Posts Tagged B2B Marketing
Five Mistakes Every B2B Company is Making on Facebook
Posted by Rick Pranitis in Social Media on February 9, 2017
While LinkedIn is often the preferred platform for B2B social media, Facebook can be the difference in the success of your marketing, if done right.
When it comes to B2B marketing, it’s crucial to find how your goals overlap with the functionality of the platform being used. In the case of Facebook, there are a range of opportunities to flip the traditionally B2C platform in your favor.
Keep reading to find out how to get B2B marketing right on Facebook.
- Not using the Custom Audience feature
You already have a list of contacts built up in your database. Why not put those email addresses to good use and try to find more followers and potential buyers through Facebook? Many B2B businesses miss out on advertising opportunities because they haven’t narrowed down their audience successfully. The Custom Audience feature will help you do this.
The Custom Audiences feature lets you upload your database directly to Facebook. Using Facebook Ads Manager, you can create targeted ads and then send them to your email contacts. Facebook will then match your emailing list against the user accounts currently open. Because so many people use their personal email addresses for social media accounts and shopping accounts, there’s a good chance that your contacts use the same address for Facebook.
You can also reach out to new customers by creating a similar audience to your already existing Custom Audience. This is a great way to find new customers who are demographically similar to your current customers. Remember, not everyone wants to be your customer, so do your best to avoid marketing to those who have no interest in your company.
- Letting posts get too sales-y
Getting people to like your page is one thing; getting them to stick around and interact with your posts is another. Some B2B marketers believe that posting on Facebook isn’t as important or necessary so long as you have those fans, but in reality, your posts say a lot about you as a company.
Your posts need to be engaging while providing industry-related information to your customers. This is how you show them that your company isn’t just about selling products and services. You care about your customers and you care about educating them. By showing them that you know your industry and will provide them with up-to-date information, you’re illustrating your company’s professionalism as well as its superior customer relations.
That’s not to say that you can never post any self-promotional material on Facebook, but remember the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your content should be useful blogs, articles, infographics, videos and other useful pages from third parties. The remaining 20 percent can be about your own promotions.
Remember this rule when your posting, and your customers will be more likely to interact with your posts. They’ll also appreciate not being bombarded with sales pitches.
- Forgetting to tag or mention people
When you post from your own Facebook account, do you tag people in your posts or mention places that you’ve recently visited? If so, then why aren’t you doing this with your B2B Facebook posts?
Social media is all about creating dialogues and connecting with customers. Tagging well-known industry experts brings them into the conversation and offers readers new perspectives. Tagging your own followers is a great way to interact with customers and make them feel appreciated by your brand. Doing so gives readers more of an incentive to comment on your posts if they think you might answer them back.
Facebook’s tag and mention options allow you to pull people into your conversation and make them feel included. This is a great way to involve your customers and get them talking with you.
For example, a higher education institution might tag a student who was recently nominated for an award in his or her field and offer a hearty congratulation. This gets followers talking and shares the good news with other who might not be aware.
- Focusing on selling rather than generating leads
One of the biggest misconceptions about Facebook marketing is that it’s all about selling, selling, selling. If you’re not generating sales from your Facebook marketing endeavors, then you’re doing something wrong.
The truth is Facebook just isn’t a good marketplace for selling your products and services. Facebook and other social media platforms are about building solid customer relationships and improving your brand. People come to Facebook to talk, not to shop, so if you’re focusing on getting people to buy your products on Facebook, then you may be wasting your time.
Facebook can be one of the most useful tools for generating great leads and nurturing them. By capturing email addresses, you build your database and expand your reach to new customers. Once you have them, you can begin marketing directly to them through Facebook.
As your leads become more invested, you can pass them on to your sales team and turn them from a lead to a valuable customer.
- Ignoring metrics data
Recently, Facebook updated its Ads Manager, giving it a whole new look that was a little overwhelming for some. The main page now gives you a plethora of data telling you how successful your ads are. If you’re ignoring this data, then your campaigns probably won’t improve, and you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.
