Success with Content Marketing Campaigns: 9 Rules for effective sales follow up

Success with ContentMarketing Campaigns:9 rules for effective sales follow up

JANUARY 2016

WHITE PAPER

Table of contents

I. Introduction .....................................................................................................................................................................3

II. Three success factors for content based lead generation ....................................................4

III. Top tips for successful selling

#1 Understand the download motives ...............................................................................................5 #2 Drive the conversation ...............................................................................................................................6 #3 Embrace real time ...........................................................................................................................................7 #4 Phone vs Email ..................................................................................................................................................8 #5 Persistence, persistence, persistence ..........................................................................................9 #6 Invest time in your reps ..........................................................................................................................10 #7 How important is the ‘MAN’? .............................................................................................................11 #8 Decision makers vs conversation makers .............................................................................12 #9 Budget is an objection, not a fact .................................................................................................13

IV. About the author ......................................................................................................................................................14

V. About Incisive Media .............................................................................................................................................14

SUCCESS WITH CONTENT MARKETING CAMPAIGNS: 9 RULES FOR EFFECTIVE SALES FOLLOW UP 02

I. Introduction

Incisive Media have been delivering content marketing leads for technology vendors for over 13 years, originally with our Email Update programme, later through our partnership with KnowledgeStorm, and then with our online library IThound. Today, we are running hundreds of simultaneous campaigns, ranging from 100 to 5,000 leads, delivering response in real time direct into customer CRM and marketing automation platforms, syndicating content via online, social and direct channels, perfecting data with state-of-the-art enrichment and enhancement, and even directly tracking customer ROI through our own cloud dashboards.

From the very beginning we noticed a puzzling difference between our vendor clients: some made a solid and immediate return on investment, their content generating a steady stream of interest from IT buyers and decision makers, with a sizable proportion of interested parties going on to purchase; others struggled, their sales follow up failing to get traction with the leads. Marketers in the latter group would usually give us feedback from their callers along the lines of ‘the prospects cannot remember downloading the white paper’ or ‘none of these leads have a project coming up’.

We wanted to know why this was happening – why did some clients book, rebook and scale their investment, challenging us to increase lead delivery exponentially, while others struggled with initial campaigns, found it hard to justify their investment and ultimately looked elsewhere? Often the clients were similar, with little difference in either product offering or price. Their content generated similar numbers of leads. Why was one group successful and the other not?

This paper is a summary of what we found by digging deep into the differences in our clients’ approach, and represents our understanding of what sets the successful apart from the unsuccessful. Some of the data presented here is our own, some is reproduced with the permission of SalesForce, (disclosure: Incisive is a SalesForce customer). Though the paper touches on some of the fundamental basics of sales best practise, it does so only to make our reasoning plain to non-sales people. It is not intended as a sales manual. We imagine it will always be something of a work in progress.

The good news is that, in our experience, ineffective sales follow and the associated challenges with marketing ROI seldom comes down to a ‘bad’ sales or marketing team. Rather it comes down to badly briefed individuals, less than perfect communication between sales and marketing, and incorrect expectations: problems that can nearly always be fixed.

WHITE PAPER


“Often the clients were similar, with little difference in either product offtering or price. Their content generated similar numbers of leads. Why was one group successful and the other not?

WHITE PAPER

II. Three Success Factors for Content Based Lead Generation

In our experience, successful clients have three key things in common:

1. Good content. These customers know what turns buyers on. They make problem-solving content focused on the buyer’s needs rather than on their sales message.

2. Professional follow up. Sales teams who know how to follow up white paper leads, have realistic expectations on turnaround, and who are very familiar with the content itself.

3. Good relationships between Marketing and Sales. The teams work closely, co-operating and providing honest feedback on what is, and what is not working.


This paper isn’t intended as guide to content production. However, as we say in publishing, ‘content is king’. Your starting point with your prospects is your content. If your content isn’t very engaging, your sales team will struggle to get sales engagement and quickly burn your marketing cash without making any sales. If you are going to make your content marketing work it is an absolute fundamental that you understand why prospects download it.

