My first reaction to the agenda was an instant feeling of superiority, thinking to myself that cold calling has no place in a 2.0 world, and wondering when I’ll see the last serious reference to cold calling as an accepted business practice. After all, Inbound Marketing is clearly the preferred way to attract and nurture qualified leads, with lower cost per new customer acquisition and a far more satisfying experience for most sales and marketing people. So it made me wonder, are there any arguments for continuing to do cold calling as part of a comprehensive sales plan? And as I looked back over the webinar agenda I had to admit and accept that cold calling still has a place and still provides value, as long as you understand situationally where it best fits.

Here are the the top five reasons I can see for still considering cold calling as part of your sales strategy:

1. It’s easy. By that I mean there aren’t many barriers to getting started. The work of cold calling isn’t easy, but lists couldn’t be easier to assemble and buy than they are now, and scripts aren’t difficult to write. So if you have resources (people) that need something productive to do, effective cold calling has positive value because, done properly, it will produce some qualified leads.
2. Feedback is black & white. There’s no sugar-coating in cold calling. When I talk to an Inbound lead who has downloaded our e-book, they often feel beholden to be interested, so they’re likely to lead us on. They feel they at least owe us that much because we gave them something for free. On the other hand, a cold call target will never lead you on. On the contrary, some will cut off the call and then Google you because they were interested in what you’re selling but personally annoyed by your interruptive call. In that case the cold call is sort of like chumming for fish. Not pretty, but something might hit.
3. Low cost of entry. Because it’s easy and manual it doesn’t require much investment in training or technology. If you can dial a phone and read from a script you’re qualified to do cold calling. Persistence, thick skin and an engaging personality will contribute to better results, but they’re not mandatory.
4. It’s fast. Like PPC, cold calling identifies qualified leads in real time, so in a crunch having effective cold calling protocols in your back pocket isn’t a bad idea. Kind of like steriods for aching joints. You know you can’t or shouldn’t always rely on them, but in a pinch they have a role. And cold calling can give a businesses a jump start, with a caveat. Since you found the lead and not the other way around, most of them may not be ready to buy. But at least you can work at getting them in the pipeline.
5. Good training. I’m not being sarcastic with this point. Requiring sales people to cut their teeth on cold calling has some great training by-products that shouldn’t be ignored. You learn that attitude (your own!) makes a difference, that rejection shouldn’t be taken personally, how to think on your feet in the face of hostility, and that preparation, even for a cold call, can improve results. As someone who many years ago spent most of a year doing almost nothing but cold calling, the most important thing I learned was how much I preferred talking to warm leads! That is, people who had indicated through opt-in behaviors that they wanted to talk about something I was selling.

So while I have to reluctantly agree that there will probably always be a place for cold calling, my memories of cold calling will serve as a constant reminder that urgency around our Inbound activities helps to keep us away from situations where we have to rely on cold calling. And that works for me.

Alas, I haven’t been able to sample the new feature because it hasn’t shown up on my profile yet. According to Angela Yang of LinkedIn, Mentions would begin rolling out to English-speaking users on April 4th, and the rest of the world to follow. So we should all be on the lookout. But I’m not going to let a little delay dampen my enthusiasm! I’m excited because it makes my favorite social platform even easier to use as a conversation starter and engagement tool.

Here’s how simple it will be to use:

• Begin by typing the name of one of your connections or a company you follow in your status update box or a comment field on your LI Homepage
• As you type a list of possible connections or companies will appear in the drop-down; select from the list, complete your status or comment and post it
• A Mention notification will be delivered to the person or company you mentioned, alerting them and providing the source (you!)
• Mentions provides seamless integration with Twitter, so LI mentions post to Twitter with your connection’s correct Twitter ID
• In addition to your connections, you can mention people whose comments appear on your homepage. Great new opportunity to connect with your 2nd degree connections in a comfortable natural setting

Key Takeaways

It’s still not clear as of this writing where the company notifications will go. That’s why trying it out on some friendlies first will be one of the first things I’ll do when it goes live for me. But I have to say the company feature is something that’s really got to be exciting for anyone using LinkedIn for business development, especially if you’re in the early phases of trying to build new relationships. This seems like it could be a great way to demonstrate sincere interest and knowledge to employees of target customer companies.

This isn’t any kind of planet-realigning breakthrough for LinkedIn, but it is another improvement that keeps moving them in the right direction to keep owning the hearts and minds of professionals depending on their platform to do business.

But learning that personas are important doesn’t mean you’re going to actually doing anything about it, right? From the conversations we have with clients and prospects it seems lots of people stop right there, with the question “OK, I know I need it, but what the heck is a persona and where do I get mine?”

WHAT’S A TARGET PERSONA?

The easiest way to think about a target persona is as an exhaustive description of your ideal customer that is so detailed you can easily imagine the persona as a real person. We’ve used a similar but far simpler technique when working on brand character projects, where we ask “If the brand were a public figure who would it be?” Sometimes the brand is represented by someone attractive and funny like Alec Baldwin, or strong and principled like Margaret Thatcher, or irreverent and controversial like Dennis Miller. The point here is it’s easy to see the differences between these three, and the different directions brand communication would take based on which was chosen.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN TARGET PERSONA(S)

With a person you’re trying to create it from scratch, a fictional amalgamation that captures all the values, fears, attitudes, aspirations, biases and idiosyncrasies that you believe will describe and predict the perfect prospect for your products or services.

Here’s our outline for creating target personas:

1. Professional background: What does their resume or LinkedIn profile look like? Title, functional slant, experience, responsibility, most important job skills. How did they get to the position they’re in, what was the path, what kinds of stops along the way?
2. Personal background: Married, kids, balanced life style? Involved as a volunteer? Live near where they grew up?
3. Demographics: Gender, age, education, income, race/ethnicity.
4. Values: Team player or lone ranger? Egotistic, charismatic or servant leader? Scorched Earth capitalist or tree-hugger?
5. Attitudes: Early adapting risk-taker, or technology laggard? Competes to win, or encourages win-win?
6. Personal interests: Golf or NASCAR? NFL or MLB? Sailboating or bass fishing? Snowmobiling or cross country skiing? HBO or PBS?
7. Professional goals: Growth for growth sake? Take share from biggest competitors? Make piles of money under the radar? Earn industry acclaim for strategic genius? Or make success look effortless!
8. Professional challenges: What keeps getting in the way of achieving their professional goals? Lack of resources, talent, time, corporate support, understanding, empathy, patience?
9. Pain points/sources of sleep deprivation: What does your target worry about most? Competitors moving faster. Industry viewed as commodity. Talent leaving the industry. Consistently missing on best opportunities.
10. What we expect them to say: These are the things they’ll say to stall you, to keep the conversation happening without making a decision. Things they’ll say to dampen your eagerness without pulling the rug out from under. “I need to be able to demonstrate ROI.” “That decision is up to the buying committee.” “Keep in mind we’ve already got relationships with a good group of qualified vendors.”
11. Favorite objections: When you signal you’re moving toward a potential close. “I can only work with qualified vendors.” “You need to demonstrate your commitment by investing in the selling process.” “Buying from you could be very disruptive to our supply chain.”
12. Our promise to them: From your positioning statement, what is the single compelling promise that you can make that you believe, based on everything you think you know, will be enough for them to start forgetting about their objections and thinking about the rewards/gratification/sense of accomplishment you’re going to help them enjoy.
13. Our elevator speech about why they should choose us: In 30 seconds (my time limit on elevator speeches) why your solution/company/you are the decision your target could consider that may make their life better.

