Archives for category: Customers

The First B2B Account Planning Stage

November 16, 2016 //

Where to start with theB2B account planning process? Well, at the beginning of course.

The first B2B account planning stage is the research. You need to do the homework on your accounts. You don’t want to do this kind of work on all your accounts. You need to pick the accounts which are strategically important, either because they are large, or because they could get large, or because their name carries weight and helps you market your business.

Once you have got your account list together, you need to update your knowledge in a number of areas:

Who are the key people in the account, and what are the reporting lines and lines of influence among them?
What have been their high level activities in the past year? Which industries, products, and do they have leadership or follower positions in those categories?
What revenue and profit figures have they done over the last 12 months? How are they faring as a business?

It takes time and effort to do your homework, but there’s no substitute for doing it. You have to get it done and it will pay dividends for you.

Don’t do all this yourself. Account planning is all about the team effort, so make sure you mine the information of all the people who work the account, both those in front of the customer and behind the scenes. This is where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Tags Account Planning, B2B, B2B Marketing, B2B Sales

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The B2B Account Planning Stages

November 14, 2016 //

I’m going to do a series of posts on the B2B account planning stages. It seems a good time to do the series. Any time’s a good time to do account planning, but it’s most commonly done in the final quarter of the current year, to make a plan for the following year.

Proper account planning is an underperformed and vastly undervalued facet of the B2B selling game. Statistics abound of the increased growth and revenues for companies that do account panning, against those that don’t. It makes brutal sense of course. If you fail to plan, and so on. Yet still companies don’t get round to doing it properly, or even at all. Amazing but true.

I’ve identified 8 discrete stages to the B2B account planning process, and I’ll devote a post to each stage. None of the stages is rocket science. You can devote many resources to each stage, or you can devote a few resources. What you put in, you’ll get back, if you do it right.

It’s very important that you follow a defined process. It’s nearly as important that you use software to help you plan and execute on your plan. Account planning is a team sport and software brings obvious collaborative and productivity benefits.

I hope you enjoy the series.

Tags Account Planning, B2B, B2B Marketing, B2B Sales

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Get it Out There

November 11, 2016 //

When is a product ready? When is a project done? When is the document finished?

It never is of course. Nothing’s perfect in the B2B world. It can always be improved upon. It can always receive another iteration. We can always go round again.

Back in the heady dot com days of the late 1990’s, it was all about ‘ready, fire, aim.’ Look where that got us. In many cases it generated false hopes, over-inflated intentions and a lot of failed businesses.

But there’s still an important philosophical argument to be waged between the ‘it’s ready enough, get it out there and see how it goes’ and the ‘no, it needs more work, let’s put the brakes on and get it out late but better’. This inevitably creates tensions within the business.

The younger and more junior you tend to be in an organisation, the more you favour the former camp. Customers will tell us what they think. It’s time to ask them and then we can iterate accordingly, or so runs the argument. ‘Pick a point and go,’ as I’ve said before. The older and more senior you are, with more at stake, and more experience to back it up, the more you side with the latter camp. It’s not going out like this. I’m not happy. We can do better and we should wait, get it right, and offer customers a better experience, you might say.

Hmm, get it right, versus get it out there. When is a product right?

Tags Business, time

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

What Type of Account Manager Are You?

November 7, 2016 //

Account Management Coverage

What type of account manager are you? Is it something you’ve thought about? Account management coverage is a bit like a pyramid. Very large and important customer accounts are few and far between. Each account might have a number of people, a whole team in fact – looking after it, each of whom may take a specialist role. This is the n:1 approach, where the left side of the colon is the vendor or supplier, and the right side is the customer or buyer.

When I worked in sales effectiveness and sales training, I heard of one lady who was responsible for a team managing an account in the US pharma industry worth $10bn per year. That account was twice the size of the US sales effectiveness and sales training industry.

Some businesses work with large accounts, but they’re of a size where one dedicated account manager can serve that account himself or herself, full time. This is the 1:1 relationship.

