Monday, June 28, 2010

Sales funnel problems ! Rejuvenate your business with focused lead nurturing programs

Marketers world-wide spend a lot of time thinking of innovative means to create/capture new leads for their business. In most cases, they are blind-folded by their sales targets and focus only on those leads that have the potential to offer immediate business opportunities and ignore the rest.

As a result of this, businesses are under continuous pressure to create new business leads, while the ones that have been created and that could have future potential are ignored. This is a classical problem faced by many. Companies build subscriber bases, opt-in marketing lists, but don't do enough to continuously and meaningfully engage with this subscriber base.

Focused lead nurturing programs offer an easy solution to these scenarios. While your sales team works on closing potential hot leads, the marketing organization or an outsourced marketing partner can focus on creating and capturing new leads and nurturing existing leads to levels, where they are ready to do business with you. This needs sustained and focused marketing efforts through a variety of customer engaging channels.  Some of the channels that are commonly used to manage this connect with your subscriber base are :
- Electronic direct mailing campaigns
- Opt-in Newsletters
- Announcements/ PR about articles/white papers being available etc.
- Generic tools/metrics/free downloads that are relevant for the customers

While you are not actively engaged with all your leads, as a business, you should make sure that when these comapnies/contacts are ready to do business with you, they have reasons and options to engage with you.

What do you think?
Suggestions/comments welcome

Atul
http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting


Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Unlock the potential of your strategic key accounts in 4 easy steps !

Most services organizations have a significant part of their revenues coming in from a few select strategic key accounts. These accounts are nurtured over the years by salesmen, account managers, delivery personnel and receive a good share of top management attention.

Over time, many of these accounts fail to realize their true potential. Companies usually face a number of challenges as they work to build stronger relationships with its largest accounts. Sales teams are confident of their current relationships, but still fail to up-sell the company’s value and brand to expand the business as per company expectations. Sales transactions tend to get opportunistic with little planning or strategy. Marketing is typically underused, or viewed simply as a source for collateral and sales tools.


Under constant pressure to sell, Sales and Account management teams often can’t afford to devote the time necessary to plan an account strategy based on researching the larger business issues that customers face. Instead, they develop plans in relative isolation, with too much of an inward focus—the plans are based on what has already been sold to customers and assumptions about what they are most likely to buy next.

In such circumstances, what helps is a focused Key Accounts Marketing plan. Here are some steps involved
1) Identify & validate your key accounts, with an integrated sales and marketing effort, based on metrics, budgets, past performance, and future guidance.
2) Lay out an account specific plan, that includes stakeholders, influencers to be mapped, business expansions in current engagements, adjacencies to the business, detailed contact, company and industry based research to get closer to the real business issues facing the business. This also involves exploring areas that your company is not currently into, but can easily get into to satisfy potential client requirements
3) Implement and execute to the plan with detailed reviews and metrics. Laying out the plan is just the start, execution is the real challenge
4) Assess & Evaluate - Define success metrics and track these intermittently, so that you know that you are on the right track

Well this sounds easy, but takes a lot of effort. One of the services we offer (Key Accounts Marketing) is focused on making sure that our customers can truly unlock the potential of their key accounts in a planned and systematic manner.

All the very best !
Best Regards,
Atul

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/


Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting


Monday, June 14, 2010

Key ingredients of a good website

It is an all too common comment. Friends, business associates calling/writing to you and telling you that you have a good website, but,, what is a good website?

The definitions are varied and differ by individuals that you ask this question to. Some would say that well designed is well built, some will say that content is king, for some, usability is of utmost importance and of course others will say that it needs to be engaging and should have the glue to keep holding your customers and prospects. For me, defining what you want to achieve from the website would be the first step to solve this puzzle. Aiming too high or too low, both will have its own problems.

For a software product company,here are what i feel, are key ingredients of a good website
1) Engaging content with clear business value for defined categories of target consumers for the defined inward links (or home page)
2) An easy C2A (Call to Action) with minimal commitment. This will ensure that your subscriber lists swells in size and feeds into your opportunities pipe. Examples could be free downloads, free tour, trial version etc.
3) An opportunity to get into the details for the detail oriented persons (these should be sidelinks and the FAB(feature/advantage/benefit) statements should not occupy too much real estate in the premium pages (inward links or home page)
4) An easy understanding of how purchase can be made, and what does it commercially involve. Getting involved with a sales guy for every transaction can put off most visitors
5) High level of sales enablement maturity with detailed documents like data sheets, technical manuals, white papers, tips n tricks and a mature FAQ in place

With all this in, your website is ready as an infrastructure that can engage with your potential clients, the next thing you need to focus on is to drive that traffic into your website.. more later.

All the best. welcome comments and feedback
Atul

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Get closer to your target market for maximizing revenue potential

Working with business owners to define and identify the target markets for their product/services has always been an enjoyable exercise. One of the most important things that it involves is to take the business owner or the CEO slightly away from the idea that he owns (about his product or service) and virtually make him wear the customer’s shoes, both physically and emotionally. Getting started is not an easy task, but as time progresses, the business owners understand where the exercise is leading to and realize the value in this exercise for their business.



Here are some steps that we usually go through in such an exercise
- Understand what your product/service does and what type of customers are likely to gain from engaging
- Identifying a concise target audience for each of your products/services. The target audience for different products/services can be different, and need not be the same across the company
- Categorize and prioritize among the categories of customers that will be interested in your products/services, based on which you will start trying to get in touch with them to source business.
- Attaching yourself emotionally to the different categories within the target audience is the next step. This gives insights into what they will gain (directly/indirectly)by using your product/services.
- Based on the emotional quotient, and what your product/service stands for at its core, design your univocal branding and messaging strategy
- Choose your communication mediums and measures based on the budgets that you can outlay for this exercise
- Execute on the strategy and do not hesitate to tweak the execution, based on early feedback.


All the best and would welcome comments
Atul
http://www.xenia-consulting.com/


Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686

Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting
Working to identify target market and defining GTM are part of core service offerings from Xenia Consulting





Wednesday, June 2, 2010

How important are elevator pitches in B2B marketing ?

I have heard this many times over. " Whats the point of creating hype and giving elevator pitches, when you are not trying to close a sale in that conversation. Elevator pitches are sales tools used by salesmen of consumer companies." 

I would say that this is very far away from the truth. Elevator pitches are relevant and important for any kind of business, be it B2B or B2C. (For those who do not know, Elevator pitches are the kind you provide to a person, who you bounce into in an elevator accidently, but want him as a customer. It need not be delivered only in an elevator though)

According to me, elevator pitches help you put a foot in the door and give you another chance to engage with your potential prospect. It helps keep the engagement alive for a sale to happen.

I feel the following are good ground rules for a 30 seconds to 2 mins elevator pitch
  • You should greet the other person well and warm the relationship quickly with any general relevancy comment
  • You should deliver a power packed message in 2-3 sentences max and actively look for signs of interest (this has to be based on a hypothesis of what would be relevant for the target prospect, which needs research to be done)
  • If there is interest shown, make sure that you define next steps very clearly and exit. (Send collateral, fix appointment, meet)

Elevator pitches help you achieve the first conditional sale with the customer. you are IN and need to prepare for the next conditional sale.

All the very best !
Atul
www.xenia-consulting.com
Linked IN - http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting