Ideas for campaigns in B2B are often focused around written content delivered by electronic media.  Content strategies are now an essential part of planning your B2B new business development.

If your clients or company do not have an explicit content strategy – it’s time to get your pen out and write one.

Content is a perfect way to engage prospective customers.

If you can demonstrate your organisation’s knowledge and expertise through what you write about, comment on and send out, then you will find it easy to filter prospects into potential buyers, potential referrers  and shortcut your sales qualification process.

Here is a list of ten ways to improve your content strategy

1. Share information – not just about your own business but topics your readers will want to know.  Can you write an unbiassed appraisal of a group of competiting products?  Do it
2. If you have pages that update regularly (e.g. monthly) then say so on that page – make it easy to find and stick to your schedule so you never miss a month.  You will have noticed my new Brands Seeking Agencies articles.  These publish weekly on a Thursday.
3. Contests and competitions are a great way to get free stuff out there and to build goodwill within your customer base.  Check out this post from my client, Rowperfect - the detail all the new books they are selling and at the end offer a contest for Yoga for Rowers.
4. Free books or e-reports are good to get new readers visiting – lots of search engines pick up on these and add them to aggregation promotion sites.  Stimulus writes iPhone apps and they ran a one week free downloads on their iPhone UK Tax app, “Write Tax Tables”.  They got add-on sales after the promotion ended by pass-on recommendation and viral WOM.
5. Extend your PR activities to include article writing.  Not just for the print journal, but also for the online edition.  I wrote an article for B2B Marketing magazine a couple of months back.  They just contacted me to say it’ll be in the September edition.  I will use it in my email newsletter and add the link to my email signature for a month after publication, plus print out copies to give to my top clients and prospects that I meet next month.
6. Once a week check through your key prospects and former clients (your database, LinkedIn, FB wherever you have them stored) and make a keep-in-touch email or call to ten people.  Send them something that made you think of them.  [One of Royal Mail's most powerful campaigns was "I saw this and thought of you..."]
7. “The best bloggers are avid blog readers” says ReadWriteWeb so what are you doing to read content elsewhere that will reflect well in your own content?
8. Search for disaffected customers who are unhappy with their current provider.  Use tools like Tweepsearch, Twitter search or Google alerts.  Chris Brogan blogged that he’d bought a car from a virtual supplier after complaining about a bricks and mortar dealership.  Grumpy customers are waiting to be converted to your products – strike up a conversation.
9. Subscribe to business databases with search so you can find people you don’t already know.  Try LinkedIn, Jigsaw search, ZoomInfo and use them to expand your network into top prospect companies
10. Content tools that help you create original output: Tokbox for personal video messaging, demos and conferencing; Jing for screen grabs, recording video and editing; Kineticast for creating presentations stored online; Zentact allows you to tag keywords onto contacts which display when you are browsing content so you can send links to the contact with that keyword.

Bonus material

Check out the recently published book From Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt, is Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections which is an overview of the tips and techniques needed to excel at business blogging [affiliate link].

Eloqua’s The_Content_Grid is a nice one page summary of types of content on the axes of centralised/decentralised and awareness/consideration.  May be a useful checklist.

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But, unless you are very lucky, few will respond to your first approach or your first request for a meeting.

The reason is that in order to get that first meeting with a new prospect, you have to answer one question

Why should I invest my time to meet with you?

Put yourself into the shoes of your prospective marketing director – she is busy, crazy busy and as far as she can tell her current agency is doing a very good job of fulfilling her brand’s needs.

In the old-fashioned world of sales calls your typical conversation went something like this

“Hello I’m Rebecca Caroe from Creative Agency Secrets.  We specialise in busienss development for creative agencies.  The reason I’m calling is to tell you about a new email lead generation service that we are launching and I wondered if I could fix a time to meet you in order to show you the product.”

Sound familiar?

That was a classic sales call script using an Introduction : Positioning : Reason : Close.

I’ve done it myself dozens of times.  I have also hung up or quickly got off the line when it’s been done to me dozens of times.

Phone calls can be a really effective lead generation tool

But you have to know how to use the tool.

Nowadays you have to use the call itself to build credibility and answer that key question “why should I invest my time to meet with you?”.

