Your Website as a Funnel — Connecting with the Decision Makers

In a previous post I talked about how your prospects have split personalities and your website needs to provide different content for different decision makers. Let’s talk about how to do just that.

You’ve got to create a funnel.

A funnel lets you start with addressing a wide audience and then presents branches that can speak directly to different subject matters. You start at a high level and then get increasingly specific by presenting exactly what each decision maker or interested party needs to decide in your favor, but what other decision makers might consider irrelevant or even boring. A website is uniquely suited to do just that-present a bit of information and let your readers decide if they want more. That means the CFO gets information about how your product might pay for itself and your technical staff gets specifications and the right level of detail to help them sign off, too.

This also means that your website and its content probably need to be bigger and deeper than they currently are. Your general or conventional marketing and sales strategy probably aren’t a single argument – your website, the text, and the way people navigate it have to reflect the complete depth of your sales process. If it doesn’t, then you will probably be disappointed in your site, too.

Let’s say you sell industrial sprockets. You’d start with the most general approach by letting the prospects see that they are in the right place and by presenting information about your company, your reputation, and how the industry praises you. You could then present them with options, which allow them to see how your pricing works, see the materials, and engineering behind your sprockets, or how easy your sprockets are to work with and install. Each story would provide increasing amounts of detail and calls to action, letting the prospects tell you when they want to know more. And, at every point, your navigation and layout should make it easy for them to shift gears (or sprockets), to switch from learning about bulk pricing to examining metallurgy and tensile strength. Of course, you will be looking at the web logs to see the paths your visitors follow and then continually adjust and strengthen them to make the paths they don’t follow more attractive. And, your CRM needs to be able to link every visitor from a single company together so your sales team can understand who is in on the decision to say, “Yes.”

Unless your product is very simple, perhaps a commodity, you need to offer your prospects and website visitors options, increasing amounts of information, and even more important, next steps at every point. These steps may include the option to contact you, to give you a bit more information about their company in order to receive white papers or useful tools, or to provide them with things that they can use to carry your sales argument further inside their organization. For example, have you ever considered offering your prospects PowerPoint slide sets that they can use to sell for you?

Yes, that means that your website has to be bigger and deeper than it is today. And it needs to keep growing and evolving. For example, do you have a blog like this? Do you encourage customers and prospects to sign up for a newsletter that contains useful information, not just sales pitches? How well does your site incorporate every interaction you have with a customer or prospect?

You probably know how to talk to each potential prospect, but might not know how to translate that into a website that sells. Give me a call or drop me a line. I’d be happy to show you how we’ve done just that for our customers and talk with you about how you can do the same thing to turn your site into an active part of your sales effort.

Improve Your List Performance through Social Scraping

For most businesses, especially B2B organizations, your lists are one of your most valuable marketing tools. What you know about your customers and prospects affects your ability to sell to them. If you want to acquire new customers, you have to either purchase or build lists. Ask yourself this: Are my lists good enough to help me meet my sales goals over the next year?

One of the things that the recent economic swing has done is dramatically shake up businesses across the country. Layoffs and reorganizations are now the rule, not the exception. All of the personnel changes are making in-house and purchased lists far less accurate than they used to be. The names and phone numbers you have for the CIO, for example, or any other title of the companies you’re targeting, are probably long out-of-date.

The term for collecting data to form lists is “scraping.” It’s unpleasant sounding, but it’s been a productive way to build lists. However, the typical list doesn’t provide enough information anymore. It’s not enough to just have the clients’ title and phone number, and maybe their email. You need to know a lot more about them in order to attract their interest.

Everyone is so inundated with messages today that you have to become very targeted to get through and capture someone’s attention. Massive shotgun marketing campaigns just aren’t producing the returns that most companies need. What is working is more personalized approaches - campaigns that segment their messages based upon factors that aren’t included in most lists, including age, interests, purchasing habits, affiliations, and more. With this type of detailed information, you can craft messages that appeal to specialized segments of your audience while still promoting the same product or service, but with the language, messages, and visuals that specifically appeal to separate areas.

How are you going to collect this data? Social scraping is the answer.

Start with your own customers. You’ll need to expand your intelligence about them, adding fields to your CRM, if necessary. Then, you’ll need to connect with them through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. You’ll learn about them and, what’s more important, they’ll help you and show you how to shape your messages to attract them.

Use your existing prospect lists and start following more people on Twitter. You’re not following them to start selling to them but to start listening to them. Find out what their interests are beyond your product area. Begin adding to your lists. Observe who they follow and track their responses. Over time, you’ll collect valuable information that will keep your lists accurate and help you form campaigns that are better targeted and more effective.

Does that sound time consuming and difficult? It might be, but put a few interns on the job and task your marketing department with the job of expanding what you know about customers and prospects. Make it a part of each sales representative’s job. Look for ways to target your marketing at more than just one possible customer type. Start segmenting your message to attract the interests of a wide variety of prospects.

Social media is providing a gold mine of information for those who are willing to dig. I’d love to talk with you about how you can take advantage of social media and develop more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

What Carnival Cruise Lines Can Learn From NASA

Just a couple of weeks ago US & World News prominently featured the story of the Carnival Cruise ship that had an engine room fire, lost power, and had to be towed back to port. The passengers went from enjoying luxury treatment to camping out and eating Spam. I thought that the company did a pretty good job of admitting fault and trying their best to take care of the passengers. They refunded their money and offered them a future cruise for free.