I know this might seem exhaustive, but it’s a great exercise at really putting meat on the bones of your target(s). In the end you may have 2 or 3 deeply defined characters you’re creating content for, which you can use both as a source of inspiration (Does CEO Chuck worry about the effects of the budget sequestration? Should we reference the Final Four or the start of MLB season to CMO Mary?) and a critical filter to evaluate content fit.

And in both cases, whether as inspiration or filter, you’ve made yourself a much better marketer by getting deep into the inner workings of your target. It’s almost not fair to your competition!

Image Credit

Our Transformation

As a HubSpot partner agency we’re just over 2 years into what’s been an exciting transformational experience for our team. We’ve gone from being a traditional small full service advertising agency that included social media and web design capabilities, to a full service Inbound Marketing agency focused on content marketing, website development, SEO, and complete utilization of social media as a distribution and promotion platform. In the process we’ve changed how we promote ourselves, and more importantly changed what we’re able to do for clients to grow their businesses.

In the process we’ve also attracted some attention from HubSpot, most recently as one of 6 subjects in their latest e-book (above right) about agencies who have transformed their businesses around Inbound Marketing. While all of the subject firms came at it from different places, with different motivations and requirements, and took different steps to get where we each are today, we have far more in common than we have different.

First, each of us realized that traditional marketing was quickly becoming obsolete because of a shift in control from sellers to buyers. Buyer (consumer) behavior was changing rapidly because of the exploding influence of search and social media, and the way businesses marketed themselves needed to reflect that buyer behavior evolution.

Second, we all had epiphany moments when we saw that online technology was converging in a way that made new, better approaches possible. New tools were emerging, cost was plummeting, innovation was exploding.

Finally, we all discovered HubSpot, or had it thrust on us by someone who felt our pain. Some got there sooner than others, but we’ve all felt the significance of the platform and mindset that allows us to re-invent our businesses to re-position for the world of today and tomorrow with a promise that is relevant, compelling, and quantifiable.

Our Message to Others

The message in this book to other agencies is simple: heed the examples offered and consider how you could re-invent your business with an Inbound-centric value proposition. And even though client businesses may not feel their business models turned upside down by changes in buyer behavior, there’s no doubt they’re experiencing a drop-off in traditional marketing effectiveness. I often ask client companies to consider 2 competing possibilities: being first in their industry to do Inbound Marketing well, or being the last one in. I can tell by their expressions that the implications are obvious about which camp they want to be in.

Are you ready to be transformed? It doesn’t matter if you’re a student of marketing or a professional earning a living on either side of the desk, the process to start your transformation can be as easy as accepting what’s happening and committing to some initial steps. Start by learning what Inbound Marketing means at 40,000 feet. Download our Step-by-Step Guide to Inbound Marketing for a logical first step. And by all means read the HubSpot eBook to be inspired by our stories.

They already know traditional methods aren’t generating the quality or quantity of leads needed to achieve business goals, and they also know that the web should or could be a more productive new business channel for many business types. At the same time, if they’ve started to look into the capabilities needed to realize any improved online marketing performance, they know they’ll need to either hire new people or pay someone to help fill their capabilities and capacity gaps.

In the past 2 years we’ve answered this question many different ways, sometimes from the gut relying on instinct and intuition, and sometimes armed with research and quantitative evidence to support a point of view. I just got a heavy dose of the latter doing research for this post when I found a recent study conducted by MBA students at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Return on Investment from Inbound Marketing through Implementing HubSpot Software. The good news: this study provides lots of great evidence that Inbound works; unfortunately it didn’t help answer my question about types of business.

In fact, based on search results it looks like there hasn’t been much written so far about the types of businesses that can benefit most from Inbound, so what I’m providing is based almost entirely on what we’ve learned first hand. So here are my top 5 characteristics of businesses that could enjoy attractive benefits from Inbound:

1. Selling a very considered purchase. A pack of gum is not a considered purchase. A compensation study, a warehouse conveyor system, or an emergency response vehicle are. So are snowshoes, canoes, and vacations. Whether it’s B2B or B2C, when it takes research to make the right purchase, and being wrong has serious ramifications, purchases become “considered” and sellers will benefit from Inbound by being found by serious considerers. Good indicators of considered purchases are the sticker price, the process businesses or individuals design to support the purchase, and the approvals required before it can be finalized.
2. Already spending big money on lead generation. Businesses that depend on lots of sales funnel activity because they primarily do project work or their industry has high customer turnover often rely on expensive lead generation services that pummel cold prospects. Research indicates Inbound can reduce the average cost of qualified warm leads by over 60% compared to traditional methods like direct mail, trade shows, call blitzes and PPC ads.
3. Heavy reliance on RFPs. Businesses that rely on requests to provide formal proposals (contractors, OEM equipment manufacturers, consultants) know that getting on the short lists of companies issuing RFPs is the biggest challenge. Companies using RFPs to make important purchases rely on search to update their short lists of potential vendors. Inbound Marketing can quickly improve SERP (search engine results page) rank and targeted visibility.
4. Meaningful and demonstrable point of difference. To create content that will attract qualified traffic a business has to possess real competitive advantage that is relevant and compelling to their target. You need to provide something in your product or delivery that reflects greater value to customers, compared to most alternatives. Your competitive advantage should be the foundation of your content strategy.
5. Lack of geographic sales boundaries. Specialty manufacturers and technology providers have long recognized that they have potential customers around the world, but some have relied too much on bi-annual trade shows or purchased mailing lists to develop leads. If you sell the best orthopedic dog bed, industrial dryer, or methane digester on the planet, your market should be the whole planet, and Inbound Marketing makes you visible to all potential buyers.

Is your business a prime candidate for the improved performance Inbound Marketing can deliver? Help yourself to our Step-by-Step Guide and decide for yourself.

No, it’s not simple or easy, but it’s also not rocket science or splitting an atom. It’s about creating and implementing processes that take advantage of available tools to effectively manage the contacts and activities that make up your sales funnel. Before I get into process, a few definitions:

Top of the funnel (TOFU) This refers to all of the traffic that finds its way to your site, hopefully due primarily to your great content strategy, SEO discipline, and social media plan. The funnel is widest at the top (DUH!) because you’re working to attract relevant traffic without deliberately or actively filtering or discouraging.

Middle of the funnel (MOFU) When a visitor fills out a form to get a content download, they’ve converted from visitor to lead. It usually means that something they saw on your site was relevant enough for them to offer some of their identity in exchange for content they valued. Even though they’ve become a lead they don’t have business value until you identify them as a qualified lead. (see below) MOFU is the most complicated funnel stage because of the broad diversity of interest and urgency represented by people here.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) This is when someone is both qualified and ready to buy, the latter based on observed behaviors that are clearly “kicking the tires” activity. Asking for demos, seeing 3 or more people from the same company doing multiple downloads, frequent visits to pricing pages, and rapid checking out of your LinkedIn profiles are all indications someone’s got you on their short list. When a lead is clearly at BOFU stage they’re an Opportunity. They’re ready for a proposal or a Statement of Work or whatever is appropriate in your business to give a prospect the ability to say “Yes” to becoming a customer.