WHITE PAPER


III. Top Tips for Successful Selling:

UNDERSTAND THE DOWNLOAD MOTIVES“Sales reps need to understand WHY buyers download your content – this is your sales connection”

Downloading a white paper is not the same as looking at a news story on a web page. The buyer knows they are going to get follow up sales calls and marketing emails. Getting hassle from sales people and ‘spam’ from marketing (unfortunately the buyers’ view of what constitutes spam is rather different from the sellers’) is not usually top of any IT professional’s wish list, so why do they do it?

In order to be motivated enough to download your content, buyers have to see enough value in it to offset the hassle they know they are letting themselves in for; it follows that this is more than a casual interest. Something in the content will have resonated with the reader, related to an issue, problem or potential opportunity in the workplace. The content seems to offer a solution to a problem or has a bearing on a need.

If your prospect has downloaded the ‘The business case for outsourcing email security’ then they are showing that they are open to a cost/benefit analysis comparing the two approaches. Ultimately, the motivation is Need. By this we don’t mean Need to buy right now, rather its the need to know, to be informed, to make the best possible decisions, to understand why change or investment might be necessary or desirable. Your content makes this connection with the buyer: it’s the job of Sales to exploit that connection.

#1

WHITE PAPER



DRIVE THE CONVERSATION“Be assumptive in your follow up and avoid the ‘research only’ trap”

As a general rule, most senior decision makers have read endless white papers and analyst reports, watched countless webinars, and attended many events. As a result they are used to dealing with follow-up calls, and, as anyone with a budget soon finds out, there isn’t enough time in the working day to talk to every sales person who approaches you. Decision makers quickly become adept at halting potentially time-wasting conversations and usually have several ‘stock’ phrases, honed by time and experience aimed specifically at getting your team off the phone with a minimum of rudeness.

This makes the first part of the call the hardest. The rep has a few seconds to explain the reason for the call, and to persuade the prospect to stay on it. The rep must build rapport quickly with a person whose knee-jerk reaction is suspicion.

When reps ask ‘why did you download the white paper?’ they nearly always get the answer ‘out of general interest’ or a variation on the theme – the most heavily used call termination strategy has been triggered – a polite minimisation of rep’s expectations from the call. Buyers access content voluntarily: interest should be assumed.

Your content contains talking points – your reps need to use them. If the prospect has downloaded a white paper called ‘security weaknesses in the supply chain’, it follows that the prospect has concerns about the security in the supply chain – why else read the content? Reps can better begin calls by thanking the prospect for accessing the content and then asking an open question related to it: ‘the white paper argues that many organisations have weaknesses when it comes to supply chain security - what do you make of that assertion?’ A buyer cannot answer ‘research only’ to this approach, and is far more likely to open up about his own security worries and problems and give the rep an opportunity to sell, because those worries and problems can be reduced or eliminated by your technology.

#2

WHITE PAPER



EMBRACE REAL TIME“Leads follow up should be as close to ‘real time’ as possible”

If you don’t want your reps to hear your prospects say they can’t remember downloading your content, don’t leave it weeks or months before they get called. Serious buyers have large information needs, and they will seldom look at one vendor in isolation – so the chances are that on most calls where there is real potential for lead conversion your prospect is also being courted by the competition.

#3

10 MINUTES VS 5 MINUTES* 10 MINUTES VS 5 MINUTES* RESPONSE TIME*

RESPONSE TIME = The moment an interested lead completes a web form until a sales representative contacts them

Tell me more

SUBMIT

INTERESTED LEAD

If your team is the last to call, they run the risk of not getting through at all. According to data from SalesForce, calling in real time – as soon as your prospect has accessed your content – improves contact rates dramatically. As difference as small as 5-10 minutes can change effective call rates by as much as 900%.

A call made within five minutes of the download is 10 x more likely to get through on the first dial

Are your suppliers delivering leads in real time? Can they deliver directly into your CRM or Marketing Automation platform? If they can’t, its time to reassess. .