But within days of the story, I received an email from Airtran announcing a deal with Carnival Cruise Lines. The big headline: “Distressed Cabin Sale.”

From everything that I can tell, the email was unrelated to the news. I’m betting it was a partner ad that they’d had in the queue scheduled for release. Instead of enticing me with an attractive discount, their email only reminded me of their recent disaster, painting a rather negative image.

I’ve traveled on Carnival before and I’ve had nothing but the best experiences. So, this idea of a “distressed cabin” left me somewhat unsettled.

Now, I know how these things work. Companies plan their campaigns in advance and have them set to drop on pre-determined dates. However, you can’t just blindly pull the trigger on these things. Even if you are in love with your creative idea, and have spent a lot of time and money developing it, if the timing is wrong, it may backfire, costing you even more in brand image dollars.

A marketing campaign is like a space shuttle launch - Mission Control watches ALL of the factors, not just internally, but also the weather and the sky around them. They have to make sure that everything is clear before they launch, monitoring the conditions every step of the way.

Like NASA, you must plan and queue up work, but then pay attention to what’s going on in your space. Keep an eye on the news, your competitors, and your customers, or in this case, your partner’s company. Even the best message can fall apart if you get the timing wrong.

With a few extra minutes, Carnival’s Mission Control could have taken a second look at the flyer and come up with a better lead- in for their ad. For instance, “$159 Cabin Closeout Sale - How Quickly Can You Pack?” Not only does this create urgency, but it also highlights the phenomenal bargain without making you think you’re buying something damaged.

How well are you monitoring your marketing efforts? Do you have a “T minus 60 and holding” pause built into your campaigns?

Let us know. I’d love to talk with you about how we work with our customers to build campaigns and monitor their pre-launch conditions and post-launch results. I’d be happy to share my cruise tips with you, too.

Your Prospects Have Split Personalities – Your Website Should Too

Minds On builds a lot of websites and I look at countless more every day. Far too many of them are exactly the same. They put their product right in your face and shout about how wonderful it is and why you need every single feature they provide. It’s jarring. I’ve also talked to a lot of business owners who are frustrated with how poorly their website is at creating new sales. They just can’t understand it. It’s an especially big problem for B2B sales. “Why isn’t my website bringing in new prospects while my competitors look like they’re raking them in?”

I can give you the secret: it’s because your prospect isn’t a single person. They don’t have the same interests and the same problems. Even inside a single company — which many think of as a single prospect — there are many different individuals who are part of the decision-making process, who have different perspectives and things that they care about. If you are putting a single message out for a single ideal buyer, you might be missing a connection with all the other decision-makers inside an organization.

Let’s say you have a software product to sell. You can talk about all of the great features and benefits it provides. That’s great; you’ve connected with the end user. But, are they the ones who make the buying decisions? What about the technical staff that has to install and maintain it AND integrate it with all of their other systems? What about the CFO and those people who are only interested in the costs and the ROI? And, what about the internal training and support staff? If you’re not talking to all of them, you could be missing out on that key individual who can decide to buy your product or decide to buy a solution from your competitor.

Virtually every product category or industry has an entire cast of characters who potentially want in on the decision. You’ve got to know how to talk with all of them. Does your website do that?

But, how do you talk to all of these individuals without making your site completely schizophrenic? You’ve got to create a funnel. I’ll talk more about that in detail in my next post.

Is your website creating new prospects and driving new sales? Does it speak to the complete range of personalities and individuals inside a single prospect organization? Give me a call or drop me a line. I’d be happy to show you how we’ve done just that for our customers and talk with you about how you can do the same thing and turn your site into an active part of your sales effort.

Tweet Your Job Postings and Get Better Results

The last few weeks have been very busy here at Minds On. New business is flooding in and existing clients are busy, too. It’s all good news. But, that also means that I have to accelerate our hiring. I decided to try a little experiment this time and instead of posting job openings on an online site like Monster.com, I simply tweeted about them.

It worked great! It’s just another sign that new marketing approaches can bear fruit if used smartly.

Not only did I get a lot of responses, but I got those responses through people I know and trust, which puts the applicants further up my trust scale to start with. I also received rapid responses and ended up scheduling five interviews the same day that I had sent the tweet. Just one little 140-character message that I had sent, which my connected network passed on and their networks also echoed, and I’ve gotten a handful of very interesting possible new employees - all in one day. That’s amazing!

I also use LinkedIn to spread the word and I’m finding that it is a very interesting resource. Not only can I spread the word rapidly through my network, but I can also see who is interested and who has taken a look at my profile. That is VERY interesting because it’s not just job applicants; it’s other companies that are interested in what I’m up to and companies that are potential customers.

In the past, it’s taken weeks to get a list of qualified applicants. But I just did it in a few hours and without breaking a sweat. When I narrow the list down, I’m betting I’ll be able to check their references more completely by using LinkedIn and Facebook. I think this is a very promising approach. I’ll write more about it after I’ve finished this round of hiring.

It’s a good idea to let your network know when you are hiring. It shows the world you’re growing and it helps to bring you great talent that you might not have known about through the conventional approach. Give me a call or drop me a line and we can talk about how you can use the latest marketing venues to accelerate your marketing and sales efforts.