To help you better manage your budget, Facebook now lists your total spent over the course of the week at the top of the Ads Manager page. Now you can keep better tallies on your expenses and make sure you don’t go over your budget.
There are a number of ways to break down your campaigns, ad sets and ads so you can better see their successes and weak points. Don’t be afraid to click around and pull up new reports. It may be hard to track your ROI through Facebook marketing, but looking at your metrics is a good place to start.
This article was originally posted to the SocialMedia B2B Blog by Michael Bird on December 1, 2015
Four Tips to Help You Connect With Those Hard-to-Reach Prospects
Posted by Rick Pranitis in MARKETING on January 25, 2017
Sometimes you just can’t seem to connect with that prospect you’ve been trying to reach. You call, you email, you try social media and it’s not working. Here are four quick tips that may give you hope.
Let me tell you a quick story. One of the sales people I was coaching last year was trying to get into a major retailer and called 42 times. I know the exact number because it became a game with him after the 5th or 6th try.
He had a place in his notebook where he put a check mark each time he called. He didn’t give up at 10 calls, kept going at 20 and finally on the 42nd call he reached the person that was in a position to review his product. The good news was the company not only showed interested in his product they became a customer. His persistence landed him a very large new account.
Here are three other proven methods for connecting
If you have a product that is typically reviewed by purchasing and you are having no luck talking to anyone in that department, then skip the buyer and go directly to someone in product management, operations or marketing. If they like the idea they can make the introduction to the buyer. “Fred you need to connect with Nick and take a serious look at this new product“.
If the person you are trying to reach has a company fax number listed on their website or product literature send them a fax. I have a client that uses faxes for lead generation regularly. Since no one is doing it anymore and most companies still have fax lines and fax machines it’s proven to be a great outbound lead generator for them. They are amazed at how well it’s working.
This is one on my favorites and I used it a lot when I was first starting out. I would send the person a Tim Horton’s gift certificate (it’s a Canadian thing) or other type of gift card in the mail.
The note with the gift card reads:
Hi Nick: It’s very difficult to schedule the time to have a coffee and talk about how _________ may be of value to (your company name) So instead of trying to set up a coffee meeting I’d like to buy you a coffee and give you a call (date, time) and speak to you for 5 minutes. Alternatively if you have a crazy busy phone schedule you can email me at _____________ and I will send you the information directly for your review”.
The coffee gift card is a very inexpensive sales tool and I landed some of my biggest accounts with this simple ice breaker.
Just remember that finding new customers can be one of the most difficult parts of building your business. Use a system, set aside time each day for prospecting and be persistent.
This article was originally posted to the Sales Compass Blog by Robert J. Weese on January 26, 2017.
Three Social Media Best Practices For Small Businesses
Posted by Rick Pranitis in Social Media on February 24, 2016
For small business owners, social media marketing is one of the most underutilized marketing tactics.
How can you say that?
Everyone has or should have a Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, and Google Business page. While it is true that most companies have dabbled with social media channels and set up their pages, most small companies pay little or no attention to these low cost and potentially high impact marketing opportunities. Most small company social media accounts are a barren waste land of blank avatars, little to no postings and small followings.
If you are a small business and are looking to kick start your social media efforts, here are 3 best practices to get you started and impact your bottom line this year.
Update Your Profile
Your social media profile is an extension of your business brand. For savvy customers particularly the growing in influence millennial generation, social media channels are one of their first stops in their decision-making process. If you have blank avatars on your Twitter or Facebook pages, or profiles that look like they belong to a different company, you’ve got a problem. When someone checks you out on Facebook, Twitter, Google, or LinkedIn, you want them to know that they are dealing with the same organization. Use the same colors, logos, and similar images as you do with your other marketing collateral, so that it is instantly recognizable.
