by Fronetics | Oct 21, 2015 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy, Talent
If you watch enough romantic comedies, you’ll start to recognize a pattern. It goes something like this: Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Movie follows antics of girl + boy, winding its way through the (oftentimes hairy) narrative. Throughout the movie we see the main characters discover what’s attractive, appealing, or annoying about the other. Eventually, these main characters end up together at the end – well versed in one another’s attributes, nuances, and idiosyncrasies.
If you think about it, the storyline of our main characters’ isn’t that different from the parallel storyline that could be drawn about lead nurturing activity in B2B marketing. When you first meet your lead, chances are they won’t be ready to purchase right away (a Marketo benchmark survey says that half aren’t). But if you spend time establishing a relationship and building trust, the moment your lead is ready to purchase, you’ll be miles ahead of your competition.
As more and more buyers are engaging with brands before they are ready to purchase, an essential function of any marketing department is lead nurturing. That is, moving leads through the sales funnel by leveraging what’s known about their needs and online behavior. Congruently, marketing software company Marketo describes lead nurturing as being “personalized, adaptive, and able to listen and react to buyer behavior in real-time.” Using a true multi-channel approach allows us to accomplish this. In a recent publication, Marketo endorsed the use of this multi-channel strategy:
“A typical buyer moves quickly from email, to social media, to your website and then back to social media, in the blink of an eye. Marketers need to prepare their lead nurturing strategy for multi-channel engagement. Buyers need to see an integrated experience across every single channel.”
Considering the multi-channel digital activity of buyers, building a multi-channel lead nurturing strategy is essential for companies that are looking to create an optimal end-user experience. Here are four tools that will help you deliver a series of targeted messages across multiple touch points and platforms to help move your leads through the buyer’s journey.
Email
Presuming that your B2B leads are derived online, email seems like a natural channel to use to connect with and nurture your leads. And it is. Create opportunities to educate your leads by sending them targeted emails that contain informational content. You’ll have to take it further than that though, or your emails will come across as spammy and annoying. Build trust with your leads by reminding them they’ve met you before – use personalization tokens (contact name, job title, etc.) within your emails. Similarly, don’t just blast the same email to your entire contact database; take the time to segment your leads based on where they stand in the buyer’s journey. A lead nurturing email you send to a lead that has only downloaded a top-level white paper should look vastly different than the email you send to a lead that has downloaded a case study, a product brochure, and a pricing guide. Above all though, make certain that the content you’re sending is valuable, relevant, and of excellent quality.
Phone
“No other interaction is more influential in the path to purchase than a phone call.” – Invoca Call Intelligence Survey
Call intelligence company Invoca has strong feelings for the telephone – and for good reason. Their analysis of 32 million phone calls found that phone calls made after parties had first engaged online had an average conversion rate between 30% and 50%. Sure, a rejection by email is less painful, but when the conversion rates are that high, you can’t afford not to pick up the phone. There are some ways to make it easier, though. Start by promoting your phone number. It sounds simple, but for those of us who work largely in the digital world, it can be easy to forget. Display your phone number in your company’s website header and throughout your site’s landing pages and blogs posts. Ensure simplicity for mobile users by making your phone number clickable on your mobile site.
Social Media
It’s not enough these days to simply post and pray, particularly on social media networks. Social media lead nurturing includes monitoring, listening, and engaging. Give your leads some love. Look for opportunities to favorite, like, or retweet the content of your leads. Monitor LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for mentions of your company, similar products, or industry and then respond with activated content using both social media and a longer form of correspondence, like email. Finally, don’t discount lead nurturing activities that use paid social media ads. These ads can be particularly successful when you are nurturing leads based on specific attributes such as geographic location or company size.
Dynamic Website Content
Displaying personalized web content for visitors helps to keep leads moving forward in their buyer’s journey. Let’s say you’d gotten a great email response from a lead when you shared your product brochure earlier in the week. Displaying complementary web content, like a pricing guide, to your lead the next time he’s on your website assures alignment between your content and your lead’s proximity to purchasing. You can also use dynamic web content to target various verticals, organizations, or buyer personas.