Three tools to build your credibility

1. Trigger events – know what the events are that can force supplier change and when they occur.  Watch for them.
2. Be an expert – know all you can about the pain the event creates and how to smoothly overcome it
3. Limit the options – keep your communications through few channels, offer one solution and keep track of the conversation over time

Here is how the new selling by phone script should work:

Introduction: Be brief – your name and organisation.  No more is needed.

Credibility: Name your referral person or campaign that should get their interest, state your research findings or outcomes and use a trigger event as a means to gain acceptance and permisssion to continue the call.

Insight: Get them really interested in you by offering free ideas, insights and information that will help the prospect agree to meet.  They know you won’t tell them everything for free on the phone – the price of the knowledge is the meeting

Close: Agree to meet and share – maybe ask them to contribute too so that you are perceived more as equals than a vendor and a buyer.  Friendly and un-pushy.

Version two of the call could go like this

“Hello I’m Rebecca Caroe from Creative Agency Secrets.  We provide leads for creative agencies.  I saw that you’d lost the Colefax and Fowler pitch recently and I wondered if you knew that Farrow and Ball are looking for an agency to collaboarate with on the Tiffany business?  I know this because of a new lead generation service that we are launching and I wondered if I could fix a time to meet you in order to show you the product.”

Now that’s deeply simplified as a script and doesn’t represent the conversation but you get the gist. 

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Anyone else notice that LinkedIn is really becoming the de facto source for business to business (B2B) personnel checking?  When you are doing demand generation for your business – do you use LinkedIn to background check?

I have been doing demand generation for my clients this week.   And twice people I approached immediately went to LinkedIn and checked out my profile and invited me to connect with them.  They also replied to my cold approach and invited me to present my client’s business to them.

This change in behaviour is very telling – business is now moving fast into online spheres and neglecting the old-style write a letter, then phone, then agree to meet.  It appears to me that from an introductory email, you can link in and cut out the letter / phone steps from the old methodology and then cut straight to a conference call (rather than a meeting) to start talking business together.

I love it.

Steps for business development demand generation

1. Get your LinkedIn profile up to date
2. Add your LinkedIn profile to your email signature
3. Get your company profiled with a page on LinkedIn Companies
4. Find people you know in your past jobs / colleagues / clients / School or University to connect to
5. Research your targets for demand generation using the Linked In “Companies” search box
6. Use the people you know to get introductions to your prospects if possible
7. Simultaneously to 4, make direct approaches  and make sure your signature is on the inbound email

Does it work for you too?

Are we Linked In?

Please connect.

This post relates to Relationship Development and Marketing Communications stages of my business development methodology.

Related articles

• How to protect your brand equity online (creativeagencysecrets.com)
• An open letter to marketing directors with old websites (creativeagencysecrets.com)
• Where do SMEs win business online? (creativeagencysecrets.com)
• Power Prospecting With LinkedIn (slideshare.net)
• The Boardroom Social Media Basics (slideshare.net)
• B2B social media spend to increase to $4.8 billion by 2014 (freshnetworks.com)

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We have been members of BIMA for a while – it’s a trade body for digital agencies.  They ran an event called “New business generation – farming style” earlier this month.  It was a panel discussion with Chris Cowpe – The Caffeine Partnership, Paul Kirkley – JWT, David Hart – Codegent and Mark Clark – @JFDI.

Here is Jane’s take on the event with her own views expanded.

Changes in Business Development

A subtle yet important shift is starting to change the way we look at business development. The change can be best described as a move from hunting to farming.
Seth Godin articulates the shift in his blog:

‘Five thousand years ago, every human was a hunter.  If you were hungry, you got a rock or a stick and you went hunting.  The problem was that all of the animals were either dead or really good at hiding.

Fortunately, we discovered/invented the idea of farming.  Plant seeds, fertilize em, water em, watch em grow and then you harvest them.   The idea spread and it led to the birth of civilization.
Everyone got the idea… except for marketers.
Marketers still like to hunt.
What we’re discovering, though, is that the good prospects are getting really good at hiding.’

Why prospects hide and how to overcome it

The shift is brought about by a realisation that it’s clients who define agencies; they’re agencies’ biggest assets.  To make the most of the opportunity client development presents, we’ve outlined some straightforward steps to winning new business.