With those definitions, some thoughts on how to evaluate and process leads.

Qualifying and Scoring

There are lots of ways to look at the first part of this process. However you do it, in the end you want to separate the wheat from the chaff, or the Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) from the bad and/or ugly. As a sales and marketing team you need to decide whether attractiveness or engagement is more important in qualifying. Lead attractiveness are those facts that are typically used to describe your ideal targets:

• Number of employees
• Annual revenue
• Specific industry (SIC code)
• Title of the contact
• Annual capital spending
• Geography
• Membership in a specific trade association

Engagement level is a judgment based on observing behaviors, things like pace of activity on your site, number of pages viewed, and direct requests for information or samples/demonstrations. So stating it really simple, attractiveness identifies prospects that would make great customers, and engagement level flags them as ready to buy from you.

Personally, I think attractiveness and engagement should be viewed as different dimensions, since attractiveness is a relatively constant measure (they either are or they aren’t) while engagement is dynamically time sensitive and changeable, where leads with low enagement today have the potential to become more engaged in 90 days or 6 months or a year, as their situation changes and they learn more about you. In some industries (consumer electronics, for example) people probably are either buying soon or they’re not. So they have a limited time to research and learn before they buy. Pretty uncomplicated. But in things like capital equipment (manufacturing lines, control systems, fire engines) a lead could be urgently looking to replace dying equipment, finalizing their RFP list, completing an appropriations request, or researching for next years budget submission. Systematically gathering that information based on the timing stages your industry experiences becomes especially valuable in lead scoring.

Scoring leads is something you do as a way to prioritize MQLs. You’ll want to do this because as TOFU traffic grows so too will the number of MQLs in your funnel, inevitably leading to the situation where your sales team becomes concurrently overwhelmed with the sheer number of MQLs and potentially frustrated by the inability to identify the best prospects within the bunch. We’re a HubSpot user and reseller, and that platform includes qualifying and scoring tools.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

SQLs (sometimes called Sales Accepted Leads) are MQLs that score high enough that sales people are confident they’re leads that are worth their time and effort to pursue. So your scoring mechanism should be structured to give the highest scores to the best opportunities, based on your actual experiences with leads who became customers. Here are the SQL categories I would want to see as a sales person, ranked from best to not-so-good:

1. Most attractive, fully engaged. These are senior decision makers from companies that are your best targets, who by their behaviors are signalling you that they’re ready to make a purchase. Go get ‘em!
2. Most attractive, moderately engaged. Again, the best targets but they’re not showing a readiness to buy. Depending on your industry, these might be highly valued by sales people because of fit and the confidence that interest will be there soon enough, with the right stimulation. Nurturing campaigns should be created that recognize segmentable differences within this cohort. This category should be watched most closely for behavioral changes that signal increasing trust and readiness to buy.
3. Moderately attractive, fully engaged. These targets meet some basic requirements like company size and purchasing power, but maybe their needs aren’t a clear match to your solutions or the contact doesn’t have final authority. But if they’re very interested they probably have value to your sales team, and should be a priority. Depending on the industry some could argue this group should be #2 priority.
4. Most attractive, not yet engaged. They may be ideal targets, but they don’t know you and trust yet, and maybe the timing or conditions aren’t right for them to be buyers. Give them Class A nurturing, with close attention to subjects most interesting to them, and watch their behaviors for any signs of warming up. Segment with foresight to developing a valuable relationship.
5. Moderately attractive, moderately engaged. Put them on low maintenance nurturing, and if they become fully engaged they’re worth putting more sales effort against them.
6. Not attractive, fully engaged. Should only be approached if the sales team doesn’t have enough in categories 1-5. The good news is they’re ready to buy; the bad news, they’ll likely be a customer you’ll regret.
7. Moderately attractive, not engaged. Same as #5, with a longer horizon.
   
8. Not attractive, moderately engaged. Purge from your contact database.
9. Not attractive, not engaged. Cut them loose!

I would be misleading and exaggerating if I implied that we had lead qualifying and scoring completely figured out. On the contrary, we’re still experimenting and analyzing based on 18 months of our own experience with Inbound Marketing, and learning from other pioneers and leaders within our industry. I’m eager to hear about others’ experiences, and I promise that we’ll continue to share as we advance our own best practices.

Image Credit

Here then are my top 10 marketing lessons I’ll take away from 2012:

1. Transparency is expected. Whether you learn from Governor Romney and his disastrous 47% comment recorded on a waiter’s phone, or look to the success of CARFAX and their full maintenance disclosure for used cars, people expect complete objective information before they make a purchase or cast a vote.
2. Social media is here to stay. NBC got blasted on Twitter for their delayed Olympic broadcasts, while the NFL was forced to solve their replacement referee situation as Twitter exploded with often obscene content following the debacle at the conclusion of the Packers-Seattle game. Ignore social media at your own risk.
3. Mobile is mainstream. For hundreds of millions around the globe, the smart phone is their primary connection to the world. Huge opportunities exist for apps that help you engage with them. Challenge is to stay ahead of behaviors altered by the technology.
4. Emotion still matters. By all objective measures President Obama was the most vulnerable incumbent U.S. president in history, with a sputtering economy, a Federal deficit of historic dimension, and dismal consumer confidence measures, but in the end he out-connected his competition in dramatic fashion.
5. Data rocks. Obama mined the electorate demographics state-by-state and put together an engineered Electoral College win that had observers searching for new superlatives. Imagine the ad products Facebook and Google are working on, driven by their consumer data?
6. Showrooming is transforming retail. Showrooming is the practice of using your smartphone to price shop an item you’re considering buying in-store. A recent study by Harris Interactive concluded that 43% of smartphone users are doing this already, and the number’s growing. Retailers are both terrified and quickly adjusting tactically to counteract.
7. Collaboration is a requirement. With technologies and behaviors changing quickly, the only way to make thoughtful decisions is to pool knowledge, experience, and capabilities. New tools make teamwork easier.
8. Google keeps getting smarter. With each new search enhancement, Google draws nearer to the ultimate authentic search. No shortcuts, no gaming, no easy way to gain ranking. Rankings will be earned.
9. Content is the new currency. Coke has made their content strategy initiative (Coca-Cola Content 2020) the cornerstone of their long-term marketing plans. Consumers today have an unquenchable thirst for a steady stream from their favorite brands and businesses.
10. Change can start now. You can start putting these lessons to work for you now by making small deliberate steps. The only barrier is the fear of letting go of old methods.

I know there are lots more lessons than my modest ten, maybe even one or two that should be at the top of the list. So what did you learn that you’re willing to share? Leave a comment!

Finally, here’s to a New Year that builds on what we’ve learned, so that by this time next year we’re all amazed by the fantastic progress we’ve made, and maybe just a little proud that we kept learning along the way. 

A week ago, a U.S. District Court judge in Seattle certified a class action lawsuit against Papa John’s International Inc. for up to $250 million in statutory damages for the alleged uninvited transmission of 500,000 text messages to consumers.

The suit contends that eight Papa John’s franchisees operating restaurants in the Pacific Northwest, working with marketing services provider OnTime4U, violated the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act by sending consumers unsolicited advertising and promotional messages via phone calls and text messages. The franchisees joined Papa John’s and OnTime4U as co-defendants in the suit.