*‘Salesforce Sales Development Presentation’ by Pete Lamb, Director, Sales Development EMEA Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

900%INCREASE IN

CONTACT RATES

10,000

10 mins 5mins

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

10,000

5 10 15 20 25 30

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

CONT

ACTS

RESPONSE TIME (MINUTES)

GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE HOT! CONTACTS MADE FROM FIRST DIALS

BEST TIME TO RESPOND:WITHIN 5 MINUTES

10XDECREASE AFTER THE

FIRST 5 MINUTES

According to similar graphs, contact and qualification rates also drop dramatcially over a span of hoursi

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

CHAN

CE

ALWAYS MAKE AT LEAST 6 CALL ATTEMPTS

1st CALL

2nd CALL

3rd CALL

4th CALL

5th CALL6th CALL

90% 40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

PERC

ENTA

GE O

F RE

PS

MOST REPS GIVE UP ON LEADS TOO SOON1 CALL

2 CALLS

3 CALLS

4 CALLS

5 CALLS6 CALLS

900%INCREASE IN

CONTACT RATES

10,000

10 mins 5mins

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

10,000

5 10 15 20 25 30

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

CONT

ACTS





FIRST 5 MINUTES


100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

CHAN

CE


1st CALL

2nd CALL

3rd CALL

4th CALL

5th CALL6th CALL

90% 40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

PERC

ENTA

GE O

F RE

PS


2 CALLS

3 CALLS

4 CALLS

5 CALLS6 CALLS

WHITE PAPER



PHONE Vs EMAIL“Realtime leads can up your calling team’s capacity, its productivity, and your lead gen ROI exponentially. ”

Your prospects face a deluge of email, both from you and your competitors, and they are very quick to hit the ‘delete’ key, especially when email is received on a mobile phone: data from leading ESP (Email Service Provider) Adestra shows that 54% of all emails are opened on cell phones (http://www.adestra.com/resources/top-10-email-clients/) . So, not only is your marketing automation follow up email highly likely to be deleted, if your aim was to get a second content download in a format that doesn’t work on an iPhone, you wasted time sending it, increased the likelihood of an unsubscribe, and allowed a warm lead to go cold.

Make an effort to capture mobile numbers: they are far more likely to be answered than modern VoIP desktop comms which are quite frequently only switched when the buyer needs to make an outgoing call.

Real-time response is doubly important here – particularly if calling every lead isn’t possible with your existing resources – remember data from SalesForce shows:

• You can deliver an increase in effective call rates as high as 900%

• You will make contact with 10 x as many prospects on the first call

#4

MOBILE / DESKTOP / WEBMAIL SPLIT*

Mobile

54%Desktop

26%

Webmail

20%

*Adestra 2015 Email Marketing Report

WHITE PAPER


AVERAGE CALL ATTEMPTS BY REPSCHANCE OF MAKING CONTACT*


PERSISTENCE, PERSISTENCE, PERSISTENCE“The more senior your contact is, the greater the level of insulation they will have from sales approaches and the more difficult they will be to get hold of. ”

When you can’t call in real time, persistence is the absolute key to success. Far too many reps give up early, and in doing so burn leads and reduce marketing ROI. A structured approach to follow up call frequency and timing can make an enormous difference. Here’s what calling patterns look like from SalesForce’s analysis of their own lead follow ups:

#5

• If you use 6 attempts, you have a 90% chance of speaking to the prospect.

• Less than 4% of reps will call 6 times.

• A staggering 30% of leads never get called.

What would happen to your ROI if your reps always made 6 attempts?

*‘Salesforce Sales Development Presentation’ by Pete Lamb, Director, Sales Development EMEA Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

900%INCREASE IN

CONTACT RATES

10,000

10 mins 5mins

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

10,000

5 10 15 20 25 30

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

CONT

ACTS





FIRST 5 MINUTES


100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

CHAN

CE


1st CALL

2nd CALL

3rd CALL

4th CALL

5th CALL6th CALL

90% 40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

PERC

ENTA

GE O

F RE

PS


2 CALLS

3 CALLS

4 CALLS

5 CALLS6 CALLS

900%INCREASE IN

CONTACT RATES

10,000

10 mins 5mins

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

10,000

5 10 15 20 25 30

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

CONT

ACTS





FIRST 5 MINUTES


100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

CHAN

CE


1st CALL

2nd CALL

3rd CALL

4th CALL

5th CALL6th CALL

90% 40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

PERC

ENTA

GE O

F RE

PS


2 CALLS

3 CALLS

4 CALLS

5 CALLS6 CALLS

WHITE PAPER


III. Top Tips for successful selling:

INVEST IN YOUR REPS“Investing time in ensuring that your reps really do know the content improves conversion rates and ensures a better handover to field sales.”

