Corporate blogs generate customers cheaper

When it comes to blogging, frequency matters.

Findings released earlier this year by HubSpot bear repeating, not to mention serious management consideration at companies of any size in any industry. Right now. Nearly 800 companies, representing B2B and B2C, were studied. Among the findings: the more you blog, the better your chances of attracting more of the traffic you want.

Brands whose management has taken this seriously, e.g., CEOs who post quality content on a weekly basis, draw the most high-quality leads. Not only that, the leads drawn were less expensive to generate than those coming via other means. To the tune of 52%.  To say that this is significant is an understatement.  Cheaper generation of quality leads drives down the costs of sales.  It’s that simple. Another nugget: Practically all those companies who post multiple times a day acquired customers directly via the posts.   Even if you can’t post every day, it’s worth noting that even a weekly post generated customers.   Turns out that the most popular frequency is once a week.  Still, more is better.

A/B testing: Things you should know before and during

Relax, fella.  We’re just testing you.

If you’re like me (and I feel for you if your are), you like to test and measure stuff.  Web pages for example.  Which headline will draw a bigger response?  Which approach will visitors prefer?  Which offer?  Which tone?  Consider some tips:

1.  Don’t test a page you already think is a dog.  Test something you believe is doing the job OK for now.

2.  Use an overlay page (one that shows up when a respondent does something) when the visitor chooses the leave an “offer” page.  The overlay should remind the visitor of something that will entice them not to leave and get them to think “What the hell, I’ll fill out the form”.

3.  Get up and stand away from your screen. Take a look at your page(s) from five or six feet away.  What jumps out?  What attracts the eye?

4.  Make the “Download Now” words big and clear.

5.  Use separate buttons for different demographics or different categories of customer.

6.  The word “enterprise” is stronger than “corporate”.  People don’t think of themselves as corporate.  They identify with working in an enterprise.  Don’t you?

7.  Begin your order forms right on the page.  Don’t make visitors go somewhere else.

8.  Use images of people, not products.

9.  Test all images of people for positive responses.

10. Don’t spend money on testing.  There are loads of free tools out there.

11.  A good vendor will guarantee results.

12. Your test should run 21 days (15 business days).

13. Measure all ongoing traffic simultaneously.

14. Start by testing something small.  A page, a portion of a page, a few lines, a small campaign.

15. Seek to drive down your cost-per-visitor and your cost-per-conversion.

16. Determine your most important metrics as dictated by your business model, business plan, sales and marketing objectives.  Your particular business mission.

17. Be politically correct!  Test pages that are politically “neutral”, at least at first, before you test your boss’s pet page to show how lame it actually is.

18. Work closely with your IT people.  Make sure that something you set up to test doesn’t bring down your site or cause a sudden, prolonged downturn in traffic.  Make sure there is a quick fix at hand.

19. Test early and often.  Google does.

20. Test one or two things at a time.

What gripes CIOs the most about tech vendors

A survey we co-conducted earlier this year with CIO Executive Council and  CIO Magazine revealed that I.T. executives have had it with the lack preparation by unsolicited vendors who, in tough times, have become more aggressive than ever.  In fact, it was the number one gripe of the CIOs we surveyed. Unwanted inquiries and spam are inundating the data center today. Sixty percent of the nearly 300 CIOs who responded to the survey, representing the likes of DuPont, MetLife and Bank of America, say that cold calls are the most annoying thing they experience with vendors. Seventy percent complain that the calls, and the email spam, are becoming much more prevalent.   CIO.com showcased the research findings in a webinar last February.  It was hailed by buyers and vendors alike for its candor and practical tips.  Put simply, vendors can do themselves a big favor by finding out the most pressing issues and needs of the prospect.  (Isn’t this what the Internet is for?)  CIOs can use permission-based filters to ensure that legitimate inquiries get through.  Seems that some I.T. buyers have mixed feelings about these issues.  They need to stay current on vendors, deals and offers but hesitate to take that phone call.  So how about a subscription Web page where a vendor can state their case and engage, Facebook-like, with a prospect more conveniently (read: less intrusively)?  What do you think?

Eight things vendors do that annoy CIOs the most

“Hey, it’s now official.  The spam I get exceeds my legitimate email.”