Also make sure that you use a consistent tone or voice. If your brand is professional, maintain that vibe, changing it up to a youthful and snarky tone will only confuse and potentially alienate your ideal customers. While your business may serve different customers, your marketing should be aimed at your target audience.
Consistency is Key
Arriving at a Twitter account or Facebook page and seeing that the last post was two years ago says something about a business. Unfortunately for many of the small businesses that we come into contact, this is precisely what we encounter. Publishing once in a while is a step in the right direction, but it will not yield the primary results that you are looking for – building and audience and driving targeted traffic to your website.
Determine which social media channels will yield the best results for your business and then work with your team to establish a regular publishing schedule for each channel that you will be working with.
Our friends at Buffer (yes, we are clients) have a great social media posting guide that can help you determine the ideal frequency to post for each social media channel. Regularity, like brand consistency, helps establish a sense of reliability in your audience (a very important trait in a company you’re considering doing business with).
At a minimum if you are just getting started, consider the following schedule.
- Twitter: 3-5 original tweets a day (morning, afternoon, and evening)
- Facebook: 1 post a day (original content or shared, ideally mid-day or early evening)
- LinkedIn: 1-2 posts a week (original content or shared)
Once you have maintained some consistency, you can start to track the impact of your postings and determine the appropriate frequency and timeframes for your posts.
Speak With, Not at Your Audience
Whether its Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn the goal of your social media activities is not to close sales. While increased sales can be a by-product of an effectively operated social media strategy, its biggest opportunities lie in creating awareness for your product or service, or maintaining communication with your legions of satisfied customers. It is important for companies to dialogue with their audience and avoid engaging in a one-sided conversation.
Unfortunately, many small companies just starting out with social media make the mistake of making overly salesy posts, or just posting a few pieces of content and never engaging with their audience.
Active engagement is the key!
Participating in group discussions on LinkedIn, or hosting chats on Twitter are just a few of the opportunities to speak with your audience and not at them. What are your followers concerned with? What problems are they struggling with? Are there solutions that you can provide to these issues? Will some of the content that you created answer their questions?
Regardless of the channel, social media offers your brand or company the opportunity to connect with your ideal customers on a personal level. Don’t take it for granted!
This article was originally posted to the Business 2 Community Blog by David Cuevas on February 14, 2016.
Five Ways to Generate Successful Leads
Posted by Rick Pranitis in MARKETING, SALES BEST PRACTICES on January 22, 2016
The argument that all you need is a smart sales executive and a bit of intuition to succeed at selling is now redundant. Technology-enabled selling is now key. Making sure the sales process is successful requires coordination across multiple facets of a business, involving sales, marketing and almost any customer facing member of staff. CRM systems, marketing automation technology and existing relationships all need to be tied together with a thorough understanding of your company’s target audience.
Key analytics need to be leveraged to discover customer insights with leads carefully nurtured through well thought out campaigns to drive the demand funnel. These are my five essential means to generate successful leads:
Use accurate marketing data
Accurate data is the base of successful marketing programs. Without it, you could end up targeting the wrong people or worse, missing out on particularly strong leads. Accurate and relevant information about a person’s role, responsibility and decision making power is critical to understanding how best to approach them. This all sounds obvious, but too often sales calls go unanswered and emails bounce back. In my view, this is usually a result of out of date or incorrect data. Your sales and marketing team needs to reach out and communicate directly with people that are verified decision makers. In order to do this, you need to ensure your current marketing database stays up-to-date and accurately maintained.
Automate marketing across the organization
Automated marketing is not only reliant on accurate data, but when used across an organization, it can produce some great insight. Integrating existing CRM and data systems with inbound leads from website data will build stronger customer profiles and help sales and marketing teams to better understand audience behavior and learn where leads are in the sales funnel.