Then there’s the other accounts which make up the vast majority of business. These accounts are sufficiently small that 1 person can manage them as a portfolio of multiple accounts. Sometimes this means 5 accounts, and sometimes it can be as high as 500. It depends on how strategic or tactical the accounts are, and how proactive or reactive your approach is. This, as you might have guessed, is 1:n account management and it probably accounts for most of the account management roles that people fulfil.

It’s important to think abut account management coverage this way because it helps identify the priorities that govern your company’s business, your time and your focus.

Tags account management

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Account Based Marketing without the Right Tech

November 4, 2016 //

In a previous post, I covered how Account Based Marketing, with the right technology like web personalisation software at your fingertips, threatens to become new ‘truth’ in demand generation. When you know who a visitor is as they come to your website, you can dynamically serve them up relevant, timely content, which is cool. You also improve your engagement and conversion rates, which is cooler still.

But how do you do this if you don’t have or can’t afford the right technology?

Account based marketing without the right tech becomes low tech, or old school. You have to go back to basics. First, you need to select the target accounts that you want to win. These accounts should be with a specific segment or segments, rather than the product of a scattergun approach. You’re not going to win them all. In fact, you should target maybe 5 to 10 times as many as you’re looking to win. Then you need to do some basic research into all of them, as follows:

Who’s the decision maker and budget holder?
What’s their email address, and social media handles if you can find them?
Who else is on their team?
What are they trying to do with their business? What are their goals?
What’s stopping them from achieving their goals?
How can you help them overcome this barrier?
How can you demonstrate you’ve done it for other businesses that they can relate to?

Armed with this information, you can design tailored information for them based on their circumstances, industry, personality and stage in the buying process.

Where the right tech enables you to go to war in an automated fashion, on this traditional battlefield your weapon is the trusty email. People will open emails and act on them if they present actionable content that’s relevant and compelling. Then you need to nurture their interest with further, well-timed emails that guide them through the buying process and the starting point of getting where they want their business to be.

Tags Account Based Marketing

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Account Based Marketing with the Right Tech

November 2, 2016 //

Account Based Marketing is like a cross between Account Planning and marketing. Instead of marketing to everyone and then qualifying the leads in your funnel to focus on the target leads, you do the qualifying up front, selecting the companies you want to work with, strategising on where and how they might need your help and targeting them with personalised messages.

Thanks to something called web personalisation, you can take a lot of the leg work out of your in-funnel marketing. You can automate the assets you deliver to certain people depending on the type pf person they are and their stage in the buying process. Web personalisation software uses functionality called reverse IP look-up, allowing you to know a lot about a website visitor, like industry, company size, and so on.

If you also recognise this visitor as one of your target accounts, then you can literally present customised web pages to them on the fly. Which is nice.

This is very powerful, and, understandably, has got a lot of people excited about more focused, higher return marketing investments.

Remember, though, that Account Based Marketing is not a silver bullet. You should do it in parallel with other more ‘traditional’ demand generation activities, because you need a good spread of differently sized opportunities for a healthy, forward-moving pipeline.

Tags Account Based Marketing

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Why is the News All Bad?

October 24, 2016 //

Why is the news all bad? Why do the media, 90 per cent of the time, lead with war, murders, attacks, death, political wranglings and nastiness, accidents or missing people? The more dramatic the better? Why do they save the good news and the good vibe stories for the end, positioning them as afterthoughts or here’s-something-quirky-fluffy-or-engaging-to-pay-lip-service-to-the-idea-of-balance pieces?

What is it about the media that confirms and prolongs the notion that bad news is good news? And what is it about us that we legitimise and condone it by continuing to buy the newspapers and tune in to the air time? For us, in our everyday lives and loves, no news is often good news. For them, no news is worse than good news. It means they have nothing to say, nothing to fill the void with.

It beats me. I try not to be saddled with the bad news. I avoid getting sucked into a good vibe vortex. I don’t watch the news on television, news that is pushed to me – whether I like it or not – in the old broadcasting style. I select the news I want to read on the web. OK, so it’s still controlled and prioritised by the same organisations, but I feel like I’m pulling the stories that I’m interested in, in the order I prefer.