It gets worse!

If a jury decides that Papa John’s willfully violated the law, they could award triple damages! At $750 million, that would be a smoking $1,500 per text message for promotions that probably cost less than a penny per to send. Ouch!

Aside from the very obvious legal lessons all parties involved will have tattooed on their brains by the time this case is resolved, what marketing strategy lessons should the rest of us take away?

1. We live in a permission-required age. Push stuff on people at your own peril. In most situations, where the law doesn’t protect, people just turn you off, switch channels, or throw your message away. We should all be thinking about how to attract the interest and invitations of customers to have a conversation, instead of looking for ways to cram more messages down their throats. Sounds like a take-away from the election too, doesn’t it?
2. Be a good citizen, or the brand pays the price. While the potential damages could be enormously costly, equally damaging whether Papa John’s wins or loses is the damage to the brand and consumer confidence. Papa John’s is spending a fortune as a major NFL sponsor this season; do they continue promoting with Peyton Manning while they’re on the front page, and risk losing momentum?
3. When you have more to lose than marketing partners, do your own due diligence. Apparently, OnTime4U worked directly for the franchisees without Papa John’s oversight, and provided assurances to the franchisees that because the cell phone numbers were mined from their own point-of-sale systems of calls previously made to them, they had an existing business relationship that exempts them from consumer protection laws.
4. Never stop listening to your customers. Does anyone today wish they got more unsolicited e-mail? How many of us spend time every day or week unsubscribing some of the junk that just keeps coming from people and businesses we never heard of? So how could an industry giant like Papa John’s, with so much to lose, not stop to ask their customers “Hey, do you mind if we promote our products this way?” I’m guessing they wouldn’t have to go very far with that line of questioning to get a clear message.

So what’s the big lesson here? For me, seeing the carnage of a blunder this size reinforces the idea that while being the first to do something in a big way might be exciting, I would rather be the second penguin in the water. All too often, the first one in is someone’s dinner!

Image Credit: Travelerstoday.com via Google Images

Anyone who is a regular reader of this blog knows Weidert Group has been a HubSpot partner for a little more than a year, and what an inspiring year it’s been! We’ve been so pumped about the progress we’ve made that we decided months ago we were going to attend the 2012 HubSpot user conference (Inbound 2012) hosted by HubSpot in Boston a few weeks ago. For months we had been hearing about the incredible keynote speakers scheduled to appear, and more recently we started getting hints about a new product release that would by all indications blow us away.

So when Frank Isca and I headed to Boston 2 weeks ago we were prepared to be amazed, and we weren’t disappointed! We relished listening to keynote addresses from some of the biggest names in our industry. Rand Fishkin, author of The Art of SEO,  schooled the room on the myths and truths of SEO in 2012. Sitting next to Frank I thought he was going to get emotional about the experience of firsthand learning from the master of SEO.

And Gary Vanderchuk, liquor store entrepreneur and author of The Thank You Economy, talking about how the web will transform business models by shifting power to consumers, blew us away both with the power of his ideas, and the passion (and, yes, artistic use of profanity!) of his delivery.

So when Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, co-founders of HubSpot, rolled out HubSpot 3 in all its glorious details, I felt a little sorry for anything still left on the agenda. How could anyone possibly top that?

But than later that same day, I got the rebuttal in the form of the best hour of the week. For me, based on smiles, energized interaction with his audience, and unabashed affirming head nods, the high point of Inbound 2012 was sitting in on a breakout session by Marcus Sheridan, aka The Sales Lion.

Marcus was someone we had heard about months ago, and we knew a little about his story. He had partnered in 2002 with two other young entrepreneurs in Warsaw, VA, near Richmond, to help grow a swimming pool business. After some early success, the 2008 financial crisis caused the overnight evaporation of most of their order backlog, and forced Marcus to begin a quick search for new ways to generate quality leads. His search led him to HubSpot and Inbound Marketing, which he quickly embraced as a way to invigorate his sales funnel. Marcus put inbound to work and turned his business around in a terrible economy, but this was only the beginning for him; word of his inbound success spread like wild fire, and before long people were contacting him for advice on implementing Inbound Marketing plans for their businesses.

Today Marcus is still a partner with River Pools and Spas, which thanks in part to his Inbound Marketing skills has grown to be one of the top 5% of pool centers in the US even though they’re in a relatively small market. Check out their Inbound Marketing case study.

Marcus’ breakout session was called 7 Content Ideas To Blow Up Your Brand, Business and Sales in 2012. Great title, huh? It sure got me, and a standing-room-only crowd, in the door. And once in our seats, Marcus kept us completely captivated with the power of his ideas, and his absolutely contagious passion and homespun enthusiasm (favorite word: “Dang!”).

Without further ado, here are those 7 ideas that are the bedrock of Marcus’ content strategy:

1. Cost and Price. Most sites never address cost, even though that’s the first question most buyers ask.
2. Common problems. Understanding what people worry about most (after price).
   
3. Comparisons. Potential buyers always think about the alternatives, so if you can honestly address the pros and cons of your solution to alternatives, your credibility soars!
4. Awards. Marcus wanted to apply for pool design awards, but couldn’t find any. So he created them! Boom! Now his competitors even link to his site.
5. Breaking News. The East Coast had minor earthquake tremors in 2011. Marcus was first to address concerns of pool owners in his blog.
6. Ratings & Reviews. Provide a platform to celebrate the best of your industry, and watch them beat a path to your site.
7. Thought Leadership. Fearlessly advance thinking by using your blog to take on issues, promote change, or encourage new ideas.

This simple content strategy has attracted around 18,000 visitors and over 100 leads per month. With a typical transaction in the $40,000 to $65,000 range, you can see why they call him the Sales Lion. His online efforts are helping keep the pride well-fed.

It’s unlikely anyone involved with those first games in 1908 thought about billion dollar TV contracts and multi-million campaigns involving multiple marketing resources. They certainly weren’t thinking about it in 1948, what are now known as the Austerity Games. Post-war Europe was broke. Athletes were encouraged to bring their own food, and participating countries were tapped for whatever donations they could spare.

For 2012, NBC paid in excess of $1.1 billion for broadcast rights to the London Games. The network is certainly helping the games live up the the hype as the most social games ever, with multiple outlets to get results, from Twitter to Facebook to YouTube.

Social media marketing is playing a key role in how the 2012 games are followed and how sponsors use their exclusive marketing rights.

The 11 global sponsors who lined up for 2012 paid an average of more than $100 million each. What do they get for that? Exclusive rights to use the association with the Olympics in their advertising and promotion for the full 4-year cycle until the marketing for the next games begins. Given the Marketing opportunities that exist now, and what will develop during the next few years – think of the pace of social media development – and that price looks like a bargain.

Analysts have already singled out Proctor & Gamble (P&G) for aggressively taking best advantage of their sponsorship. P&G launched an advertising campaign called Gold Medal Moms recognizing all the moms behind the Olympians, spots that have been applauded for their ability to elicit tears.

The TV spots are great, but what really gives the P&G effort legs is the social media opportunities it has to keep that message in front of fans and followers. P&G has dedicated a Facebook campaign with a library of films highlighting the role of moms in helping their Olympians succeed. The Facebook page will be there long after the games pass, keeping that message alive.

