The Funnelholic

I hope to bring more data as I gather slides from trip to the Warrilow Summit.  One session really hit me.  It was a panel of SMB owners and the topic was “How to sell to the SMB”.  It was 9-10 folks so not 100’s, but they said something that really hit me:

1.  They rely heavily on their admins.  Most of them said, pushing their admin away to get to them was a mistake.  The admin runs their lives, does the purchasing research, and schedules the sales guys they like.  Message: Embrace the admin

2.  They do the majority of their research online and at night.

3.  They have no time for incompetent sales guys.  Sound obvious? Not really, the economics of selling to the SMB typically means the high-end sales guys end up selling big systems to enterprise accounts. TRAIN YOUR PEOPLE FOLKS

Just some tidbits, with more to come

I haven’t ranted much about the fall of trade shows, but as an online lead generation wonk you can imagine how I feel about them. (Lets just say as shows dwindle in size and scope, I nod knowingly.)

Now, I have found a conference I can sink my teeth into.  I just got back from the Warrilow Summit at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The conference is focused on helping vendors market to and sell to the SMB market.  Its no secret that every company and their mom is trying to crack two markets: International and SMB.  Sound crazy? Its true, the enterprise is OUT.  You should have seen the companies there: IBM, Cisco, Dell, you name it.  Anyway, so the Summit was intended to bring in marketing/sales folks hoping to crack the SMB nut.  It succeeded.

Here are my trade show rules of today:

1. Trade shows need to be maniacally focused and targeted to be valuable.   Warrilow had the right people mixed with the right vendors

2.  Trade shows need to keep people moving, this show did

3.  Trade shows need to throw amazing parties at Pure Nightclub, they did.

4.  Helpful employees who are actually employees of Warrilow

5.  A charismatic and respected host of the entire event.

Net, net…I wholly recommend the show to anyone focused on the SMB market.  Warrilow. I will certainly go again.

Well, as a blogger, you need to love yourself…but I didn’t love myself enough to publicize my own webinar. HA. I am speaking today at 10AM PST with Leo Manson from Microsoft. The goal is to give marketers the ability to kick start an effective lead generation platform leveraging their current CRM system. Check me out. PS if you cant make it today, Ill send an archived version.

I’d love to hear feedback as I refine my outward messaging.

Unless you’re in a cave, thanks the credit markets the global economy is on the rocks. I have always marveled at the carefully chosen words of our politicians or economists. BTW, not just in trying times but all the time. Right now, my most uncomfortable laughs are coming from the pundits regarding the current financial mess. I especially enjoyed this, so this pundit Martin Feldman from Harvard is the first one to declare a recession. Here is my favorite though:
Martin Feldman on Bloomberg.com (read article here):

Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein, a member of the group that dates business cycles in the U.S., said the nation has entered a recession that could be the worst since World War II.

I didn’t have perfect grades, but wasn’t the recession during World War II known as the “Great Depression”? Way to go out on a limb there Marty! Of course he prefaces it with “could”.

Even more hilarious is our boy Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulsen.

From Bloomberg.com also:

“We have slowed down very significantly. I’m not getting into’ whether it is a recession.

That’s a good one. Our guy whose job it is to keep our economy safe is going with a “no comment”.

Bottom line, you gotta be an idiot to not see that the sh__ is hitting the fan. Pundits and politicians know full well what is going down, but their job is to couch hysteria so they have to choose their words careful.

Here are the translations:

What Feldman really said was: We are headed into a financial cycle close to or worse than the Great Depression

What Paulsen really said was: We are clearly in recession, I am too dumb to consider the Great Depression, all my buddies work on Wall Street so I gotta keep the markets pumped up, and I am not going to be the one to call this what it is.

Ahh, the beauty of words. So why does the Funnelholic weigh in? Well, I for one while “growing up” professionally in the valley used to laugh at marketing folks worrying about every word, but when I was finally an adult I realized the importance. Now, I notice it all the time. you might say, well, I am not that dumb I am not falling for this, but the truth of the matter is there has not been a massive sell-off yet and people aren’t fully freaking out so their words are likely working against the mass public. (BTW, words can only hold reality for “that long” (imagine me barely holding my two fingers apart). Funnelholic learning: Words do matter.

I thought this was a good article on InsideCRM.com where the editors looked up as many valuable SFA links on the internet and tossed them into one article…Great for research, the editors did all the work for you.

Insidecrm.com: The Ultimate Guide to Sales Force Automation 

Warning: Yes, I work with InsideCRM.com.

On the other hand, I think this series of webinars has been great both topic-wise and production-wise. The next webinar is a great idea with real customers discussing real CRM implementations and the learnings. The moderator Chris Bucholtz, who is the editor of InsideCRM, is really good combining his career as a tech editor with a background in radio. Click here or on the picture below to sign up.