Step 1 – re-focus

Did you know you’re five times more likely to grow existing business than win new?  What’s more, growing existing business is your only real chance of short term revenue.  Ask yourself some questions about your organisation:
★ Is winning new business viewed as sexily as winning new new business? Do you celebrate those who grow existing clients rather than viewing it as everyday?
★ Is your approach to new business as formalised and structured as your approach to new new business? Are you investing enough energy and resources?
★ Are you leveraging relationship equity by sharing responsibility for business development with senior management?
★ Have you equipped your staff with new business tools and know-how so everyone knows what to ask and how to ask it?
The usual goal of growing business by 10% if very casual and non-specific, versus someone telling you they can see a £500k opportunity with an existing client.   Make sure your culture is such that people aren’t afraid to ask for time and resources to pursue client development opportunities.

Step 2 – pick your targets

Every client represents some opportunity, but where should you invest?  The key is to identify a manageable number to pursue. If you’re finding it tricky to decide, ask yourself:
★ Which clients will most enhance our reputation?
★ Are we in danger of chasing those who already have strong agency relationships?
★ Do we have a great rapport with this client?
★ Have we defined what we want? e.g. are we good at taking clients from offline to online, or do we want sophisticated clients only?
Remember winning extra assignments is better, creds wise, than having a wide array of fragmented business.  If you’re wasting time and not getting traction, change tactics or cut your losses and switch from target A to target B.

Step 3 – winning

Too often agencies claim to do everything, when in reality they only really do two or three things exceptionally well. Clients are fed up of agencies trying to sell them everything when they just want X, so focus on your strengths.
Digital agencies are in the perfect position to assume the role of trusted adviser – armed with knowledge and insights that your clients are desperate to understand.
Yet do you find yourself trapped in a tactical, project orientated role (‘build that site’, ‘do that DM’)?  The good news is clients want more retained relationships.
★ When was the last time you asked your clients what their business plans and life plans are?
★ Have you asked what keeps them awake at night?
★ Do you understand their business objectives and individual ambitions? Just by asking you might reposition yourself in the client’s mind. Even if they’re taken aback, go with it!
★ How can we position ourselves in the wider context? Can we merchandise the work we’ve done through the lense of building brands as opposed to completing projects?
★ Can we engage clients at a higher level, by helping instead of selling? Are we investing enough time without an order book down our trousers?
★ How can we convince our client’s board they aren’t pursuing a digital fantasy?
★ How can we validate what we’ve done through measurement? Does each piece of work have measurable business objectives?
★ Are we measuring the quality of our relationships?
★ Have we made our organisational objectives clear to the client?  Can they help write our business plan? (brass neck required!)
Agencies often make the mistake of waiting until a job is done and the honeymoon over to try and expand.  Instead try to use honeymoon periods, when you’re in the thick of it, to win more work.
It’s also worthwhile doing client audits. They’re nothing short of revelatory. If you’re not scoring seven or eight out of ten you need to get your house in order.  Scoring high means you’ll get more business.
By understanding your client’s business in greater depth (through questioning with confidence) – and ensuring your client understands yours – you can avoid typecasting one-another.  Don’t assume ‘they’ll never do that’ and prevent your client falling into the same trap, leading to lost business for you.
It’s up to you to prove to your client that there’s value in moving to a closer, more strategic relationship, as opposed to buying project by project.  To be a trusted adviser you may have to offer yourself and your advice free – but very selectively; aware of to whom and why.  If you underprice you’re not leaving room for (‘free’) honest advice.
Given that it’s clients who define your next steps, be very speci!c about what your piece of success looks like, while remaining agile and a step ahead.  It’s helpful that outsourcing and freelancing are easier now than ever.
Finally, procurement are your greatest friends in growing organic business.  If they think you’re doing a good job, ask them what else you could do.  Invite them over and they’ll warm to the fact you’re helping them understand what you do.  And remember they’re trained negotiators – so dedicate at least a day’s training to your staff so it isn’t a disadvantage.

Just be sure not to offer them champagne!

Jane Young tweets (@resonanceblog) and works both with Kanbee, a digital agency and is the founder of Scramblr the creative collaboration tool.

