David Meerman Scott - Principal/Creative Director, Freshspot Marketing -
Marketing efforts often fall flat because the vast majority of technology marketing programs focus only on the early part of the sales process. In this engaging presentation, learn how smart technology companies build creative, integrated marketing platforms linked directly to the entire sales process - all with measurable revenue results.

Marketing-savvy organizations are succeeding with a strategy that drives prospects to action, shortens the sales cycle, builds market awareness, and unleashes the power of viral marketing.

David Meerman Scott is a writer, consultant, conference speaker and seminar leader specializing in marketing complex technology products and services to demanding customers worldwide. He is principal / creative director of Freshspot Marketing LLC, the author of the books "Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers Into Buyers," and "Eyeball Wars." He is also a Contributing Editor at EContent Magazine.

TRANSCRIPT

Shorten Your Sales Cycle: Marketing Programs That Deliver More Revenue
David Meerman Scott

John Desmond:
David spoke at the Cambridge event. He gave a presentation called "Shorten Your Sales Cycle: Marketing Programs That Deliver More Revenue, Faster" that was very well-received. David is a writer, consultant, conference speaker and seminar leader who specializes in marketing complex technology products and services. He is the principal and creative director of Freshspot Marketing. He is the author of the books Cashing In with Content, about how innovative marketers use digital information to turn browsers into buyers, published in 2005. He also wrote Eyeball Wars, published previously. Prior to founding Freshspot, David was a VP and director of marketing with NewsEdge Corporation, which was sold to Thompson Publishing in 2002. With that, take it away, David

David Meerman Scott:
Thanks a lot, John. It's great to be here and giving this presentation a second time, after the great conference that you put on in Cambridge.

Slide:

Let's spend a little bit of time talking about the sales cycle. What I have noticed, in talking with hundreds of marketers for high technology companies and software companies, is that marketing programs are very rarely aligned with sales cycles. So I want to spend some time talking about that. I have a bunch of examples of how you can put this into practice. It's not just theory. Together marketing and sales can drive more revenue.
Slide:

Most companies that we run across are dysfunctional. But the distance between how software and services are marketed and how they are sold absolutely needs to shrink. That's what we're going to be talking about. We don't want our programs to happen in a vacuum. We don't want our tradeshows to happen without a focus on revenue and a focus on sales. PR, without a focus on driving people into the sales process and through the sales process, is not as effective as it could be.

Some symptoms of non-alignment are when tradeshow business card leads are tied up in a ribbon and thrown over the cubicle wall to the sales director, but we never market to anybody after that. Another symptom is when search engine marketing only focuses on the keywords and the phrases and we are not talking at all about how we are driving people into and through the sales process. Also, there are press releases that spew gobbledy-gook like, "XYZ Company, the leader in world-class enterprise software that helps business to process, has announced a new, flexible, scalable solution ... blah, blah, blah." That is what we want to try to avoid.
Slide:

And the way that we're going to avoid that is to totally understand the sales process. On the left there is an example sales process. This is not to suggest that these terms are best practice. You need to understand what the terms are for your own organization. In this example we have got: Attention, Interest, Conviction, Desire, and Close. We want to make sure that the words that we are using are the same words that the sales people are using, so that we can align with them.
Slide:

Then, if the slide will build, we want to make sure that our marketing programs are aligned with the sales process.

Most sales people, in our experience, are working the entire sales funnel. They are working from Attention all the way through Close. However, most marketing people tend to focus on the very top. They tend to think that their job is to get a lot more leads and throw them into the funnel and that's it. They are not interested in a whole lot after that.

What we to make sure that we do is to focus on the entire sales process, not just on putting leads into the top of the funnel, not just on gaining attention and doing advertising and tradeshows and stuff that is putting people at the top.
Slide:

There are some interesting analogies that we can talk about when we are looking at this process. One example is that the sales process is like dating. When do you give that "special someone" your phone number? When do you introduce your mother? Understanding the sales process and how marketing can help is much like the way that we go through a dating process.

Another analogy that I like is to buying a car. When do you care about the financing options? When do you want to know the location of a dealer? These are the things that marketing people need to know for our organizations. And as we are thinking about this and how we can do a good job, one of the things that we fail to do is to remember what it is like when we are a buyer.