In all of journalism has there ever been an editor who has decided to achieve a genuine balance of good and bad, and even lead with the good stuff, to lift his or her readership and ultimately the region out of this misery funk? Is it even possible to start a movement that becomes seismic this way? Probably not an example who has lasted, since circulation and ratings would have tanked in the short term, and the powers that be would never have stayed the course.

Perhaps it simply feeds our constant need for affirmation that there’s always someone less well off than us, because they’ve been killed, orphaned, injured, marginalised, threatened, beaten, ripped off or otherwise suffered at the hands of others or from the fickle hand of fate.

So perhaps we’re the problem, or is there no chance for us to change?

Tags Media, News, People

Categories Communication, Customers, General

Welcome Back

October 21, 2016 //

In 2000, I was in San Diego, California, for a conference. The day before the conference started, I had some time to kill and I needed a new travel bag with wheels and one of those extendable handles. So I went to the local mall with a colleague to do some research.

We split up and I went into a couple of shops. I nodded my hellos to the staff and I didn’t speak any more to a sales assistant. In the second store found the bag I thought I was looking for. I left the store and went to go find my buddy for a second opinion, as he travelled for work more than I did.

20 minutes later we came back into the store. ‘Welcome back’, said the sales assistant, a handsome African American bloke in his late-20’s. The store was Sharper Image.

What struck was that the guy remembered me. When he said ‘Welcome back’, I took the unspoken part of this to mean:

I noticed you come in before
You’re important to us
We pay attention to our prospects and customers
I want you to know that
We want to serve you so that you can become a customer

I bought the bag.

I still have the bag.

Tags Attention, Behaviour

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Best B2B Sales Deck Ever

October 17, 2016 //

The other day a colleague pointed me towards an article he’d seen by a chap called Andy Raskin on LinkedIn. It was a recounting and generalising around the best sales deck he’s ever seen. You can read the full article here.

If you can’t get to the article now, I’d recommend you bookmark it for another time. For now, though, the essence of the article is that the best flow of a sales deck, predominantly for B2B and disruptive technologies, touches on 5 key milestones. I’ve written about this a lot, and the following flow definitely hits all the major points.

Here are the 5 milestones:

1) Set the scene with a major change event in the world

2) Show that there’ll be winners who embrace this change event, and losers who don’t

3) Show them what success looks like when you’ve got there – what Andy calls ‘teasing the promised land’

4) Introduce your features as ‘magic gifts’ to get them to the promised land

5) Demonstrate your evidence that you can get them there, ie you’ve done it for others

Nothing new here perhaps, but it brings the prospect along the journey in an exciting way and doesn’t slam them on the defensive or put them off progressing because it’s too complex/scary/hard. As I said, the full article is here and well worth a read.

Tags B2B, B2B Marketing, B2B Sales

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Industrial Inaction

October 14, 2016 //

I was on the receiving end of a transport strike the other day. Or, industrial action, as it’s rather euphemistically called, as I attempted to get into the UK nation’s capital.

Industrial action. It should be called industrial inaction. It’s people who are providing a service – sometimes a single point of failure service – deciding not to provide that service, to do nothing.

Who suffers in this protracted battle of wills between the employer and the union? Other employees of supporting businesses who have to try and take the strain, but mainly the end customer, who funds – partly, I suppose – the service that’s supposed to be delivered but is being withheld.

A hundred thousand working people delayed, inconvenienced, frustrated and stressed. Wedged into late, irregular trains of a skeleton service like passengers on a Japanese commuter train, but with none of the punctuality. Hundreds of thousands of hours in lost productivity, lost contributions to national GDP, per day.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but it can’t lie in the antediluvian practices of outdated bodies, chaos, and meaningless apologies.

Tags Strike, time, Transport, Travel

Categories Customers, General

Archive

Categories

Tags

Follow Paul Dilger's blog via email