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Yes, this is major.

I have had it with brands that will not or cannot successfully unsubscribe me from their mailing lists when I ask.

The name and shame begins with a childrens toy catalogue, Baker Ross.  I once bought something from them as a gift and have been bombarded ever since.  Haven’t they heard of data segmentation?  I don’t have any children.  But I buy from you, occasionally.

I am now quoting my customer reference number to an internet-blank-wall.

Things to do if you are a customer

1. Despite feeling aggressive, getting mad and even are not really an option here – write a letter and mail it to yourself.  It will make you feel better.
2. Write politely to the company reminding them about your unsubscribe, maybe pointing out the money they waste / why you don’t want to hear from them / asking them to check all databases / and adding a link to the Data Protection Act 1998
3. Ask them to confirm to you that your data is no longer to be used for mailings
4. Remind them to also exclude you from purchased lists
5. Scream once, very loud.  Then get on with your life.

Things to do if you are a brand

1. Have a clear process map of your subscribe and unsubscribe processes.  Check for online and offline and mystery shop them regularly.
2. If you screw up, apologise to the customer immediately and unreservedly.  Thank them for pointing out your mistake and promise to investigate how the error occurred.  Even if you don’t track down the precise cause, it will make them feel better.

Got any advice for me?

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If you work in a niche environment and want to do some “trend spotting” for the next year, here’s a great idea on how to engage your prospects, clients, staff and key influencers.

1. Start by finding a hot topic of the moment as the focus for your trend spotting.  You could consider using online consumer engagement or  new social media tools for your industry.
2. Decide on the period – 6 months, 1 year or more that you’ll predict .
3. Brainstorm with your internal team about the trends you think might emerge, or change over the period.
4. Draw up a list of clients, prospects and key influencers or industry thought leaders who might be persuaded to take part.
5. Write a briefing document for them explaining what you want, how they can submit their ideas and a timeframe.  I’d suggest asking for 3 to 5 bullet points of trends with a brief explanation of each plus a catchy title.  You will also need their permission to quote them in your final report.
6. You could open this up to a public collaboration as well using regular readers of your blog / FB page as well.  This could be developed into an open forum discussion.  Remember for this to be successful you probably need a large and already-engaged audience and a strong topic for the conversation.
7. Collate all the ideas into a single slide deck, e-book or pdf document and use as the basis for a campaign (email it, download from your site and public sites, create linked content from social media sites and don’t forget to send it to journalists for PR).

Here’s one done by David Armano Rudy de Waele on the future of Mobile trends to 2020 [an ambitious time horizon] with contributions from a wide range of experts.  Note he credits each contributor both in slide 2 and on each page with their ideas.

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Brewster Barclay is MD of Clickstream

Clickstream is all about B2B – we aim for hosting companies and large enterprises as target markets for our software.

I used to look at DomoDomain daily – we have had it installed for 3 – 4 years now.  It is wonderful.

We use it in several ways for example when we send out a press release – we see which companies have visited our site and we can see if they are current clients.

It is very important to look at current clients and to know which visit the site and which pages they view. The sales people call up and say “I saw you were looking at “widget X page” and would you like to know more…”

This increases leverage with current customers: it also reveals new prospects.

This is easier for hosting prospects as there are only about 20 different companies people can buy from.  Sales folk can easily see whether a visitor is on their list of targets or not.

When we visit people we look up the next day and see which bits of our site they visit.  We can add a tracking domain click that tells us each time they come back to the site and which pages they view.

This is a whole load more complicated for big companies like MS or Google who have multipel product lines and customer bases but for your typical industrial company it is much easier.

Random people come through which is also great – we know our targets and deliberately exclude the smaller companies.

You can get a daily pdf too which is great to share with colleagues and a quick summary of page visits and stats.

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There are two providers – LeadsExplorer.com and Trovus.co.uk [and since starting to write this series of posts, Prospect Vision has been introduced to us].

Trovus has the more slick back-end with visually beautiful and easy-to-read tabs, screens and reports.  Leads Explorer has as slightly cramped layout but makes better use of colour to differentiate new visitors from returning ones who are already in your database.

Lots of insight

Visitors to CAS website

This is a screen grab of the list of visitors on 12 and 13th October to CreativeAgencySecrets.

