Why Change Selling Blog

Most marketing executives will have lead generation close to the top of their list of goals in 2010; however generating quality sales leads has never been harder, or easier - depending on your strategy.

Clarity in Internet, marketing and sales messaging is a topic we have been writing about for the past five years as it critical in creating marketing messages for B2B technology companies that resonate with buyers and help them get found on the Internet.

We signed with Hubspot 12 months ago in December 2008 and chose to migrate our Website onto the HubSpot Owner (now Small Business) package, which uses the HubSpot CMS. (Click the following link for a review of our 2nd year with HubSpot.) For a review of our 3rd year on Hubspot visit  Hubspot Review - Year 3.

We are a specialist marketing consulting helping companies to generate inbound leads through aligning sales and marketing messaging around buyer needs. We create buyer relevant messaging and use this messaging in conjuction with communication, language and conversation skills training in our  selling in the internet age blended learning program to improve individual sales performance.

We contacted HubSpot after receiving a strong recommendation from one of our clients, VICO Software in Boston, who had been using HubSpot for over a year and were achieiving outstanding results.

Our goals with HubSpot are to generate inbound leads and to grow awareness of our marketing and sales performance offerings in the markets we serve.

The situationprior to HubSpot was that we were doing poorly with Google Adwords; our old CMS had no social media integration, nor the ability for us to change any content. We had been placing articles in the Cambridge Network magazine and averaged about 100 unique visitors per month. We received only one inbound lead in the prior year.

What we learned

1. If you actively use HubSpot as a blogging and social media integration platform, HubSpot works as advertised. See our visitor chart below, showing inbound visits, repeat visits and lead conversion events.
2. The charts speak for themselves....you can't fudge the results.
3. We began climbing organic search rankings almost immediately, purely through blogging on a weekly basis.
4. We needed a conversion vehicle to capture interested visitors and added our professionally developed white-paper on 30th. September, (see spike on chart) and have been averaging about 12 inbound leads per month and will close our first new clients as a result of these leads in the next month.
5. White-papers create conversion opportunities, but they take time to write and they have to be high quality.
6. We engaged a professional, Stephanie Tilton from TenTon Marketing who did a fantastic job editing our white-paper, asking questions to help us focus our message and formatting it to produce a high quality product.
7. We used an idea from David Meerman-Scott, which was to give part of the white-paper content away with no registration required. The theory is that after spending 10-15 minutes reading part 1, sufficient trust is developed which motivates the visitor to complete a form (and become a lead) in order to download part 2. The Guide to better sales performance is the part 2. of the the white-paper and requires name and email for download.
8. When we started blogging we were a bit internally focused, but soon learned that people are interested in your ideas first and then make decisions about product/service, so focus blogging on ideas relevant to target buyer buyer-persona, not on your products or services.
9. Blogging takes time and in the style of blog I write, requires intellectual effort and must be posted at least weekly; link blogging is quicker and also effective in getting inbound visitors initially, see chart blog subscribers.

What we like about Hubspot is the Integration of keywords, blogging, social media, analytics, SEO, landing pages, keyword grader, link grader and page optimization wizards and CMS on one easy to use platform which gives us tremendous productivity at low cost.

• HubSpot provides quality support and every time we have had a problem have gotten an answer within a couple of minutes.
• HubSpot forums are rich and useful and the 2000+ HubSpot customers provide a tremendous resource base of expertise very willing to help answer questions.
• Finally we love the fact that we can do it ourselves, see and analyze the results, make the changes and watch it grow.

We became a HubSpot reseller partner as we believe HubSpot can solve the Inbound lead generation problem while at the same time creating mindshare and thought leadership for a large percentage of our clients who tend to be early stage technology companies or large companies with emerging technology products/services.

What were going to do differently in 2010

1. Set up lead nurturing within HubSpot....this requires thought and mutliple offerings to be effective.
2. Set up multiple conversion events including regular Webinars and an eBook.
3. Stronger and more obvious calls to action.
4. Redesign of the front page and restructure of content around our business focus for 2010 to make it easier to for visitors to understand how we create value.
5. Refine our focus on target markets and messaging, keywords and phrases for target markets
6. Engage our target buyers more actively through social media.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to my friends colleagues and fellow group members.