We asked 277 CIOs at Fortune 1000 companies how vendors could be more effective in their sales outreach.  Here are the eight biggest gripes:

Cold calling (56%).

Being unprepared, uninformed (50%).

Spamming (43%).

Email with no clear value proposition (40%).

Voice mail no clear value proposition (34%).

Going around the CIO to peers or superiors (29%).

Assuming a lunch invitation is worth the time (23%).

Gift giving (14%)

Selling technology to technologists in a slow economy

“Well, actually, no, the product won’t do squat to remove wine stains. Why do you ask?”

Peter Iovino/CBS Films

The biggest disconnect in marketing today is the definition gap between vendors and buyers when it comes to the term “value proposition”.   All vendors think they have one.  Problem is, buyers rare hear it in terms they can relate to, or in terms relevant to them.  CIOs responsible for buying and maintaining the big-ticket tech0logy gear that keeps their companies in business tend to look at a the concept of value propositions as a way to calculate the ROI of what they buy.  Vendors, on the other hand, (read: the marketing dudes with the messages and talking points) think it’s all about those messages and talking points.  They convince themselves that this is where the value lives — in the product “feature-set” and “functionality”.  Our survey last year of 277 CIOs, representing mid-size companies and global enterprises, found that 60% of them wanted to know only how a vendor’s product could accomplish specific business or I.T. goals for their company.  Lesson: In marketing and selling, make it about them, not you.  Make the case that there is a ideal match between your product and the screaming need of your customer.   Of course, this implies that you have intimate knowledge of that “screaming need”.  And you’ll never come by that knowledge memorizing your product’s spec sheets, no matter how many features and functions they describe.

Offering white papers to get customer info

Theresa Schnetz, executive assistant to the CIO at a large hospital in California,  says that sales calls have increased significantly during the recession and that the cold-callers “are more assertive and sneaky”.

She cites the common tactic used by more and more callers pretending to be a personal friend of her boss, for example.  “They pretend they know (him); they speak casually. For example, ‘Hey, it’s Karen. Is Randy there?’”

Of course, the spike in cold calls during a time when business is bad, cannot be blamed only on new technology, tools and lists that are for sale; other sources of prospect data include enticing website visitors to submit contact
information when they download a white paper. And CIOs are noticing that this trade is happening with much greater frequency. “I find myself looking at fewer articles where they demand my phone number to read their article, because of the unwanted follow-up. IT people need to be able to learn about new products without being immediately harassed to purchase them,” says Fran White, director of IT at M. Rothman & Company. “I feel that vendors
are losing sales because of their hard-sell tactics.”

The findings above are part of study conducted recently by CIO Executive Council and CIO Magazine in collaboration with my firm.  Download it here and find out how CIOs want to be approached today.

How to sell to a CIO today (or a CEO or anybody else in the C-suite)

Just like timing, tailoring is EVERYTHING when it comes to approaching your prospect, especially when it’s the first time.  And we don’t mean what you’re wearing.

As the economy struggles to climb out of its sick bed, vendors making unsolicited sales calls grow more aggressive to get meetings, arrange conference calls, make contacts and steer clear of the voicemail blackholes and spam filters.  Problem is, as we’ve learned after months of research on CIOs and the I.T. buying community, aggressive-to-the-point-of-desperation vendors do great harm to themselves by tone-deaf outreach to prospective customers.   Here’s the loud-and-clear message we get from the people to whom those vendors (and by extension the marketing people behind them) want to talk:

Make it all about them, not about you. Show current familiarity with their company, their problems and their specific I.T. issues today.  NEVER assume that overworked, overbooked CIOs are going to jump at the chance to be de-briefed just so you can be brought up to speed.  Even if you’re buying the meal.  Put yourself in their shoes.  How you can you make a significant contribution to their day without interrupting it?  No, it’s not by telling them about your revolutionary solution.  There’s nothing revolutionary about it.  Own up to this. See the world through their eyes. What might you show them that would earn their favorable attention today and clearly separate you from the pack chasing them?  I don’t mean gimmicks in FedEx packages. What can you communicate that would portray you as a go-to resource for making their lives less complicated?  What might you share or convey that would position you as someone worth their time?  If your objective is a call back or a return email, give them a reason to make the effort.  One way to do this is to leave them with a question in the back of their mind to which they’d want a prompt answer.