The organisations coloured red have already been tagged by us as being of interest to us – they are in the database of suspects already and so when they return and visit a second time, they are coloured red to stand out.

In some cases, the actual URL page from the site that was visited has also been captured.  See the Young and Rubicam visitor has taken a look at My Top 5 Strengths page.

The visitor from Telepac has used a search string “How to write creative proposals”.  Now that’s great insight in itself – to be able to tie a search string to a specific organisation tells me they might be pitching for some work!  So on researching Telepac, I find that it is an internet service provider.  Hence likely a home-internet user and not an organisation.  This demonstrates nicely why this technology does not work for B2C.

[Aside: during the trial I saw that a major Australian cancer charity wanted to learn how to run an agency pitch in exactly this way.  And I was able to forward that intelligence to a client agency to follow up.  That was a great way to get onto the pitch list before the pitch was public knowledge.]

The student from Sheffield is interested in how to start a creative agency – might be a good subscriber to our RSS feed but is unlikely to buy consultancy.

And Airside was introduced to us by The Hand and we helped them publicise a biz dev job they were filling.

New pitch insights

Comet Group seeks a magazine publishing agency

On 23rd October, the search string “how to write a brief for a customer magazine” brought the UK electrical retailer, Comet Group to the website.

Now we don’t have any clients in that sector right now – but imagine how you could have used that early hint of a new pitch if you were a magazine publishing agency?  I did a quick search and I think they don’t yet have a customer magazine.

Don’t all rush at once.

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Sales pitches

Leads Explorer lets you install the code and has online tutorials for self-help.  Trovus insists on a sales demo online or a face to face group presentation and focuses more on the biz dev / sales lead process than the technology.  They’ve clearly had some client failures when processes let down the solution.

When you visit the company websites don’t expect any screen shots – for some reason both are coy about showing back-end details.

So what does it cost?

Pricing will certainly be your next question. Trovus offers an 8 week trial that includes sales process workshop training as well as installing the tracking code all for a discounted £5,000. While leads Explorer allows 1 month free of charge use and you get the code installed on your website yourself (it takes minutes for most sites). Clearly Trovus has a higher conversion rate because the cost of the trial and the personal investment in training mostly would preclude moving to another supplier

Monthly unique visitors of up to 1,000 costs £3,500 and up to 3,000 unique visitors costs £5,000 a month.

By comparison, Leads Explorer is modestly priced:  They offer two levels of service:

• DISCOVER:where  pricing is function of number of users and number of monthly visitors

For I user and a website getting fewer than 2,500 visitors per month costs US$97.

• SALESTractor: pricing is function of number of users and the number of leads and links.

For fewer than 10 leads put into the Sales Tractor database out of 180 companies visiting your site and 1 user costs $54 per month; >35 leads out of 480 companies visiting costs $132 and for up to 120 leads and 2,500 companies is $294 per month.

So which one is right for my company?

If you already have a strong sales culture and internal CRM processes are well -stablished, pick Leads Explorer.  Its pricing is keen and your embedded sales processes and strong discipline will enable you to put it to work immediately.

If your company does not have great discipline for biz dev, you’ll find the clear guidance and process mapping of Trovus will set you up better to succeed over the medium term and the higher prices will be part of your investment in biz dev process training for the internal team.

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What the tech looks like

Using the raw data of IP addresses and registered WHOIS companies the technology solutions create a private online site where your website’s day by day visitors can be

• logged,
• researched,
• added to a CRM database,
• pushed out as leads to your sales team
• tracked through the sales pipeline.

The mechanics are very simple.

Using a short line of code embedded on your website, visitor identity data is generated almost immediately.

You can see a list of dates down the left and a list of organisations on the right.

At its simplest level this gives you a clear starting point for finding “suspects” or early-stage future clients.

The software allows you to click on each company and from a different window, links into search engines enable your biz dev team to research the suspect company and decide whether to qualify them as a lead in the normal way.

Two competing products

The two products we tested are “Leads Explorer.com” and “Trovus.com“.

Both sell on a license model based on the number of incoming visitors to your website monthly and charging is by visitor volumes.

On Monday, we’ll review how they compare in features and functionality.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend.

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