Use a CRM system
Understanding existing customer patterns is essential to getting new ones. Retargeting previous customers is a great way to securing future sales. But failing to understand them won’t do you any favors. A customer relationship management system should by default contain highly detailed information about every customer; from what products they’ve bought, down to the best means to contact them. By fostering an understanding of existing customers, a CRM system allows sales and marketing teams to communicate to leads exactly how they can solve a clearly defined and relevant business problem, whilst developing a detailed market and vertical knowledge.
Ensure sales and marketing teams have domain expertise
Few things are more embarrassing for a salesperson than being told they don’t understand a prospect’s business. As you develop a marketing strategy and automate aspects across your business, ensuring all teams have strong vertical sector knowledge is key. Failing to understand and sympathize with the needs and demands of prospects will hinder any chance of making a sale, throwing away any previous successful marketing efforts. Hiring salespeople with relevant domain expertise and sales process knowledge can be a great first step. These individuals can help to enable other new hires and team members to have a high level understanding of customer business requirements and sales planning.
Create a collaborative culture between sales and marketing teams
Marketing supports sales, and marketing departments are reliant on the business that sales teams bring in. The two departments are intrinsically linked in function, and often even use the same databases. In a data driven environment, field sales should understand the role of marketing and vis-versa. Fostering collaboration between the two departments and ultimately uniting their culture will pave the way for more effective lead generation with the two working in full tandem together.
In short, generating sales leads is all about focus and collaboration. Data needs to be accurate and relevant, and teams need to be focused on their target customer sectors and business needs. Chatty and confident salespersons are of course still important, but without the support of accurate data, effective CRM and automated marketing alongside a deep market knowledge and a collaborative environment between sales and marketing, lead generation will be limited. Following just one of these suggestions simply isn’t good enough. They need to be implemented in tandem, as each is intrinsically reliant on the other to succeed. Following all will ultimately result in more successful leads, sales and consequently a higher bottom line.
This article was originally posted to the Sales&Marketing Management Blog by Varun Chandran on January 6, 2016.
Breaking The Rules of B2B Social Media
Posted by Rick Pranitis in MARKETING on October 20, 2015
When someone tells you to follow the rules, are you more likely to take their advice or do you believe that rules were made to be broken? There are so many rules governing B2B social media and almost all of them can or should be broken at one time or another.
But the thing about social media marketing and rules is that nobody can agree on what the rules are. Even if you pull back from the strict approach of rules and call them guidelines, nobody can agree on that either.
In the real world, rules are created in response to some complaint or action by someone or many someone’s. I recently checked into a beach hotel and there was a list of rules on the nightstand. Along with a reminder that guests not clean fish in their room (really?), was one that said they were not responsible for inclement weather. Wait, does that mean that someone complained to the hotel about the weather? I booked my beach vacation and you were supposed to guarantee my family five out of seven sunny days.
In social media every blogger, speaker, consultant and street corner huckster has their own set of rules. And they all contradict each other. Pick a common question and try to find a single answer. Try this one. How many times should I tweet? Once a day? Ten times a day? Multiple times for each tweet? And is that my content or someone else’s? You can pretty much find any answer you want. Want to justify your plan to your boss? You can probably find a blog post out there that supports what you want to do. It may not be from the most reputable source, but someone has likely recommended it.
The makes it easy to follow the rules. But it makes it even easier to break the rules.
What’s a B2B marketer to do?
Since so many B2B companies have very different audiences and marketing requirements, here are some suggestions for creating your own rules for social media. And by following these steps you will have a much better understanding of why you are doing what you are doing. You won’t need some blog post telling you what to do. Well, except this one.
- Establish goals and objectives for your social media efforts. This will help you measure success.
- Decide if you are using social media for lead generation or customer retention. This will drive your content and calls to action.
- Determine if you need a local or global presence. This will set the times of day you share content.
- Talk to your customers to learn what social media sites provide value to them. This will identify what sites to focus on.
- Review what your competitors are doing on social media. This is give you a sense of social media awareness in the industry.
- Realistically examine your resources. This will keep you from over-extended you or your team.