So, I suggest that there are two things that you can do. One is to be "a buyer" and visit your own website and see how well you go through the sales process. The other is to think about the last time that you bought a big purchase, for example, a car. That is a good example, I think. How did the process feel to you? Did you go to a user website? What was the dealer like? To show an example, we'll go to the next slide.
Slide:

My favorite example of "not very good marketing" is automobile manufacturers. Automobile manufacturers tend to be very egotistical in their marketing. It's all about them and the cars they provide. It's all about what is available, in terms of the product. And it's not about what the buyers are interested in or where they are in the sales cycle. In fact, in this particular case about a Cadillac, you see the website homepage. They even make you wait while they load some Flash plugin, as if the Web were TV.

These are some of the things that we want to avoid. We want to avoid the egotistical aspect and we want to avoid having something that is only product focused. Instead we want to think about all of the different ways that people go through the sales process and where they are within the sales process. We want to make sure that we understand where our buyers are.
Slide:

This slide is about Understanding the Sales Process. In all cases the sales process is definable, repeatable, and understandable. That is really the big thing. For any organization, for any software company, or any technology company, you can understand the sales process. It might be complex. It might take six months or a year for sales to go through the process and close. But you can define the different steps. You can repeat the process and understand the process. So, marketing people can work with sales management to get people into the process and then get them through the process.

The key for aligning marketing and sales is to understand that process well enough that we can develop sales tools and programs that are totally aligned to our buyers and that are directly linked to the process. Let's take a look at some examples of that.
Slide:

Let's look at how you might analyze your existing sales process. This is just a very basic example. This is not to suggest that this sales practice is best practice or that it is in any representative of what you are doing. But this is a slide that shows an example of a company's sales process.

What I suggest that you do first, if you have not done this already, is to get together with your sales vice-president, or a top person from sales management, literally lock yourselves in a room. Throw away the Blackberry and the cell phone for a couple of hours. Get a huge whiteboard and map out all of the steps.

There probably will be a heck of a lot more steps than you see here. Understand the process from the very beginning of where names come in, from the website, for example, or the 800 number and where they go, into a database or to the sales director. Where do they go? Then you know specifically how your sales process works. And you are helping to define the terms with your sales people and sales management team so that you know, at each step, what words you use for when things go to the next process.
Slide:

Then we want to link marketing programs directly with the sales process, so that we can increase the likelihood that we are going to be successful at every step of the process.

I'm going to go through a couple of examples for each of the different processes within this sales cycle. Remember, this is just an example, and these words are not necessarily the words that you would use.

The first step is Attention. (Remember, later on we do Attention, Interest, Conviction, Desire, and Close.) With Gaining Attention, there are lots of different ways to drive people into the sales process. How can we get more leads into the sales process? I suggest that one of the best ways is to think about how we can leverage some of the existing programs that we are doing. And that might not be considered as part of the sales process today, working in order to drive more leads into the top of the sales funnel.
Slide:

I'm going to use an example. This next slide will show an example of a search engine marketing campaign that happens to be generated through a public relations program, a PR program. This is a really good example of the way that a company can do this. In this case the company that I'm going to be talking about is WebEx, the company we happen to be using for the technology behind this webinar.

They wrote a press release. It's the top one up there on this Google list. It talks about how ... . "Accelerate sales cycle" is the term that I put into Google. And this particular press release appears at the top.
Slide:

If you go to the next slide, what you'll see is that this particular press release is totally optimized for search engine marketing. It has a bunch of different words and phrases in there that WebEx knows that its buyers use.
Slide:

Then the cool thing, as you can see, is that there is a link that drives people from that press release directly to the WebEx homepage. That is something that we rarely see, that somebody is actually able to go from a press release to a homepage and then have that become a lead. Yes, there is often a homepage sitting there at the bottom of the press release, but not from the perspective of understanding where the words and phrases in the press help to drive people into the sales process and then get them through the sales process.
Slide:

Then we want to cultivate Interest. We want to tell the story, once people arrive on our website, or people have gotten into our process some other way, by raising their hand. Perhaps they visit us at a tradeshow. Perhaps they responded to an email offer. Perhaps they responded to an offline direct mail offer. Or they called the 800 number. Whatever.

