. Chances are they are somewhere in between, but the point is they can make your life easier, or they can be a constant source of irritation. In fact, careers can …