- Test and measure everything you do. This will ensure you keep doing the things that work for your audience and drop the ones that don’t.
- Give it time. This shows you understand that social media does not change your marketing overnight.
This article was originally posted to the Social Media B2B Blog by Jeffery L. Cohen on July 31, 2015.
Why No One is Reading Your Email Newsletter
Posted by Rick Pranitis in MARKETING on September 29, 2015
Bombarded by an endless stream of messages every day, decision makers at B2B companies often see a vendor’s email newsletter as useless inbox clutter and immediately delete the message without reading it. Are newsletters a lost cause?
I spoke with Matt Senatore, a research director for Sirius Decisions’ Account-Based Marketing practice, on current best practices and common pitfalls for this tactic. The key point that emerged from our discussion: Although overall spending on email marketing has decreased in recent years, newsletters still serve a variety of valuable purposes and can help influence purchase decisions if properly crafted.
“We’re seeing a trend of less reliance – and spending – on newsletters and email in general for outbound net new demand creation,” Matt said. “However, newsletters provide good opportunity to stay engaged and continue the dialogue with prospects already in the database that are being nurtured – and also with existing customers.”
The first step to continuing that dialogue is getting the recipient to open that newsletter message and engage with it. Here are some of the most common mistakes that land b-to-b email newsletters in the trash:
- Boring content. “You need to have an authentic voice that breaks through the clutter – that is critical,” Matt said. To grab readers’ attention with the subject line or top-level content, frame a thought as an interactive question (e.g. “What Do You Think of…”), mention a timely industry event or hot topic, or promise bite-sized servings of useful information (e.g. “Three Tips to…”). Images, statistics and info-graphics can liven up the body of the message. You should also include clear calls to action and integrate keywords in short snippets that link to landing pages on the Web site.
- Blatant sales pitches. At all points in the customer lifecycle, newsletter content must strike a balance between encouraging interest in the organization’s offerings and not appearing to be an aggressive advertisement. Customers who have recently purchased the offering may be especially turned off by pushy messaging. Instead, offer tips on how to get up to speed and best utilize the new solution. As the customer nears a potential point of repurchase or additional buying, email newsletters can highlight how the organization can support their needs and continue to maximize their benefits from the offering.
- One-size-fits-all messages. Build newsletter content to accommodate recipients’ customer lifecycle stages, personas, and stated preferences and interests. Best practice companies provide recipients with an easy-to-use portal for modifying their newsletter preferences and settings (e.g. frequency, types of content). Profile data can be linked to the contact’s record in the sales force automation system and seamlessly cross-populated and updated. Organizations also must keep in mind the devices on which their recipients most often read the newsletter, optimizing content and presentation for each platform.
- Untested or static strategy. Identifying optimal email subject lines using basic A/B testing is fairly common practice. But delivery times, message layout, color schemes, subtle phrasing changes and a multitude of other variables can – and should – be measured, refined and measured again. Organizations can also use heat maps to display relative click rates for text in different regions of the message.
This article was originally posted to the Sirius Decisions Blog by Jessica Lillian on March 14, 2014.
Social Media: Creating an Early Warning System
Posted by Rick Pranitis in MARKETING on December 12, 2013
Social media can work like an early warning system to alert an organization to an emerging problem; it can also recycle old news and spread misinformation and rumors. In either case, it is important to be prepared with a plan to address negative themes that are being amplified in social media, which can attract broader media coverage, as well as potential damage to the company and brand.
Smart companies prepare crisis response protocols as part of their social media strategy or as part of an overall corporate crisis communications plan. A typical crisis plan covers areas such as:
Definition of roles and responsibilities: Who is responsible for monitoring social media accounts? Is there an expectation that this will be done 24×7? What channels will be monitored? When negative comments appear, what will happen?