Now they are in the sales process. Now we want to have programs that are aligned at this stage of the funnel. This is the point where, I believe, many marketers fall down, this particular point. This is a very, very important one. Most marketers that we are familiar with are good at getting people into the top. They could be better. But they are pretty good at getting people into the top of the funnel. But now, how do we get as many people as we can, through marketing programs, not just having the sales people work with these potential customers, but using marketing programs to drive them through?
Slide:

This slide shows UPS, United Parcel Service. But this is not the consumer version of UPS. This is the business version of UPS and concerns their supply-chain solution. This is their supply-chain solutions page. This is not the consumer page. This is a B2B page for people who want to manage their supply-chain solution. You'll see that on the left there what they have done is that they have organized the site around the problems they have identified that their customers have. Then those problems link to a supply-chain solutions page where their potential customers can then read more about what UPS has to offer.
Slide:

Now, what's cool about this is that they understand who their buyers are. They understand the questions that their buyers have. And they understand the words and phrases that their buyers use and how UPS can potentially solve those problems in the B2B world. They provide content in the form of this great Web content here that is designed specifically for that type of buyer.
Slide:

With the next slide we should be on the slide for Develop Conviction. Now you are getting a little bit further into the process of driving people into and through the sales process. These are the stages where most companies have only their sales people focused on driving people down and through the process. This is a stage, however, where "thought leadership" sorts of content, things like white papers and case studies and email newsletters, can do a lot to work in concert with the sales people and the sales process to drive people through.
Slide:

I'm going to illustrate this with an example from a company called Knova. On this slide you'll see that Knova has, on their homepage, some interesting ways that you can click through, based on who you are and what solution you are interested in, whether you are in high technology or telecommunications, or whatnot.
Slide:

Then you will see that Knova has some great content based on who you are. This one is for the case if you are a high-technology person. This slide shows that Knova has lots of content designed for each individual person. In this case they have lots of different white papers that you can download.

What is fascinating about this company is that they have told me that seventy-five percent of their closed business can directly be attributable to website content driving people through the sales process. That is a remarkable statistic. Seventy-five percent of closed business can be directly attributable to website content. And it's remarkable that they were able to achieve that much help for the salespeople as the Web content helps to drive people through this middle part of the sales process.
Slide:

We should be on the slide for Support Desire. Now we are getting pretty far down there, in terms of the process. We are looking at how can marketing, and Web content in particular, help people when we are really close to the bottom of the sales process? This is a little bit harder. But there are some interesting things to do.

One of the things to remember is that, at this stage of the process, many prospects are totally engaged with a direct sales person. Perhaps they have been engaged for a long time, for several months, six months, or even a year, going through this sales process. At this stage in the process there are often times when that prospect wants to test out the company, to find out more about them. Or perhaps they want to find out, "What would it be like if I were actually a customer and not just somebody whom they are trying to court in the sales process?"
Slide:

On this slide what you will see is a really interesting way that one company, called Symmetricom, has been able to provide some information on their website that helps people. This is their "Ask a Question" box. It allows people to ask a really simple question so that they can find out if the company is going to be responsive to their needs. All it requires is that you ask the actual question and submit an email address. Then you are able to go through and get your question answered.

What is neat about this is that the buyer can separate from their intimate relationship with the salesperson and interact with the company on its website in a way that is transparent to the salesperson. This is a great way to help move the sales process forward and a great way that marketing can build programs and tools that help those salespeople to move forward.

Interestingly, the company tells us that fifty percent of the people who fill out that form eventually are interested in purchasing their products, and many of them actually buy.
Slide:

With this slide, obviously we get to the point where we Close the Sale. This is good stuff and marketing can help there, too, in making sure that we get them onto some kind of customer newsletter. Or maybe there is a Welcome Kit and other information that goes out. Customers are always prospects for something else. So it's always good to bring them back and put them into the top of the sales funnel again.
Slide:

Here we are, after we have been able to map out this process, in terms of putting together marketing programs that align specifically for each part of that sales process. Of course, I only showed you one example for each, but there are dozens and dozens of them. And what worked for one company is not necessarily going to work for all companies. The way that you are going to be effective is to map out your sales process, understand what each of those steps are, understand what materials and programs are being used today, and understand what might be needed to move people down through the process. What we want to do is to re-visit the process and then take a look at where each of those things that we have just worked on, each one of those programs that we have developed, can influence the sales process.
Slide:

This next slide shows just the Cultivate Interest part of the process that we mapped out with our sales people. We may have done some of what we just talked about. Perhaps we created self-select paths on our website the way that UPS did, or we communicated with the people who visited us at a tradeshow, with an email newsletter. Or we may offer white papers. We are able to increase the likelihood that people are going to go to the next step in the process.
Slide:

There might be a "build" in this slide. If there is, click it through. If we have authentic white paper "thought leadership" and we totally understand what our buyers are thinking, we as marketing people can help to Cultivate Interest. The percentages that you might see, on the slide here, are percentages that I have been able to triangulate, based on a number of different programs that I have worked at. I have also interviewed hundreds and hundreds of companies. That is by no means to say that this is going to be what is going to happen to you. But these things can really increase the likelihood that people are going to get to the next step.
Slide:

This slide is for Develop Conviction. Here are a couple of examples of how our programs can help to develop conviction. If the build is in there, you will see these.
Slide:

Here you'll see Customer Case Studies and Email Newsletters. At this stage you are driving people even further into the sales process. Case studies are great. Most companies in the high-technology marketing area use them today. Why are they good? That's because they are one of the few programs and materials that we have at our disposal that are actually written in the buyer's words. And people love stories. People don't respond to marketing gobbledy-gook. People don't respond to basic collateral that is essentially interchangeable from one company to another. But they do respond to stories. So case studies are a great way to get people through the middle part of the sales process.
Slide:

Finally, with this slide, we are getting towards the bottom of the sales funnel. We want to Support Desire and get people to go through and actually close a deal, with things like an ROI calculator or an "Ask a question" box. These are things that help people to get to the bottom of the sales process.
Slide:

Here we can look at your existing sales cycle, such as this basic, generic example that I put together. This is not best practices, by any means, in terms of the percentages. But this is a basic way of looking at how a sales cycle might work. Most marketing people will look at a sales cycle like this and they will say, "Okay, I need to generate two or three new customers."

Then they work backwards and say, "I'm going to need twenty thousand impressions." Then they say, "An impression might be that we are going to participate in a couple of tradeshows or we are going to do an email marketing campaign to twenty thousand people. Or we'll send out a direct mail shot to twenty thousand people." They are going to see a .5 percent initial response rate. They are going to calculate that twenty-five percent of those turn into prospects. And twenty-five percent of those turn into proposals, and so on. So that gets us those three new customers.

That is the old way. That is the way that people assume things happen. Most people think that this is fixed. However, if we integrate our marketing programs into the sales process and we are able to add individual programs at each step of the process and have marketing programs push people through, what we are able to do is to use this wonderful magic of "compounding interest."
Slide:

In other words, we are able to take the same number of impressions that we started with, which is the twenty thousand impressions, and we are able to increase at each step of the way, only by a little bit, the likelihood that people are going to go to the next step in the process.

It's really just a matter of making sure of the right programs, the right Web content, "thought leadership" with white papers, responses to people when they ask a question. And, with all of those programs, as marketers, if we just tweak them by a little bit to increase the likelihood that they are going to go to the next step in the sales process, then we have this magic of "compounding interest." It's much like when your financial planner tells you to put away a few thousand dollars and then, magically, you will have lots and lots of money at retirement. The "build" of the slide should show here that you are going to get eighteen customers as a result of this effort, as opposed to the three that we had before.
Slide:

The next slide shows the last step in this process, which is to measure and improve. One of the things that many marketers don't do is to measure and improve what they are doing in their marketing programs. But this is step that is really, really important. This is a way that you can understand what is going well, what is not going well, and how you can tweak or modify your programs and make things better.

On the Web it's really easy to measure. You get a company to help out in terms of measuring your statistics. You understand where people are clicking and why. And you can test one offer against another offer or one white paper against another white paper. You can constantly improve.

One thing that I do suggest, though, which is sort of buried there in the third bullet point, is to "beware of industry benchmarks." What I mean by that is this. This stuff is hard work. Measuring yourself and benchmarking against yourself is really good. But beware of the sort of thing where someone might say, "You must have a twenty-five percent response rate or it's not very good." That may not be true in your industry or for your product. Or, beware of people who will tell you, "Always send an email campaign on a Tuesday afternoon." Those are the sorts of things that can fail. Gee, if everyone did it on Tuesday afternoon, then how good would that be, right? So, make sure that you don't obsess about what people tell you are the benchmarks or the best practices. And measure and improve against yourself.

So, that's it. The last slide just contains my contact details. I would be happy to answer any questions offline, if you have any. My email address, david@freshspot.com, is there. Also I have a blog where I talk about Web content. The blog address is www.WebInkNow.com If you are interested at all in Web content, there are twenty great case studies in my book, Cashing In with Content, which will provide much more detail about how Web content drives action.