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Piecing together segmentation

Remember those old Publishers Clearing House mailings? It was a big deal when they came to our house. Having an uncommon last name, we invariably got to see our name misspelled many times throughout the mail-piece. They contained wooden sentences like “Just imagine when you, [your full name], appear on the TV and in newspaper headlines in [your city] because you won our sweepstakes. Every member of the [your last name] family will celebrate winning the $10 million prize.”

We used to laugh at those corny campaigns, but the truth is that prospects now expect to be communicated with using what your organization knows about them. Don’t believe me? Answer honestly: how fast do you hit ‘delete’ when seeing an email from a retailer (even if you like them) that’s not relevant to you?! What’s a marketing group to do?

The first thing is to admit that your target audience isn’t one big homogeneous group. Do a top-to-bottom appraisal of your buyers, noting the differences among them so that you can do some good old-fashioned segmentation. For me, segmentation involves communicating a single message in the way that’s most appropriate to an identifiable audience. This post won’t go into the many copywriting tactics used to achieve ‘appropriate,’ let’s just say it’s improved since Publishers Clearing House’s time. Here we’ll focus on the amazingly new twist that the internet has brought to segmentation – it can be done remotely and, if warranted, automatically. If you’re a Salesforce user, look at apps like Postcode Anywhere and you’ll see what I mean.

Starting at the lowest level, let’s say you get a work email address from a web contact form and you need firmographic/demographic data so you can send them the appropriate follow-on email. There are some great online tools to help you flesh out their information, whether you’re looking for Company-level or individual-level data.

Company-level Data

Company-level segmentation can be done with fields like: number of employees, SIC code, annual revenue and headquarters location. Big, public companies are the easiest to get information on – they’re trackable on sites like EDGAR. Those that aren’t publically traded companies still have a lot of research sources available. Here are some websites that let you search by company name:

SIC Code Directory

Thomas Register

Dun & Bradstreet’s Selectory

Hoovers

The Fortune 500, Business Week

The Software 500 database, for US-based software firms

GoogleNews (media coverage is often peppered with facts.)

You may have to pay to access some of these, but the information’s worth it.

Individual-level Data

If you have the persons name and contact details, you can do more segmentation by supplementing: professional designations, title/scope of responsibility, job function, years they’ve held role, gender or location (letting you derive timezone or size of city/town they live in). How do you find these fields? It’s getting easier, now that so many people are publishing their own online profiles. But even without, there are many sites that will yield great data to help your segmentation. There are social media sites that can help here too: twitter and BlogPulse are just two of them. Some sites you can search by name are:

Spoke

Forbes People

Jigsaw

Plaxo Pulse

If the organization is already your client, you can blend in even more data from your corporate records, such as: key contacts, total sales and other transactional information by which you can group them with similar clients.

In summary, it’s easy to see how these tools have made segmentation not only relevant, but an essential part of your marketing and sales arsenal. Start using this extra data and communicate smartly with your prospects, they’ll thank you for it.

A level playing field for all marketers

Let me first say that I’ve never ever done B2C marketing. Yesterday I spoke with a non-marketer about what “B2B marketing” is. He kept trying to understand it by comparing it to slick consumer marketing tactics he’s seen. I found myself repeatedly saying “No, B2B can’t do that because it costs too much,” or “B2B hasn’t caught up to that level yet.” But as I thought more about it, I came up with many B2B tactics that have revolutionized our jobs. Here are a few of them:

REMOTE SALES
15 years ago, I was a marketing analyst for a services company in which ‘sales calls’ involved several people disappearing from the office for several days. Now the need to connect in-person was, is and always will be a vital step for B2B sales, but that’s not the way one software company sold me. I’d called them about their statistical analysis program and received a floppy disk (!) in the mail. Shortly after, an inside representative called and asked me to run the program. In that one call, we walked through some demo data and ran some reports; I echoed his actions and he magically described everything on my screen. Well since then, web-demos, demos using real-time data and mobile apps have all become standard staples for B2B teams. But looking back, we should be amazed at how far we’ve come and how much we can accomplish without meeting in-person.

CRMs
Say what you will about it, but the adoption of Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) has improved client service and prospect engagement.  Years ago, when you ordered something from a Manufacturer, you needed to know your customer #, the catalog SKU, your receiving department’s particulars and your PO number. It was once commonplace for several sales reps from the same company to hassle you – sometimes VPs tacitly encouraged this practice. Thank goodness CRM’s have made these problems a thing of the past. CRMs have now burgeoned into profiles, which allow users to generated content that they share with their vendor as well as with other like-minded members. Constant Contact and WordPress have forums that are banding users together and slashing support costs all at the same time. I can’t wait to see where online interaction will take us next.