Most sales professionals will be very focused on closing last minute deals in the popular end of year discount-fest enjoyed around this time of year by our customers. Most marketers will be considering how they can improve program performance in 2010 to generate more leads and build mindshare.
It's a bad time to be calling sales and marketing leaders to engage in conversations about improving sales and marketing performance in 2010, but when is a good time?
So instead of calling prospective 2010 clients, I'm posting a blog and sending a link with the top 10 things for sales and marketing leaders to consider in their planning for improved performance in 2010, with a link back to a landing page on our site to register interest in further discussion.

1. Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment: of all the productivity initiatives, this one is the easiest to implement, the lowest cost, with the highest payback as it drives inbound marketing messaging on the Website and elevates the standard of sales conversations with customers.
   
   
2. Territory and Compensation review: are you rewarding your sales team for the behavior you are seeking? Do you have top reps sitting on house accounts and easily making their numbers and potential new stars struggling to learn the business and open new business at the same time, are you under or over paying for performance?
   
   
3. Adopt Inbound Marketing: If your sales team is still cold calling, then your marketing isn't working and your sales team is wasting a lot of time; inbound marketing is a better approach to lead generation. Inbound marketing using HubSpot has potential to significantly outperform cold-calling and traditional telesales performance over 6-12 months and provide an ongoing lead generation annuity. If you enter 2010 with an Inbound Marketing Strategy using HubSpot, you will exit it richer in many ways.
   
   
4. Get into Social Media: in particular, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and if you are in Europe (Germany) XING. These tools will help you research, connect and engage prospects for your products and services.
   
   
5. Implement Lead Nurturing best practices: if you are a thought leader in your market, or an early stage technology company that has a potential for leadership, you need to nurture your leads with a program that educates, informs and engages over the year until they are ready to convert.
   
   
6. Get performance data: so you can benchmark your performance against peers in your industry. The most comprehensive sales performance data I have seen is from CSO Insights and by clicking here to taking this survey you will receive a free copy of the 200+ page 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Survey from more than 1500 companies, when published in January.
   
   
7. Align your selling culture with the way your customers buy: Did you know that early adopters buy differently from mainstream buyers? Failing to engage and win the early market with novel technology is the leading cause of death for start-ups and many killer-products and it's both a sales and marketing problem.
   
   
8. Implement a professional sales certification program for your sales team: We know that sales performance improvement requires deliberate practice of skill and technique, regular role-playing and feedback from experts. A one-off training event is a waste of money without a learning methodology that includes Performance Support, Coaching, collaborative learning and support from experts and sales managers and a certification event to drive behaviour to attain a minimum standard.
   
   
9. Review CRM activity and make changes to formalise your sales process to create pipeline milestones and transparency in the sales process, so that everyone is selling the same way and that buyer and seller are aligned and qualified at each transition in the process. If you haven't seen it yet, take a look at Landslide Technologies, it's the future of CRM - very cool!
   
   
10. Have a great holiday, enjoy your family and friends, get some well earned rest...you all deserve it; 2009 was the toughest year ever in our business.

To discuss any of the above topics and your performance goals for 2010, follow this link to contact Advanced Marketing Concepts Ltd.

I have read some really important books this year that expanded my view of the World and gained valuable insight and I wanted share my top reads in 2009 with you and include links to either Amazon or to my reviews. Please feel free to recommmend any of your favorites that have a base in science and serve to expand our understanding of the sales and marketing sphere.

The marketing messaging used in Websites and Blogs to drive Inbound Marketing leads, must be used to drive sales conversations with the gamut of prospects and customers, without salespeople having to translate it or figure it out themselves.

Rules for Inbound Marketing Messaging:

For a B2B Internet Site to be effective, there is more work required than simply selecting and optimizing keywords. Effective Website messaging and blogposts have the following characteristics

W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology is an important book for technologists, entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, in fact anyone in the business of creating, marketing or selling innovative technology.

I subscribe to the New Scientist magazine because each week articles are published from the fields of pyschology, neuroscience and behavioral science on the understanding of human behavior.

The problems affecting technology companies that operate silo’ed sales and marketing organizations are many and varied. The gulf between sales and marketing in these companies is a lonely place – a “no-mans land”.