P&G also announced earlier in the year their pledge to support 28 Olympic and Para-Olympic athletes with financial aid, and in the last week announced the opening of the P&G Family Home, a facility on the London Olympic grounds that would serve as a hospitality center for families of all participating athletes.

In statements to industry analysts, Marc Pritchard, the company’s global branding officer, said they expect the global sponsorship to add roughly $500 million to 2012 revenue, and called it one of the most attractive sponsorship programs they’ve been involved in.

Great opportunity indeed, but what about the challenges?

The biggest challenges will likely come from competitors deploying ambush strategies. Adidas is the athletic shoe and gear exclusive sponsor, but that won’t stop Nike and Puma from advertising during the Olympics, and playing off the excitement created.

Social media is playing a huge role in those stealth tactics, such as Nike’s Find Your Greatness campaign that features every city, town and park with London in its name, except the one where the Olympics are actually being held.

The International Olympic Committee actually put a moratorium on any Olympic participants mentioning non-sponsor brands from 1 month before the Games until they close. Usain Bolt, defending 100 meter champ, is with Puma. If he defends his gold medal, how does the IOC keep him from taking his shoes off for the world to see? (Puma unveiled its “old school” track and field online video game about a week before the games started.)

It seems “exclusive” rights are going to be much harder to come by with future games. Good luck Adidas! Maybe one of your guys upsets him.

Learn more about the opportunities social media can add to your marketing strategy by downloading our FREE guide How to Enhance Your Internet Presence with Social Media. Looking to give your social media marketing efforts a boost?! Maybe it’s time for a Social Media Jumpstart.

We’ve known Buck over a year, but we’re just getting to know Dan. The first thing we learned about Dan is he asks very good direct questions. He’s skilled at uncovering basic truths, all the while keeping the conversation well-peppered with positivism and charm. As he interrogated us about a few of our top leads, he demonstrated to us that in our enthusiasm to get to closing, we were proposing to prospects before we had clearly qualified, defined and demonstrated the fit (or lack thereof) with HubSpot and inbound marketing to the prospect’s needs.

Dan introduced us to HubSpot’s GPCT (Goals, Plans, Challenges, and Timeline) approach, which he encouraged us to start learning and practicing immediately. While this is a great method for us to learn more about prospects, it’s also the first step in the process of helping businesses formulate actionable plans to achieve their growth goals. Here’s how simple this first step is:

1. What are your goals? A monthly revenue target? A specific % increase compared to last year or last month? A certain number of new customers representing a revenue target?
2. What is your fundamental plan? (Or “How will you achieve the goals in #1) Improve customer acquisition processes and frequency? Expand your market geography? Increase customer retention? Grow sales per customer with new products?
3. What are the challenges keeping you from success? Don’t have staff capacity? Lack of resources for non-critical spending? Don’t have in-house skills necessary to succeed?
4. What’s the timeline to achieve your goals? Have the necessary processes in place by Jan 1? Hit monthly revenue goals by end of year? Hire business development pro by Oct 1?

From here the approach drills deeper into the specifics of how businesses grow revenue, and the actions required to be successful. Like understanding how much web traffic you need to generate the quantity of qualified leads you need, or understanding what a new customer is worth to you, and how long their typical purchase cycle is.

HubSpot believes so deeply in this approach that they’ve initiated a webinar series called How To Grow Your Small Business In 2012. I watched a recording of the first running of the seminar, and it seemed to strike a cord with businesses of all types. They’re running it again next week (July 24th & 25th) and I’m sure it will be well-attended.

What I learned once again is that so much of what good marketers do is blocking & tackling. My associates hear me use this expression all the time, but it’s because it fits so well. Know your goals. Understand what you have to do to achieve them. Practice tirelessly at overcoming the challenges. And hold yourself accountable by always measuring what you do. Get the blocking and tackling right and there’s no stopping any of us. 

Great question! As I answered his question I saw my colleague Frank scribbling some notes, and then completely forgot about it. After the meeting Frank followed me into my office and said “You should blog about something you said to Tim.” Since I don’t always hear everything I’m saying I had to ask for Frank’s help. “About relationships,” he said. “We’ve never blogged about how Inbound Marketing helps grow relationships with prospects. That’s a great subject!”

As usual Frank was right on both counts.

Here’s what I said, think I said, or wish I had said, about how Inbound Marketing helps grow relationships:

1. First you have to be visible. That’s why peacocks have big tailfeathers, so the peahens can easily find them. When prospects search they have to find you, or no relationship can happen. Inbound Marketing positions you to be found by the most relevant prospects searching for what you do best.
2. Relationships start with deciding who’s relevant to our needs or interests. Think about dating. Attractive people usually get the most initial attention, but we tend to remember the one who was the best combination of all the things that matter to us. Prospects are the same. They remember vendors whose solutions are most relevant to their situations and fit well with their business culture and philosophy. Knowing and expressing your prospect’s persona in all your content is an important part of demonstrating genuine relevancy.
3. Relationships grow as prospects become familiar through nurturing activities, offering and demonstrating value with no strings attached. When prospects become comfortable with their expectations of the value they’ll receive from you from a blog, webinar or an e-blast, trust becomes solidified. Familiarity means they might even start introducing you to others, because they trust your brand promise enough to attach their name to it as well.
4. As trust deepens, buying from you becomes a real possibility, probably a potential just waiting for the best situation. This is when prospects feel they truly know who you are and what they could count on you for, and they conceptually put you on their short list. That’s when the tools of Inbound Marketing help to signal when a prospect is in the buy mode and increase the odds that you’ll correctly recognize opportunity knocking.
5. Finally, clients become promoters, because they’ve seen and experienced how you both grow relationships and deliver value, and they may also have learned that being aligned to someone who does business that way is good for their standing.

Throughout American history the most successful professional sales people have been those individuals capable of building and maintaining meaningful customer relationships that survive recessions, mergers, new technologies, even political upheaval. Inbound Marketing builds on that legacy of success through relationships by cleverly combining technology, tools, strategy and process. It’s not rocket science, but it does rock!

Do I sound pretty convinced in this assertion? Well, I am, and here are some of the reasons why I feel so strongly about this.

Start with the idea that the majority of professional service firms are hired because a business has a problem that has become too distracting, complicated or dangerous to continue ignoring, and senior management has become convinced they don’t have the internal expertise to resolve the issue.

So who they gonna call? That’s easy, and you know the answer. They’re going to call a short list of the firms and people they’ve become aware of while their problem slowly grew and they gradually became aware of the need to bring in help. Firms that seem to dominate the search terms that have been most productive, and who have on their websites the most relevant and current content that seems to speak directly to their issues, and the reason they’re there.

If you’re reading this because you manage or work for a professional service firm, take a minute to answer a few questions about your own online preparedness to attract prospects at their moment of need. Because if you’re not prepared you’re potentially missing out on what could be both the largest and fastest growing source of business development leads.