Your content is the basis for the engagement with your customers. The content helps reps shorten the sales cycle by easing them past that difficult first few seconds of the call, and making it easier to achieve rapport with the customer. As in rule #2, you do this by talking about the content and how the issues raised in it have impacted on the buyer.

You can’t do this if you haven’t read the papers. Effective marketing organisations ensure that calling teams are completely familiar with marketing content, understand the technology, how customers benefit from it, and ensure that this knowledge is up to date.

Investing time in ensuring that your reps really do know the content improves conversion rates and ensures a better handover to field sales. Vendors who don’t invest in their sales people’s knowledge almost invariably have problems. Reps are left starting calls with gambits like ‘how are you today?’ (the buyer doesn’t know them and isn’t their friend and finds this irritating) and then trying to ask a really intrusive question like ‘Have you got a project coming up?’. Aggressive qualification before a proper conversation irritates and alienates buyers.

#6

WHITE PAPER


HOW IMPORTANT IS THE ‘M.A.N.’? Sales people are trained to find the ‘M.A.N’., the person with the Money, the Authority to buy and the Need for the product, service or solution. This theory fits perfectly for commodity products, where there’s little to compare except price, and where there is

little risk for the buyer because they have total familiarity with the product and complete confidence in it.

However, in more complex B2B buys, for example where an organisation is switching from one mission critical supplier to another, or investing in a new approach that the buying organisation lacks experience in or knowledge of, the usefulness of the M.A.N. diminishes markedly. Why? Because when decisions involve organisational risk, human beings have a natural inclination to share responsibility. And the greater the risk, the greater the human desire to work by consensus. Organisational procedure backs this up. Big buys are rigorously justified, in documents, in presentations, in public with your peers: in practise holding a budget does not mean your organisation allows a reckless lack of accountability. Even CIOs work by consensus – as you can see from the below, the number of CIOs who make decisions not based on the recommendations of in house experts is tiny.

Don’t expect CIOs to tell your sales reps this – your customers do not improve their negotiating stance by telling you that you’ve come highly recommended by an important Influencer – skilled negotiators will not reveal you are in a strong position because they know it will harden your price position.


#7

KEY BUYING STAGES

I provide background information and do research

I take part in decisions as partof a team or as a committeemember

I make the final decision,based on the input of co-workersand subject specialists

I make the final decision,

Requirementsgathering

Vendorshortlisting

Vendornegotiations

IT engineer/administrator

Business management

IT manager

IT director

CIO

COO

Finance director/CFO

Managing director/CEO

Final purchasingdecision

relying primarily on my ownjudgement

Other100%80%60%40%20%0%

IT analyst

CIO

IT project manager

IT manager

IT director/head of IT

Drawn solely fromthe annual IT budget

Drawn from the budgets ofother departments as well as IT

Allocated specificallyfor this project

40%

50%

60%

30%

20%

10%

0%

*Base 755 IT decision-makers



Hardware

Software31%

13%

21%

24%

48%

63%

70%60%50%40%30%20%10%0%

WHITE PAPER


ROLES WITHIN THE IT DECISION-MAKING PROCESS ACROSS ORGANISATIONS OF ALL SIZES






Vendorshortlisting

Vendornegotiations


Business management

IT manager

IT director

CIO

COO





Other100%80%60%40%20%0%

IT analyst

CIO

IT project manager

IT manager





40%

50%

60%

30%

20%

10%

0%




Hardware

Software31%

13%

21%

24%

48%

63%

70%60%50%40%30%20%10%0%


DECISION MAKERS VS CONVERSATION MAKERS“The ultimate decision maker seldom initiates the sale.”