The last webinar went great. That was the one on my favorite topic, I blogged on it before. That was before the webinar. First of all, attendance was incredible and secondly, the webinar went great. Bottom line, no matter what you do, CRM adoption is still a massive problem and solving that issue is critical for your CRM or metrics success…i recommend watching it. Its archived, so you can sign up and watch this.
If you are considering CRM, watch this one which is more of a CRM primer. Sign up here.

I thought there were some good topics on this. The actual video itself was grainy for me.

Anyway, the topic is rich media and its role in B2B lead generation. Example: moving away from straight whitepaper PDFs.

More and more people are pushing their archived webinars onto youtube.com. Now, when I look there are not a ton of views…but since its free, why wouldn’t you? If you want validation, please look at Insight24 putting their webinars on Youtube.com. Insight24 part of On24, who are webinar providers!

Youtube will become legitimate when it becomes easier for B2B folks to find their types of video. Even now, its hard to find B2B topics.

Anyway, lets watch the youtube development and see what happens.

PS I am about to post a pretty good B2B lead gen webinar.

Warning:  If you have been giving the task of generating leads and have been given a limited budget, then you should quit.  Depending on how limited it is, you will probably fail.  That typically means that the organization you are working for doesn’t understand lead generation.  We can talk more about this in depth in future posts, but lead generation takes time and money.

The Pilot’s License:    One of the great situations for marketers today is that a number of lead generation vendors will allow you to test their programs.  The wave has caught on as the outsourced appointment-setting service organizations and telemarketing firms are on board too.    Not long ago, we had to make major commitments to vendors to get going.  These were big bets that got people fired. Take advantage of this situation and try everything you can.  Some will fail but at least you know. By the way, these pilots are not FREE and should not be either, the lead generation vendor has to do work so you should expect to get anything for. If you are a c  Expect to pay for this, but expect to not have to make any long term or higher dollar commitment YET.

Set a reasonable goal: On-Base Percentage:  Now, you need to decide what you are going to test for….as I have mentioned before, the best lead generation marketers I have run into have expectation set that they will give sales AT-BATS, its up to sales to hit the home runs and grand slams.  Pilots are short-term limited engagements remember so you have to set your expectations correctly.  The vendor hits a couple home runs in the pilot  should not make them better or worse than the vendors they are up against.  Now you are using the pilot to gamble.  You know how many “nobodies” hit home runs in their first at-bats in the majors?  You have took at this like Billy Beane of Moneyball fame would in evaluating talent.  Billy would never judge a prospect on home runs, instead he would look at ON-BASE PERCENTAGE.  When you look at lead generation vendors, you are looking for the fundamentals to consistently give the sales team at-bats and thus the ability to hit.    If the sales team stats look like the vendor batted 1 for 50 with 1 home run and 49 unsellable prospects, they are not likely better than the vendor that had no home runs but 15 sellable prospects in the 50.

So, set a goal that will set you up for success going forward, I suggest one way:  At-bats – how many of these guys fit your qualified lead critieria (Geo, company type, right guy, willing to listen).  Its that simple, you want to judge these guys up-front and quickly, live by your unified lead definition.  As processes iron themselves out, you can start attributing more ROI metrics.

If you are comfortable with you’re current lead generation process and have an idea what the cost per opportunity rate is for your lead sources, this can work as well.  That is the total spend versus the number opportunities created in the SFA.

 
Test multiple vendors:  This is a big deal, don’t test one…test a bunch.  That is why I mentioned the budgetary issues.  If you can’t test multiple vendors at the same time, you can’t test, it’s not a test.  Bottom line.  Get a number of vendors in the door.

Beware of the Direct Sales feedback:  I am a broken record, but if you pass these lead to the direct sales reps for feedback…they will all lose.  You have to have infrastructure set up to handle, qualify, and pass leads to your direct reps.  This is especially true with field sales reps, they are not good sources of feedback. Time is their enemy and they don’t like to spend their day war-dialing and trying to turn leads into prospects.  They just don’t.  You will not win in this regard.  Now, there is a caveat…if you are using appointment setting services, this is not true.  These services are built for direct-to-direct sales and should be passed accordingly.

Nobody is really sending me funnels anymore. But I have a bunch in my email box that I haven’t gotten to. Here is one that is great. It represents the “funnel to the funnel”. As I have railed in favor of before, you have to understand your marketing funnel like sales looks at their sales process funnel. You can’t just send leads to Field Sales Reps or others. You have to understand from web traffic to passing the leads to sales. And what you do in the Sales Support stage will have a substantial impact on your lead ROI. The hard part is convincing an organization that doesn’t understand that you will have increase cost-per-lead to drive a higher ROI. Unfortunately, the best lead generation organizations I have seen start out with a realistic view of cost-per-lead (ie they dont just use the $90 CPL from TechTarget, they build in realistic conversion rates, drip/nurture costs, lead qualification costs).