1. Do you understand your best prospects pain points well enough to articulate in their own words? So your content reflects your intimate understanding of their situation and needs?
2. Have you developed prospect personas so you can create content that speaks to their values, fears and beliefs? Since bringing in a consultant involves some personal risk, empathy is critical.
3. Do you have a disciplined content strategy that has defined goals, editorial strategies, roles and protocols?
4. Have you created a social media plan to distribute and promote content and serve as a vital source of prospect web traffic? Do you know where your best prospects are online?
5. Have you formulated a focused SEO strategy that recognizes the nuanced complexity of SEO today and provides appropriate care to optimize all influencers?
6. Have you integrated sales and marketing processes to ensure effective conversion of leads to clients? Since qualified leads are valuable and perishable, you don’t want to waste ‘em!

Inbound marketing makes it an incredibly exciting time to be selling professional services, bounded only by the reach of our ambition. It’s never been easier for the world to find the most brilliant people and firms, regardless of their size, as long as those firms are doing what’s possible to be found when they’re needed. If you know today that your firm would instantly have a more robust sale pipeline if only more people could find you, what are you going to do about it tomorrow?

It’s pretty cool what usually happens when we jump into this discussion. While most clients have the initial reaction of “We’re not a publisher, we make widgets!”, it doesn’t take many questions from us to start to demonstrate that their business does have a story to tell that just needs to be framed. Framed on one side by what are the most compelling pain or need points that their products or services address with customers, and on the other side by all the different things they do that allow them to deliver their satisfying product or service.

Our questions usually run something like this:

1. Who are the customers that most appreciate your products? What are their common characteristics?
2. What would they say is most valuable about how your product performs or what you do? How are your products better than the alternatives?
3. What would they say about you if they were recommending your business to another business?
4. What do you do as a business to create the points of difference that your customers appreciate?
5. What special skills do your people possess to create superior products and better customer experiences?
6. What technologies or proprietary capabilities lead to superior products?
7. How do your vendors and allied businesses contribute to your strong market position?
8. What do you do as a company to measure your performance versus competitors to insure future high customer satisfaction and loyalty?
9. What values do you embrace as a business that help keep you at the top?
10. What do you do as a business to make sure your future is as bright as your present?

Now, these aren’t easy questions to answer, nor should they be. But if you go through the rigor of answering them as honestly and objectively as you can (get help if you need help!) you’ll see some very natural editorial categories start to form. And before you know it, you’ll have created a powerful content strategy from what previously was a loose collection of unsubstantiated anecdotes. If only all value creation was this simple!

Follow @greglinn 

Follow @WeidertGroup

Things are a little (Ha!!) more complicated today. Now marketers have hundreds of available cable TV channels, thousands of radio stations through the air and the Internet, hundreds of online platforms/channels/media choices, smart phones as the dominant personal communication mode, and thanks to technology the ability as marketers to utilize any combination of options almost instantly. And we wonder why we’re further away from effective marketing integration today than we were 30 years ago!

Let’s start with what integrated marketing means to consumers and customers in 2012. As consumers we simply expect dependable consistency across all online and offline touch points we have with a marketer. The best way to illustrate integration expectations is in the world of retail.

Take Kohl’s Department Stores, well known for being a hyper-aggressive merchandiser. Good marketing integration means that when their flyer or mailer shows up in homes, consumers going online to shop expect to see the same products, pricing, sale dates and Kohls’ Cash offers, down to the last detail, and the same holds for an e-mail flyer, which they may receive on their smart phone. Everything consumers see online, including promotions featured on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, should be consistently represented on POP in every store.

If you’re a Kohl’s customer, you probably already know they do a great job of building consistency into all their marketing communications. They integrate with the precision of a championship drill team, and they do it without taking any promotional sabbaticals. Everything they do is in support of creating a positive customer shopping experience that celebrates saving money in a variety of ways.

Kohl’s appears to be executionally way ahead of the curve. Most Chief Marketing Officers at some of the world’s largest companies aren’t so happy with the job they’re doing on integration. In fact, in a study conducted by the CMO Council of 200 global marketers (“More Gain, Less Strain”), only 9% felt their firms had a highly evolved integrated marketing model. Most thought their tactics were randomly embraced as a result of tactical silos, especially regarding digital strategies. So the guy in charge of social media may be more focused on growing “Likes” or “Follows” than supporting the Fathers Day Promotion.

What can you do to present a consistent, integrated experience for your customers?

• Start with a plan focused on goals. I have no doubt Kohl’s has discrete goals on consumer purchase frequency and transaction size. Initiatives that don’t support the goals don’t get funded.
• Clearly define brand standards and personality for everyone touching marketing communications. So whether it’s a flyer or e-mail or Facebook page every element rings true.
• Don’t allow tactical silos or islands. Organize tactical planning behind strategic events or initiatives that support goals, and allow no plans to be created in isolation.

In a marketing environment that seems to change almost daily, it takes a thoughtful plan and real discipline to keep all the moving parts pointed in the same direction. There’s nothing magic about making it work, either. Ask any successful marching band director the secret of their success, and they’ll probably tell you “practice!”

Because inbound marketing is getting more press and organizations of all types, sizes, and industries are looking into inbound as a potential path to faster growth, agencies like ours that are qualified (Hubspot Certified Silver VAR) to support inbound marketing efforts are having far more conversations on the subject. Those conversations, as well as our inbound marketing experiences with clients and our own business, have helped us develop some indicators that tell us if a prospect company would likely benefit from the commitment of resources and focus that effective inbound marketing efforts require to achieve success. Here’s our own top 10:

1. Declining effectiveness of traditional marketing tactics – according to research released earlier this year by Hubspot, inbound leads cost 61% less than traditional outbound-generated leads through outbound tactics such as direct mail, trade shows, or telemarketing.
2. Pressure to demonstrate ROI on marketing expenditure – inbound marketing can provide more real-time metrics on the effectiveness of specific tactics than any traditional methods, allowing you to test, adjust and respond to what you learn instantly.
3. You’re selling a considered purchase – whether it’s B2B or B2C, people making purchase decisions about things that affect their quality of life (like a vacation or retirement plan) or their career success (such as a capital improvement or professional service) are relying on search to help them research decisions quickly and effectively. If you don’t show up, you’re not considered.
4. Differentiated product or service – If you sell something that is most valued by a specific type of prospect, you want to be found and completely understood by every one of those, since those are the people or companies that will most willingly pay a premium price for your product or service. Hand-crafted custom canoes might cost 10 times as much as a comparable mass-produced, so if that’s your business, you need to be considered by everyone willing to pay that price.
5. Complexity of product or service – Complexity translates into rich keyword opportunities, since prospects will be searching to better understand potential solutions and vendors. If you build equipment for a specific set of industries, you need to be page one when someone in those industries researches new equipment options.
6. Major competitors dominating the best keywords – see number 5!
7. Limited physical access of customers to product or service – if online is the easiest place for people to sample your capabilities (charter fishing and YouTube!) those who are found will attract the leads.
8. Opportunity to expand market geography – if your business has been limited by your ability to physically call on prospects, but you could service good customers wherever they are, inbound marketing can quickly impact your global visibility and help make the best prospects blind to distances.
9. Lack of sales funnel vitality – we’ve all seen it: a sales force misses their numbers and blames the lack of warm leads coming from marketing. Even great sales people will abandon ship if their livelihood is depending on them closing cold leads. Inbound marketing attracts the most qualified prospects and helps nurture them toward a warm relationship with potential vendors. So sales people don’t waste their time on bad prospects because they don’t have any alternatives.
10. Perception of missed opportunities with best prospects – if your business depends on RFPs, and you hear about the best ones only after they’re awarded, that’s because when the short lists are put together they’re not finding you, even though you might be best suited for the work.