Multi-channel lead nurturing is really about using all the tools at your disposal to meaningfully connect with your leads in order to build trust and establish credibility as you guide them on their journey to becoming a customer. Building a winning strategy does require attention to detail as there are many moving parts, but at the end of the day, if your messaging is credible and consistent it becomes less about channel and more about content. And ultimately, high-converting lead nurturing campaigns are only as good as the content they’re built around.
by Fronetics | Oct 20, 2015 | Blog, Leadership, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain, Talent
It’s common to think of the people who work for a company as “employees”, but reframing language and thinking could be critical to your supply chain. Start considering your employees as “talent”. The word employee has the connotation of working for someone or under someone. It implies being one of many, whereas the word talent has a positive connotation, implying that a person has depth, value, and potential. The term talent empowers both employees and companies to be the best and seek the best in their work and their search for other skilled people.
Reframing is an important step, but it doesn’t fix common problems that plague supply chain managers and human resource departments. It’s important to think about hiring processes as a long undertaking that extends beyond an ad, job interview, and offer letter. Companies should always be thinking about retention and promotion. This is called succession planning.
According to a study conducted by supply chain management researchers at Auburn University and Central Michigan University, 37.5% of surveyed companies had no engagement in succession planning, 27% had just started to work on planning, 23% engaged in informal planning, while only 12.5% engaged in formal succession planning.
Acquire
The supply chain is notorious for having a dearth of talent. The area is growing and more talent will need to be acquired for businesses to compete. As job titles expand and shift, due to the rapid changes in supply chain management and technological requirements, many people won’t be qualified for their own job title. Looking towards universities who are teaching supply chain management, and looking to other business sectors could be critical to find the right, flexible kind of talent the supply chain will need. Considering women for these traditionally male-dominant roles will also be important as women tend to be strong in many of the soft skills needed for the future of SCM. According to Shanton J. Wilcox, vice president, North America, and lead for logistics and fulfillment at Capgemini, “many so-called tactical jobs will be replaced by positions requiring more interpersonal and relationship management skills.”
Develop
As more and more money floods into the supply chain, it will be important to avoid the Silicon Valley problem of poaching, or talent leaving for larger and larger salaries elsewhere. Investing in current employees in a meaningful, attentive way, could make all the difference. Think about their future and next steps within your company. They probably have a plan for their future, and you should as well. Make sure those plans align and be open to assisting their journey to meet their goals.
Instead of conducting exit interviews, try conducting “stay” interviews. Ask specific questions about what it takes to create the environment that would help encourage your talents’ best performance. Ask what works, and also ask what doesn’t work. Be specific and ask what causes your talent anxiety or stress. You may find a trend and be able to fix it before people leave, rather than after. Investment is a big part of development. It helps talent feel like part of a bigger picture. If you invest in them they will invest in you.
Advance
Consider talent from within. According to a Forbes article, many companies are getting it wrong in trying to hire from outside. Internal candidates may not seem as appealing or exciting as the unknown, external candidate, but companies need to be clear-minded in these decisions. “Internal successors are in many ways lower risk than outsiders, yet surprisingly few promotions are awarded internally. That appears to be because boards often prefer the devil they don’t know to the devil they do. Also, some find it difficult to imagine someone at the top after seeing him operate in a lesser role for years.”
Internal talent may not appear to be ready for the next level if the position they’re seeking is a promotion, whereas an external candidate going for the same job may be making a lateral move and appear more “ready”. One thing to consider is the knowledge the internal candidate holds and brings to the job. Getting external talent up to speed can take months if not years.
Don’t sit back and assume your employees are willing to be passive about their careers. See your employees as assets. Have a strategy. Be part of their team, and make them part of yours. See their talent and invest in them, otherwise they’ll find another supply chain company who will.
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Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm. Our firm works with companies to identify and execute strategies for growth and value creation.
We advise and work with companies on their most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketing, organization, talent acquisition, performance management, and M&A support.
by Fronetics | Oct 13, 2015 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Imagine for a moment you’re entering an electronics retailer, ready to purchase a new television. You’ve been thinking about buying a new TV for a while, so you’ve done your homework. You know the difference between LCD and plasma. You’re certain that a 50 inch flat screen would look stellar hanging on the wall in your living room. Today’s the day. As you approach the salesman and begin to tell him the specifics of what you are looking to purchase, he looks at you and says, “Thanks for contacting me. I’ll be in touch within 24 to 48 hours.” It sounds silly, right? But that’s essentially what your company is telling prospects when it fails to respond quickly to online leads.
So how is “quickly” defined? Harvard Business Review (HBR) set out to measure how long on average it took for companies to respond to a web-generated lead. Auditing more than 2,200 businesses, they found an average first response time of 42 hours for businesses that responded to a lead within 30 days. Surprisingly, 23% of companies never responded. 
42 hours sure sounds like a long response time, but is it really? Turns out, it’s worse than you might think.