Process and workflow: The person who monitors social media should have a process prepared in advance for responding to various types of attacks. In some cases, this individual may take the lead in providing a quick response, but often another department must get involved. The social monitoring team must maintain an up-to-date list of contacts that can be reached in the event of a problem. Typically, the most important departments are customer service, legal and communications.
Agree on the timeframe for response: In social media, it’s usually best to respond in as short a period of time as possible, especially on channels such as Twitter where a snowball effect can happen very quickly. For blogs and other forms of social media where posting is less frequent, a well-reasoned response may take longer to prepare, but it is important to respond with some urgency. In the case of an influential blogger, there may be a quick response in the form of a comment, followed by outreach from the communications team to provide information.
Training and practice: As virtually any employee may uncover a social media attack, all employees must be trained what to do. Best-in-class organizations practice crisis response in a variety of scenarios. This helps to uncover gaps in response plans, so problems can be handled more quickly when they occur.
Consider a number of factors when deciding how to respond, including the person/entity posting the comment, the topic, and how it relates to the company and your ability to effect change. While all situations are different, all responses should be respectful and sincere. Avoid any displays of emotion that can themselves become the subject of social media chatter. A prompt but measured response shows that the company is listening and cares what people think, but does not suggest a panicky over-reaction. Handled correctly, a social media response can become a moment of truth that turns a vocal detractor into an advocate!
.
This article was originally posted to the SIriusDecisions Blog by Julie Ogilvie on December 2, 2013.
.
Respect Your Competition
Posted by Rick Pranitis in MARKETING on July 9, 2013
Product managers and marketers are naturally competitive. They want their products to win in the marketplace, and they want to beat the competition. This trait is important to the success of a product manager or product marketer.
However, it’s important to balance support and bias toward your product with the realities of the marketplace. There’s a difference between being a champion for your product and being blind to the market, customer needs and perceptions.
There are countless examples of former industry leaders who underestimated their competition and were beat by scrappy upstarts. There are also countless examples of scrappy upstarts who have underestimated the reach and resources of industry leaders. In many of these cases, objectivity toward the market was overpowered by hubris.
Successful product managers and marketers walk a fine line between being completely objective and being a die-hard super-fan supporter. Here are two simple tips on how to respect your competition when it’s natural to be focused on how much better you are than them:
– Consciously seek out objective viewpoints. Spending all of your time in the office with colleagues or interacting only with happy customers isn’t going to provide you with a real picture of what’s going on in the market. Rather than hiding in a self-congratulating bubble, actively seek out places where you will get objective viewpoints. Go to a conference for an industry where you’re not the market leader. Reach out to customers who have left you for another vendor. Find places outside your product’s comfort zone and keep your ears open and your mouth closed. The feedback will be enlightening.
– Be conscious of the many roles you need to play. In a given week – or day – product managers need to wear a number of different hats. One hat might be the one you wear when you’re working a trade show booth and trying to make your pitch to prospects. Another hat might be the one you wear when you’re making your case to senior management for more funding to address weaknesses in your product. You wear another hat when you’re enabling your sales force and yet another when you’re conducting market research. In each of these scenarios, you’re in a different mode, that requires a particular attitude. Your “rah rah” attitude should be in full effect when you’re making your pitch to prospects at a trade show booth, but it should be put in check when you’re conducting site visits as part of a market research project.
.
.
This article was originally posted to the Sirius Decisions Blog by Jeff Lash on 22 May 2013.
.
.
.
Five Keys to Building an Effective Social Media Strategy
Posted by Rick Pranitis in MARKETING on July 1, 2013
The social media world seems like a whirlwind, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants territory. After all, with the demanding work of posting content multiple times a day—every day—who has time to actually think about creating a strategy and goals? Having a purposeful plan for your company, though, is invaluable to making your work translate into results.