Focusing on the CIO/IT Director is often (not always) a mistake. If you can get to C level contact, and turn around a meeting quickly, you can achieve a sale quickly. However, when they do the maths, most sales organisations find that in the vast majority of cases their initial contact was not C level – there was a meeting or a call or some other marketing contact with someone else who has ‘championed’ using your organisation. Someone who doesn’t hold the budget but whose knowledge and expertise is respected by the budget holder.

The most influential tier of IT decision makers is IT Management, who frequently aren’t budget holders. Someone with influence over the final decision maker is often as effective a starting point and can be far, far easier to contact. As you can see from fig 5 above, the number of CIOs who make decisions on the basis solely of their own judgement is tiny – for most organisations basing marketing strategy solely on the c-suite means ignoring really important decision makers.

#8

This graph can be found in the IThound Buyers Review 2012 - http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/technical-paper/2397786/computing-it-buyers-cycle-review-2012

WHITE PAPER



BUDGET IS AN OBJECTION, NOT A FACT“No budget = no sale’ or ‘no selling = no budget?”

Sales people believe in the ‘budget’. As a group, they tend to think ‘no budget = no sale’. They ask buyers if they have a budget, and frequently hear that its either been cut, or has already been completely committed. This is because they have: spending plans are committed before they are approved.

In most organisations, budgets are agreed between the budget holder and their manager, who approves or awards the budget. When the Budget Holder asks for approval, they have to explain to the Approving Manager what they will do with it and how the organisation will benefit. The Approving Manager will only approve what the Budget Holder can justify, so usually the Suppliers are known before the Budget is agreed.

This actually means, that ‘call me back when my budget has come through’ quite often means in practise ‘call me back when I’ve committed my budget to a competing vendor’. Reps who ask ‘have you got a budget?’ early – are setting themselves up for a short call and giving the prospect an opportunity to say ‘no’ and terminate the call, and they are doing it before they’ve had a chance to build any kind of desire for the product.

The truth is that rather than ‘no budget = no sale’, ‘no selling = no budget’. Budget is created ONLY when Need is agreed. So, don’t think in terms of budget. Think instead in terms of Influence. If the person you are selling to has influence over, or access to, someone who can create budget, then they don’t need a personal budget of their own to become your customer.

Influence trumps budget every time because Influence can go away and make a budget. Computing’s research shows that in 63% of cases with software sales, and 48% of hardware sales, budget is created for a specific project funded by the business, regardless of size, not from the IT budget.

#9

BUDGET ALLOCATION ACROSS ORGANISATIONS OF ALL SIZES






Vendorshortlisting

Vendornegotiations


Business management

IT manager

IT director

CIO

COO





Other100%80%60%40%20%0%

IT analyst

CIO

IT project manager

IT manager





40%

50%

60%

30%

20%

10%

0%




Hardware

Software31%

13%

21%

24%

48%

63%

70%60%50%40%30%20%10%0%

This graph can be found in the IThound Buyers Review 2012 - http://www.computing.co.uk/ ctg/technical-paper/2397786/computing-it-buyers-cycle-review-2012

About the author:Tom Wright is Enterprise IT Publisher at Incisive Media. 020 7316 9529 [email protected]

About Incisive Media’s lead generation capabilities:Generate engaged sales leads by syndicating your content across the Incisive portfolio of sites. With over 300,000 registered subscribers, Incisive Media guarantees volume delivery and lead quality. Our technology checks email and phone numbers for every lead delivered, adds social profile data including LinkedIn, and delivers in real time into your CRM: this puts you ahead of the competition by getting you to the prospect first, and eliminates time wasted on spreadsheets and poor quality data.

For more details on how you can start a content marketing campaign, please email [email protected] or fill in an enquiry form at http://btgmarketingsolutions.incisivemedia.com

Incisive Media have a large range of marketing solutions, beyond lead generation, that can help you connect with a highly engaged audience of senior IT professionals.

Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, grow your sales pipeline or gather industry insight, we have the tools and experience to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Visit our dedicated marketing solutions website to find out more.

http://btgmarketingsolutions.incisivemedia.com