After reviewing the results of the HBR study, a research team at InsideSales.com examined three years of data across six companies that generate and response to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts. They focused on one question for this study: When should companies call web-generated leads for optimal contact and qualification ratios? Of this study a researcher wrote:
“…the odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted. Similarly, the odds of the lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.”
Essentially, sales teams aren’t only missing opportunities to contact leads when they wait to respond, they’re also missing opportunities to qualify leads.
So where does the organizational problem lie? It could be that your sales team is hyper-focused on their own sales leads, ignoring signs from online leads that they’re nearing closer to purchase. It’s also possible there’s inherit incongruence in the distribution of online leads to members of your sales team. Could you improve response time if leads were distributed differently? Also culpable could be the frequency with which your sales team checks for new leads. Is your CRM pushing sales lead notifications to your sales team only once per day? Pushing out immediate notifications could positively affect your lead response time. Whatever the reason you identify, it’s important to address and rectify these issues as soon as possible.
With a white paper authored by Google and the Corporate Executive Board reporting that today’s B2B customers are nearly 60% through the sales process before engaging a sales rep, it is unsurprising that a reported 35% to 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Is your sales team’s average response time faster than your competition?
by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 12, 2015 | Blog, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain
There are organizations that sell products and there are organizations that sell solutions. To be sure, both can be successful as long as products are being sold as products and solutions like solutions. The difference is that the product sale is really a commodity sale. Commodities come with an “each” price or a “per pound” pricing matrix, etc. It usually is a short or shortened sales cycle and negotiations revolve around the total price and your typical supplier performance metrics. The solution sale is much different. This sale is one that requires client discovery, isolation of unique client pain points (that only your solution can address effectively), and being able to drive distinct value for the client, and in turn, for your organization. This sales effort is highly specialized and requires selling time (sales cycle) that is much more detailed than a product sale. That being the case, you need to be sure that your close rates are high enough to justify the work load and sales cycle needed. You also need to be sure that the deals you close have a deal size that reflect the sales effort and cycle time (said another way, is the deal worth winning?)
If your sales team thrives on creating value for their customers far beyond ‘supplying’ their ‘product’ at the best price, check out our other solution selling tips below.
Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm. Our firm works with companies to identify and execute strategies for growth and value creation.
We advise and work with companies on their most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketing, organization, talent acquisition, performance management, and M&A support.
We have deep expertise and a proven track record in a broad range of industries including: supply chain, real estate, software, and logistics.
by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 8, 2015 | Blog, Strategy, Talent
Hiring someone who says he or she is not a team player sounds like a risky proposition, right? Few employers are, after all, searching for renegade employees or stubborn loners who refuse to interact with co-workers. But what if it actually turned out to be a good strategy? Researchers at the University of Tuebingen set out to examine the effects on applicant pools by stressing the need for teamwork in job ads. The conclusion of the study puts it like this: “Given the evidence of a possible downside, it is recommended that firms should never look for team players just because ‘everyone else is doing so.'”
The study analyzed survey data from 1,300 college students who had been asked to evaluate a number of job postings that outlined various requirements, including whether the applicant should be a team player or an independent task-oriented self-starter. Interestingly, what researchers found was that although the ads did indeed attract applicants who considered their teamwork skills to be a primary asset, they also discouraged people whose qualifications matched the job description with the exception of one criterion: social skills. As a result, the employer missed out on technically skilled or task-oriented candidates who took themselves out of the running before the race even began. The study went on:
“…considering that organizations always need employees with high task-related skills, but that they may not always need team players, they should carefully consider when the requirement for teamwork skills is listed in their job advertisements—because there is a downside to looking for team players.”
For organizations that truly need employees with an aptitude for collegial collaboration, the study shows ads that stress the importance of possessing teamwork skills do what they were intended to accomplish. But in other cases, where teamwork takes a backseat to specific talents or technical skills, the employer is likely to end up with a smaller pool of applicants than if that routine phrase had been left out of the job requirements.
People who don’t cite social acumen among their list of skills may not thrive at “water-cooler conversations” or rush to plan the next company outing, but they know how to get the job done and they do it well. If teamwork is irrelevant to their job description, isn’t that all we really need?
Fronetics Strategic Advisors is a leading management consulting firm. Our firm works with companies to identify and execute strategies for growth and value creation.
We advise and work with companies on their most critical issues and opportunities: strategy, marketing, organization, talent acquisition, performance management, and M&A support.
We have deep expertise and a proven track record in a broad range of industries including: supply chain, real estate, software, and logistics.
