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Monday November 28, 2011

Topic: Sales Management

Reference: Madhu Gulati. (November 21, 2011) . “5 Ways to Get Started With Closed Loop Marketing.” Modern B2B marketing – Marketo Best Practices Blog, http://blog.marketo.com.

With this business environment continuing to slowly churn along, it has become an imperative to squeeze more value out of existing resources. Many people look to expense management as the key to creating a safe harbor and indeed that is one part of the story. The other part of the story is the need to generate more sales and sales prospects. Because the cost of acquiring new customers can be fairly expensive, it is important to manage your existing customers extremely well. While new media applications and social media can assist in the cost management process of prospecting for new customers, these tools must still be integrated into an overall campaign and require time on task. That time, no matter how it is deployed, has an associated opportunity cost. Like everything else, this opportunity cost has to be managed properly in order to produce the best results. One way to do this to make sure that your marketing is more effective at producing sales and that the sales process is well coordinated with the marketing effort. In the referenced article the commentator supports this strategy with the concept of Closed Loop Marketing. “In a nutshell, with Closed Loop Marketing…marketers are responsible for more than branding and product updates, and need to watch customer reaction to marketing, to ensure their sales funnel doesn’t have any leaks.” As a result, the commentator advocates tightening up 5 critical areas in the sales process to secure the best results. They include making sure that data is properly managed, accurate and standardized; lead scoring is handled in an effective and iterative fashion; lead nurturing happens on a timely basis and that lead movement occurs at regular intervals; that there is a feedback loop that is monitored and maintained between sales and marketing; and finally that ROI on these activities is being tracked. “Reporting should be able to measure the effectiveness and ROI of marketing investment.” This is really on point and creates a roadmap for getting more value of new as well as existing relationships.  If your sales process is out of balance, now is the time to check it for leaking value.

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Monday October 31, 2011

Topic: Social Media Management

Reference: Maria Pergolino. (October 24, 2011). “B2B Social Media Myths-My Favorite lessons from Jay Baer at Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Summit.” Marketo B2B Marketing and Sales Blogs.  http://sn128w.snt128.mail.live.com/mail/Printmessage.aspx.

The interface between social media and mobile is growing at a rapid rate and it is getting more difficult to keep up with some of the most important developments. However, it is imperative at this time to keep abreast of the best information out there on social media management and the various deployment strategies that companies are using to generate significant marketing impact.  I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds, email list articles, and regularly scan old and new media sources for new information. This process is helpful in building a deeper understanding of what the limits of social media are. To date I am not sure that I have seen any limits, except as limited by the creative mind. In the referenced article the commentator adds to this dialogue by chronicling a recent keynote address by  Jay Baer a leading commentator in the social media space. Some of the observations include: social media is being used by B2B customers and if you are not interacting with them you are missing an opportunity; B2C and B2B social media are similar but use different tactics; make content free don’t hide it behind forms; leverage your content everywhere possible; and social media is not about lead generation but rather customer nurturing.  This nurturing makes social media different than “marketing”, and is one of the reasons that just having a page is insufficient.  It also means that even if people are not tweeting about you, you still need to be in the game.  “You can’t measure social media marketing success by website visits.” The bottom line is that customer kinship is the new driver of purchases from new and existing customers and you have to work at maintaining and building kinship.  I believe that this level of insight is helpful and I get the value proposition. Do you get it?