If any of these – or most of them! – sound familiar to you, it’s time you took a closer look at how you might integrate a disciplined inbound marketing approach into your sales and marketing plans. And you can start learning more about inbound marketing now by downloading our Step-by-Step Guide to Inbound Marketing below. 

But lately we’ve been getting questions from clients about what to do with leads, and especially deciding when and how it’s appropriate to personally reach out to leads to move them toward closing. Great question!

Here are the key factors we consider that help us decide if and when we should go after a direct conversation.

1. Financial – Based on the size of the business and any available evidence on past investment in marketing (like website sophistication, prior social media activity, PR history), is it reasonable to expect they could afford your services? If you sell capital equipment, are they considering adding to their asset base, or are they entrepreneurs thinking about plunging in? Because if it looks like they can’t afford you, think twice about spending time pursuing.
2. Title of lead contact. Our website is built on Hubspot, and leads generated from our landing pages are instantly uploaded to our crm product (Highrise). I can go right from my Hubspot lead listing to the leads Highrise profile which shows me an abridged LinkedIn profile. (Isn’t integration grand!) I can often tell from that profile if a lead is a potential decision-maker or a junior person just trying to learn.
3. Honestly filling out download forms with real information, and providing genuine insights into their needs. People who are really considering a purchase or a long-term commitment with a vendor want to have conversations with qualified vendors. They know that will accelerate the process and help them make a better decision.
4. Exhibiting online behavior that says there’s serious interest in what you’re selling. I’m encouraged if I see a lead eagerly consuming good content. Not downloading the same stuff every week, but progressing through a logical learning sequence.
5. Number of visitors and frequency of visits. If the same organization suddenly has multiple visitors registering as leads, and they’re all taking meaty downloads about our core competencies, they’re kicking the tires and are all but screaming for a call from us. Every industry is different, but watching for behavioral tells in any industry is a critical factor in selling success.

Because inbound marketing is a relatively new approach and most practitioners are still learning as we go, I’m really interested in hearing how others are approaching this. Please tell us how you decide when it’s time to go in for the sale!

This Wednesday a group of Northeast Wisconsin professionals had the distinct privilege of learning from one of the acknowledged gurus of LinkedIn, Wayne Breitbarth, who visited Appleton, WI for a lunchtime seminar. Wayne is the author of The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success, a thoughtful how-to book that starts with the basics of getting started on LinkedIn and takes the reader all the way to unlocking some of the little known secrets that have helped make LinkedIn one of the most powerful online business tools available.

For those of you who regret missing the opportunity to learn from a master, go to www.powerformula.net and subscribe to his blog. You won’t regret it!

While Wayne covered a ton of subject matter in 90+ minutes, what was most exciting to me was his overview of LinkedIn Company pages and all the free (that’s right, free!) capabilities offered that most businesses and organizations aren’t yet taking full advantage of.

In a nutshell, here’s what you can easily get from a LinkedIn company page:

• A company overview that includes your elevator speech and key points of competitive advantage
• Products & Services – provide details on everything your company offers to customers. Use the Products & Services Spotlight to include up to three HTML call-to-action buttons linked directly to landing pages on your website, so your followers have an opportunity to take action immediately.
• Careers – post job openings at your organization.
• Use the status update feature to regularly provide information on events, new hires, product introductions, and industry awards. These go to everyone who follows your company with their regular news stream.
• Analytics to tell you the demographics of your followers, the number of visitors to your company page, and what content they’re most interested in.

Here are a few very simple tips to get started:

• Set an administrator. Decide the person or people you want responsible and set them up as page admin. They become the keepers of content.
• Get branding set. Position your logo so your company page and updates always appear with logo.
• Optimize keywords and content. LinkedIn is a search engine and is searchable by other search engines. Make sure all pages make good use of keywords, and you tell your business story throughout.
• Include locations, because many searches target geographies.

Attracting followers is your next assignment. Start by encouraging all your employees to follow your company page. By that simple step you’ll be announcing to their networks that you have a company page. Just imagine if you have 20 employees with 200 connections each, you’ve just found a way to communicate to 4000 potential interested targets!

Want to learn more? Go to the LinkedIn Learning Center. Or talk to a marketing professional. But don’t miss the opportunity to take advantage of this great tool.

And if you’re interested in more technical advice, read Frank Isca’s blog from April 4, 2012, Turn Your LinkedIn Company Page Into A Sales Magnet.

Valuable content delivered or offered with predictable frequency is the currency of IM, so companies considering IM have to start thinking like a publisher. Publishers know that their primary product is content, so having a clearly understood content strategy is a non-negotiable requirement.

Here are our top 5 tips (so far) for building a content strategy that works and doesn’t overwhelm:

1. Know your audience – Knowing who they are by industry, company type, or job title is important, but also important is knowing what their pain points are and why they might be interested in what you can do. Segmentation of the audience matters too, especially about their place in the sales cycle. Someone just starting to learn has different content requirements than someone who’s been following you for months.
2. Know yourself – Understand your unique promise and the value your brand has to prospects. Also know the brand character you want to convey, and work to imbed this personality in all your content. Be authentic.
3. Identify forms and platforms – Once you know yourself and your audience you’ll start to identify the more critical forms your content should take. Think about how your audience can best learn about you, and how your competitive advantage versus alternatives is best expressed. You’ll might see quickly that a video is worth 10,000 words, or a free analysis of the scope of the prospects improvement opportunity is the most compelling evidence possible.
4. Define and commit to an action plan – Schedule content creation, review and distribution on a frequency your team/resources can handle, focusing first on an effective frequency before you worry about reach.
5. Test, adjust, test, adjust – For geeks like me, the best thing about IM is the content and channel testing ability. Analytic tools allow you to test messaging, format, timing, channel, offers, etc., and make data-based adjustments on the fly. So building testing into the creation stream is of high-value. 

What have you learned about content strategy so far? Since it’s an emerging skill area, I would love to hear what others have picked up.

What if I told you not only will you be found more often, but I can help you increase the number of qualified leads in your sales funnel, and have those leads self-identify via opt-in processes that actually warm the lead to you?

As if that’s not exciting enough, what if I told you I had the processes and tools available for you to systematically nurture those qualified leads so your conversion of leads to customers is at a level you wouldn’t have thought possible?

And what if you had the ability to see which of your online offers and messages are most effective at turning prospects into leads and converting leads into customers? If you had that information readily available, you could be constantly improving your online marketing performance, driving the ROI of your activity higher, and the cost of customer acquisition even lower.

Inbound marketing processes and tools make this possible, allowing you to improve your marketing performance in four key dimensions:

1. Be found. Inbound marketing helps to drive your relevant visibility through aggressive online content publishing and disciplined SEO management.
2. Nurture. Grow relationships with your qualified leads with a steady stream of relevant content and offers that help grow their understanding of the value you represent.
3. Convert. Keep them close and in dialog with you so when they’re ready to decide, you’re the first choice.
4. Analyze. Monitor, measure, and learn about the effectiveness of all your online activities so that everything you do either proven or part of the next test.  Never stop learning what’s most relevant to the pain your prospects feel.

