Embarrassment as a Motivator?

Spoke with Jim Burns from Avitage!, and conversation moved towards what are the strong selling points when marketing into the Sales function. Jim spoke about Embarrassment as a huge motivator...

Even in light of the current economy, few are receiving relief from their sales objectives. In fact, the job is much tougher as those objectives need to be met with fewer people. The last thing any sales manager needs is to be off-course with their plan. They need to be completely accurate and on-target with their sales efforts, from forecasting to sales pipeline management to closed revenue.

So to this end, 2008 may have been quite an embarrassing year for many sales managers, as they did not live up to what they promised. Throughout the year, the sales manager has been making periodic (weekly, monthly quarterly) assessments of the sales pipeline, and they have had to go back and readjust over and over and over again...to the downside. If they were lucky enough to survive the year, then at the very least there was egg on the face in every single meeting. Now that's embarrassing.

The LAST thing our intrepid sales manager needs is to continue to be embarrassed, so those tools and services that can help him/her stave off embarrassment would be greatly appreciated...and purchased.

Think about it: if you're marketing into the Sales function, what has embarrassed your audience? How can you help them save themselves from continued embarrassment?

Suggested Construct for B2B Lead Nurturing - Content

Content is like air: it's all over the place. But we spoke about the right content for your audience that will help position you as a thought leader, and that content needs to emanate from you. Publishing 3rd party content won't help you to be seen as a thought leader, only a manual source of stuff that can be claimed via RSS. You need to develop and deliver this content internally from your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and should be in the form of any of the following three categories: Deep Content, Light Content, and Response Content.

Deep Content comes from heavy lifting. That's the content that results from research (primary and/or secondary), surveys, studies, etc., and it's content that is quoted in press releases, by journalists, by analysts, and (hopefully) by the general public. It's designed to shape internal policy and direction, train internal staff (especially Sales) and influence outside decisions regarding your organization and your industry. It's usually not developed overnight by your SMEs, in fact, it's probably the content that your SMEs love to create. The end product is usually a white paper which sometimes gets delivered as a web seminar, but more often recently it's delivered as an online video.

Light Content requires far less of an effort from your SMEs than Deep Content, yet still has strong collateral impact. Light Content is often less detailed, and comes from your SMEs learned insight regarding a trend or an industry occurrence, and is used as a quick update internal and external constituents. It's usually distributed in the form of a brief, and can act as a blog entry or an email attachment to a targeted audience.

Your SMEs quite often act as a resource for internal and external queries, and as a result of those queries, create intelligent responses that are both compelling and actionable. We refer to this content as Response Content: brief but powerful, market-driven content that your audience perceives as valuable. This is not the fodder for FAQs, but just the opposite as these are questions that are floating out there representing common concerns/curiosities. The questions can come from anywhere: via a member of the Sales team, the press, analysts, through a Contact Us form, or even a form specially-designed to capture these types of questions.

Think about it for a second: most likely you've got all three sources of Content available in your organization. As individual units of "useful information", it's strong, but as a collective, it's very, very powerful. So when collecting this valuable content, what do you do with it, i.e., how do you convert it into PUI that positions you as a thought leader and acts as the foundation for Lead Nurturing? We need to talk about personalized blogs...

Suggested Construct for B2B Lead Nurturing - PUI

An old boss of mine, Rick Rose, coined the acronym "PUI" which stands for Potentially Useful Information. His philosophy was this: if you're a salesperson and you have prospect, always stay in touch with that prospect by delivering to him/her Potentially Useful Information, for one day, that prospect will need that which you are selling, and because you have share of mind, you'll get the call. The PUI that you're sending ostensibly helps the prospect by delivering a constant stream of education, information, updates, etc. related to the industry, category, products, competitors, etc.

PUI is the underlying foundation for our suggested B2B Lead Nurturing construct. With a constant stream of delivered PUI, you're seen as a thought leader in your space PROVIDED that your PUI is just that: PUI.

How does PUI position you as a thought leader? It completely depends on how you want to educate your audience, which depends on the education that they desire. Perhaps it is a stream of summarized updates from a variety of sources, or perhaps it is home-grown knowledge. Whatever the case is, you can believe this: every business professional wants to improve their value to their company, so they strive for information that allows them to grow personally and professionally. Meet this need, and you've started down the path of thought-leadership. BTW: this is not a short path, rather, it takes some time for thought leadership to be established.

What type of PUI? We believe there are three types of PUI that act as the foundation for the B2B Lead Nurturing construct: Deep Content, Light Content, and Response Content. More about this later...