All of the above implies depth of knowledge about the customer’s immediate situation. Not only your knowledge, but your creativity in showing how this knowledge can only be applied by you.  Just like a lot of employers today, buyers are looking to fill extremely specific needs.  Needs they believe are unique to them.   Never before has a general, one-size-fits-all solution seemed so irrelevant and less compelling.  When you’re selling to XYZ, Ltd., be certain that your pitch and your product are made-to-order for XYZ, Ltd.  Off-the-shelf isn’t just off the mark today.  Its off the radar.

How to end B2B cold calls and email spam and still keep current on deals and cool new stuff



Cold calls are a leading cause of CIO stress.

If you’re like the I.T. professionals we survey and interviewed in our study of CIOs a while back, you’re up to here with unsolicited “solicitations”.   You’ve had it with vendors who call with nothing compelling or even relevant.  Who are unprepared and clueless about who you are or what your company actually needs.  Who are a pain in your, er, day. So you put them into  into voicemail or filter them out of your inbox.  Still, you can’t help but wonder if there may have something useful in that pile of trash.  Did you miss out on a deal or prevent yourself from learning of something worthwhile?

What if you could have all those pitches re-routed somewhere online where you could peruse them at your leisure a few minutes a week and see if, indeed, there were some nuggets among the junk?  And you could decide if something or someone was worth a call-back?  And what if you could then establish an online dialogue and have their, and your, updated information and specs mutually visible?  Like on a Facebook page or microsite?  Sound useful?  We think so.  And CIOs at places like the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, the City of Minneapolis, and PetInsurance (part of Nationwide) agree.

What CIOs hate the most about getting cold calls from I.T. vendors

The results are in from a survey co-conducted by CIO Magazine and us.   Seems that I.T. executives are fed up with the lack preparedness by cold-callers who are becoming more ever more aggressive.   It’s their number-one gripe.  And the calls are flooding in these days at a greater rate than ever. Sixty percent of the 277 CIOs who responded to the survey, representing the likes of DuPont, MetLife and Bank of America, say that cold calls are the most annoying thing they experience with vendors. Seventy percent complain that the calls, and the email spam, are becoming more prevalent.  The survey will be the subject of a teleconference moderated by CIO Magazine on Wednesday, February 10 at 1PM (ET).   It will feature some of the execs who surveyed, and a panel of vendors.  It should get interesting.  An exec summary of the survey is available from Turner DeVaughn Network.

The future marketing agency

The results of a recent survey of CIOs reveals some things that vendors probably won’t like but need to face.  The fact is that unsolicited sales inquiries annoy the hell out of I.T. buyers more than ever today.  It’s bad enough that cold calls are intrusive by nature and that spam clogs their inbox.

But the problem goes deeper.  It’s the lack of preparation and research that galls them the most.  But wait  minute.  Aren’t these same CIOs who bemoan the fact that telemarketers don’t do their homework the same ones who refuse to offer pertinent information to begin with?  Well, yes they are.  Which leads to an interesting quandary.  In an ailing economy, with buyers having no budget to make purchases and sellers more aggressive and desperate than ever, what’s the answer?  Maybe it lies in a whole new way of thinking about the buyer-seller relationship.  Which is what we did when we wrote the book on B2B marketing in the digital culture.

But this isn’t about our book or our theories.  It’s about the practicality of how to make sales transactions more valuable for buyer and seller alike.  If the problem is that vendors forget what it’s like to be a buyer, and buyers refuse to understand the reality of selling, perhaps it’s time for a disinterested third party to intervene as a honest broker.   That third party would operate on behalf of the buyer as an unpaid agent who takes the calls and the email and reports back to the buyer.

From here it becomes an iterative process.  The basic value proposition of the seller is documented and the buyer decides if futher information is desirable.  Then the vendor is given the option of subscribing to the interpretive services of the third-party which is supplying the platform by which the seller can represent himself.  The buyer can appraise the sellers offerings more conveniently an thoughfully while the seller knows that his value proposition will be given a fair hearing.  A more valuable transaction is enabled.  Anyway, it beats the hell out of making or taking cold calls.