If you’re not interested now, it means you’re already doing everything I just described. Or you’re 2 weeks from retirement and you don’t care about improving your company’s marketing effectiveness. If you’re not in one of those two groups, we should talk.

Based on the volume and intensity of the responses on both sides of the issue, you would have thought he asked about the pros and cons of public employee unions! But obviously to people who provide social media counsel, training, content, monitoring, and execution services, this is an issue that inflames passions and provokes the drawing of philosophical lines in the sand.

The online debate that ensued following John’s posted questions quickly established these opposing points of view:

• The Social Media Purist – This opinion seemed to be represented by independent consultants who believe any automation is wrong. According to Jody Raines, a Philadelphia-based consultant, automation “definitely violates the spirit of social networks. I see auto DM’s and I cringe.” Another likened automation to a restaurant that advertises freshly prepared food but uses frozen when necessary. Good analogy!

• The Social Media Pragmatist – This side of the debate was represented by principals of full service agencies who made the argument that automation, used appropriately and in concert with real live human involvement, could be more effective at delivering the kind of results clients are looking for within the budgets that small to medium sized businesses can devote to social media.

Where do you fall, either as a social media adviser to clients or as a practitioner of social media for your own ends? Is it okay to use automation to reach the broadest audience with your valuable content, or are you violating the very essence of social media when any communication across the social networks is executed by a program? Is your brand damaged by any evidence that automation is involved, or does the greater good of the brand’s business performance and resulting SM ROI more than compensate?

Tell me what you think! Since we’re all on a pretty steep part of the social media learning curve, this is a good time to have this debate.

Instead, Getting Naked is a wonderful instructional by Patrick Lencioni, author of the best-seller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and the founder/president of The Table Group, a management consulting firm focused on organizational health. The title is derived from Lencioni’s approach to consulting, which he calls “naked consulting”, which, according to Lencioni

“…boils down to the ability of a service provider to be vulnerable, to embrace uncommon levels of humility, selflessness and transparency for the good of the client.” The author presents a compelling case that most consultants sabotage their best efforts at winning long-term client loyalty by allowing their work to be influenced by three fears:

1. Fear of losing the business – Because we’re afraid of losing a client we avoid some of the very behaviors (like giving away ideas, or telling truths that may hurt egos) that ultimately can grow trust that keeps clients.
2. Fear of being embarrassed – Since as business advisers we think we should always look smart, we avoid asking potentially dumb questions or making possibly silly suggestions that might end up being brilliant because we want to avoid risk – even though being vulnerable in questioning and suggestions is another way to build client trust.
3. Fear of feeling inferior – To avoid feeling irrelevant or unappreciated, we might avoid getting our hands dirty, or even “taking a bullet” for the client, even though those again are demonstrations to the client that everything we do is for them.

So the simple but powerful advice Lencioni would offer for anyone in a business-adviser role is to work at being candid, modest, and transparent – that these characteristics at their essence help you to be vulnerable, honest, and authentic with clients. And when clients begin to realize the genuineness of these behaviors toward them, that’s when true trust can thrive, and both you and your clients have relationships they can count on.

If you’re not already practicing naked consulting, now might be a great time to loosen your tie, pick up this helpful book, and start Getting Naked.

I had a conversation last week with the VP of business development for a B2B financial services provider who patiently listened to my explanation of inbound marketing. When he was comfortable that I was finished he explained to me that his business was different since it depended on direct referrals from attorneys, accountants, and wealth management advisors.

In another meeting last week our team participated in a conference call with several Hubspot people and a logistics company prospect. While the prospect was genuinely impressed with many of the Hubspot tools, they too told us their business was “different,” that they had a relatively small prospect target pool that they believed was well-covered by their direct sales force.

In both cases, it wasn’t hard to show the potential value they could realize through inbound marketing, just by asking them a few simple but direct questions:

1. Would you like to have more well-qualified leads?
2. Do your prospects use online search to learn more about potential product and service providers? (research says 95% of business people do)
3. Would you like to know which elements of your value proposition are most attractive to prospects?
4. Would you like to know where your best leads are coming from?
5. If you could, would you segment prospects based on the challenges they face and tailor direct communications to their challenges?
6. Finally, would you pay for marketing services that can demonstrate a higher ROI than any recent capital investment your company has made?

Funny thing is, most B2B and all but the largest B2C businesses answer yes to all six of these questions. If that includes you, what are you waiting for? Your competition is probably thinking about this too.

Here’s the kicker that makes that apathy funny: 50% of those same people said word-of-mouth is something they can’t do without, and 40% said word-of-mouth was their main method of generating business.

That contradiction in attitude reminded me of a recent conversation I had with a regional sales manager for a large paper products company. I was at their national sales meeting to do a social media overview presentation, and during a break this regional manager started a conversation by saying “Hey, all this social media stuff is great for big consumer brands, but you need to understand, my business is all about relationships.”

Well, needless to say, the rest of my presentation was peppered with examples of how social media builds relationships faster and more efficiently than any traditional means, and in fact works in tandem with many traditional approaches. And of course the same holds for creating word-of-mouth 2.0. I couldn’t help but launch into how social media as part of an integrated inbound marketing campaign is word-of-mouth on steroids!

Here are a few of the reasons why:

• More control/influence on your message. Your self-generated content should be a big part of the WOM you’re working to create, so you play a big role in keeping the message directed.
• Your message can go way beyond your network because of the ease of sharing social media provides. Smart, funny, relevant content will experience many generations of sharing.
• Referrals are easy! Between the formal review sites and the informal recommendations, it’s never been easier to share opinions of what we like. And you can influence recommendations by encouraging and facilitating.
• Social media accelerates relationship building. You can touch more people, more often, with greater variety of content and actually have knowledge through analytics about what is most relevant to them.

So what’s the message to SMBs that think social media isn’t relevant to their world? Stop making excuses and rationalizing about why you haven’t done anything; instead, bite the bullet and start taking positive steps to take advantage of the tools and capabilities available to every business on the planet.

What finally got us to a decision to commit was thinking about the possibility that one of our closest competitors could do it before us. Thinking about that possibility quickly became much scarier than the thought of spending a little cash and a lot of people’s time and energy on something that didn’t generate positive business results. So for me personally as a small business owner, the decision became a no-brainer. If we wanted to be successful and profitably grow the business, we needed to embrace Inbound Marketing and make it our primary marketing strategy.

We embraced it so completely that within 6 weeks of becoming a customer, we became a very enthusiastic Value Added Reseller (VAR) for Hubspot.

Here are the top 5 reasons you should commit to Inbound Marketing before your competitors:

1. The lowest hanging fruit is only there for the first one in the orchard. Which means first in should have the best ROI.
2. If leadership and innovation are valued in your industry, nothing says it like being first with a pioneering approach. Being first has definite news value.
3. Being first makes it easier and more likely you can execute a dominating and proprietary SEO strategy.
4. Most good marketing partners won’t work for a client’s competitors. So if you want the prettiest girl at the dance, be the first one on the floor.
5. While competition is a long race that never really ends, it’s easier to stay in first place if that’s where you start.

I know we have a lot of forward thinking individuals among our readers. Please share your reasons for why you should be first in your industry or market.