ONLINE DIALOGUES
In the corporate world, most people who use (or are candidates to use) a product make themselves known to vendors. This trend, called permission marketing nowadays, began when companies started opening their email systems to ‘outside’ senders. Judging by the number of corporate newsletters, RSS feeds, listservs and online forms that exist, I’d say this development has been largely positive. In my own experience, I can point to email communications that brought in a major upsell, drove a sudden change to a user conference that was weeks away and re-opened talks with a client who wouldn’t talk to our sales rep. There are still improvements to be made in segmenting and personalizing emails – our bloated inboxes demand it, but the technology to do this is now within almost every business’ reach.

So getting back to the conversation I had yesterday, I ended up upholding B2B marketing as every bit as potent in reaching its market as B2C is in reaching consumers. It seems that marketers, regardless of their target audience, are being put on a level playing field. There’s no longer two camps of marketing competing for dominance, but this levelling has put us all into one big training camp where all marketers can sharpen their skills and learn from whomever has the best ideas.

The right way to write B2B Marketing pieces

[This blog was inspired by many good posts out there about copywriting, such as this post by David Orban from O&Y.]

Attention everyone, class is now in session. I know some of you have taken this course because you major in related fields. Judging from your transcripts, I see a lot of ENGL, JRNL and of course some ADMN backgrounds. That shows me that you have some written communication skills, but it doesn’t automatically make you good marketers. Fear not, I’m going to give you some handy hints on how to write every item you send to business prospects. Here they are:

Avoid the words “we, us, our” as much as you can. While your company is no doubt really interesting, it’s not the one that the reader is keenly interested in. They’re most interested in solving their own issues or achieving more milestones. If you can talk to them about how they can do that (with some help from you), then you’ll have their attention.

I realize you rarely meet the end user, but try to imagine their environment and how they talk. Now match their communication style. If, for example, you’re writing for a buyer of industrial machinery, don’t use writing that looks like it came from an investment banker.

Don’t use exaggerated phrases, like those typically used in B2C marketing. Your target audience isn’t going to choose you because you put a “50¢ off your next purchase” coupon at the bottom of your collateral or used a cutesy rhyme. You’re not writing a newspaper flyer, you’re writing something that demonstrates your understanding of the prospect’s need and provides a solution whose value is beyond question. For these reasons, I forbid your assignments from saying: “Don’t delay, act today”… “You’ve tried the rest now try the best” … “This category-killing, breakthrough product” … here’s a good list of gobbledygook phrases to avoid.

I know most of you make your writing assignments as long as possible and ensure that you don’t leave out any explanation. But your prospective reader wants to read as little as possible, so help them by being brief. Remember that they want to find the quickest possible way to solve their problem – and they’ll listen to you if your piece clearly tells them that you can solve it.

I’ve been asked, “What happens if my piece is longer than it has to be?” and my answer is “nothing, meaning that the prospect will do nothing with your company, because they didn’t read your collateral.” So with all this in mind, I’m dismissing class to let you get on with your writing. By the way, I won’t be grading your assignment, your prospects will. Good luck!

Buyers are just not that into you

By Matt Massey, Managing Director, drive2 Inc.

I was stunned by the results of a poll done a while ago by the Business Products Buyers Survey*. They asked a panel of 478 B2B buyers to specify the percentage of their purchases where the vendor found them. Astonishingly, these were in the minority. These buyers claimed that 75-80% of the time, 'We found the vendor.'

Am I saying we should throw in the towel on outbound campaigns? Do I believe we should abandon direct marketing and let buyers assign themselves to our sales funnels? Absolutely not.

Let me point out some inaccurate conclusions people draw from these results:

• The 20-25% that were found by a vendor most likely bought from that vendor.
• The 'We found them' faction formed their own impression of the vendors in the space, based on…whatever information they came across and put credence in. In other words, it's anyone's guess whether they heard the marketing pitch the vendor had painstakingly created for them.
• Given that B2B prospects are fairly easy to identify, I don't believe that vendors missed 75-80% of the target audience. We must conclude that those who claimed they found the vendor must have forgotten any of the vendor's attempts to reach them. How many times have you heard your rep say, after a rival snagged the business, "I had them in our CRM, but they never moved past the suspect stage."

What I am saying is that if we want to have visibility on more than 25% of our sales, we have to shape up our sales & marketing processes. It's not something either sales or marketing can fix on their own. We have to integrate the message that they first responded to with later lead nurturing messages we give them. Our sales process has to incent reps to regularly check in with prospects. Our outbound activities have to entice them to introduce us to other stakeholders, instead of betraying their trust by going directly to the stakeholders ourselves. We have to politely create urgency for them and give them a business-case rationale that proves our value, not a gimmicky promotion.

As the vendors, we only have so much control over the buying process. We have to work as hard as we can to stay relevant to the buyer, over prolonged periods of time, in the hope that they'll involve us when they decide to buy.

*Results reported in MarketingSherpa's B2B Lead Generation Handbook, 2008 edition.