Before diving into the social media storm, develop a strategy. Building one out can result in benefits like demonstrating your company’s expertise in the industry, improving SEO traffic to your website, and developing leads and prospects. Here are some important key steps that will put you on the road to developing an effective social media strategy:
1. Pick a relevant theme.
Find a theme that will resonate with your target customers—and your company. For example, “increasing collaboration and efficiency in the workplace” may be a good focus for an HR solutions company. You don’t necessarily have to share this theme with your followers. It’s more for yourself so you can guide your content development. The key is to find something that you can talk about knowledgeably, find articles and posts on, and provide value to your prospects.
2. Find the top influencers in your industry.
If you want your voice to be heard, find the people who “matter” in your part of the social media world. Follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Share their content (making sure it’s relevant to your theme and strategy), and ask them to share yours. Ask them to guest-blog for you, and offer to guest-blog for them. Tools like Little Bird, Klout, and Traackr can help you find your industry’s influencers.
3. Set up a social dashboard.
This may seem like an obvious step. But are you using the one that works best for your goals? There are a vast number of options available—the trick is finding one or several that work for you. Hootsuite is a great way to monitor and post to all your accounts. Buffer is great for queuing up lots of content and seeing immediate post results. A measuring tool like RivalIQ or SproutSocial can show your social growth over time. Explore, try out different tools, and see what works best for your goals.
4. Post value-add content.
Whether you’re curating or posting original content, providing value-add content is vital. Don’t constantly post about why your company is awesome and what products are for sale. Instead, at least 80 percent of the time, post valuable content that will present your company as an industry expert and influencer. Share posts that your prospects will want to read and learn from. Over time, your prospects will see your expertise and keep you in mind when they’re ready to buy.
5. Use SEO keywords.
To help drive SEO traffic, use the SEO keywords from your site in your social media work. Revamp your company’s “About” section on each social media profile, especially for LinkedIn and Google+, so it contains the core keywords from your site. Use relevant keywords in your Google+ and blog posts so they’re more likely to show up in natural search results. Also, make sure you use important keywords in some of your daily tweets.
.
.
.
This article was originally posted to the Heinz Marketing blog by Meghan Bradwell on June 27, 2013.
.
.
.
Why BANT No Longer Applies for B2B Lead Qualification
Posted by Rick Pranitis in MARKETING on August 28, 2012
Today’s buyer has unprecedented access to information enabling them to make informed buying decisions, short lists and determine the best fit for their needs without ever speaking to a seller. In fact, recent statistics from Sirius Decisions and Selling Power state that more than 50% of the buying process is completed before a buyer ever engages with a vendor or a sales rep. We are smack in the middle of marketing 2.0, a more “modern” way of marketing that makes BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe) no longer effective for several reasons.
This being the case, one has to wonder why many organizations (especially sales people) still want to include BANT as part of their early stage lead qualification criteria? Don’t get me wrong – I do believe that in any sales process a sales rep should discuss these key criteria with their prospects. However, this should come later in the sales cycle, once the sales rep has defined some kind of relationship.
Here are a few reasons why BANT is not relevant for lead qualification:
Traditional Buying is Dead
Not long ago DemandGen Report ran a research report focused on the B2B buyer. One of the questions was as follows – “Did the buying path follow a traditional path where budget was established, criteria outlined, and then an RFP distributed to a pre-set list of solution providers?” No surprise that 83.3% of B2B buyers answered “no” to this question, a signal that indeed the traditional ways of buying are a thing of the past. Now think about these 83.3% in terms of BANT – while they were in the buying process, all would have been disqualified because of not being able to identify budget.
Buyers Lie
I’ll be honest – I’ve answered the budget, need and timeframe fields on a form simply to gain access to the information being offered. If it is a required field, do buyers have a choice? In a recent study, only 29% of B2B buyers said they “always” supply accurate information on custom questions on a web form. This means that 7 in 10 are lying about that information and that includes BANT. By requiring BANT in the early stages of the qualification process, you are inducing false-positives and leaving the buyers no choice but to provide information that is inaccurate. It is no wonder why Tony Jaros of Sirius Decisions stated, “B-A-N-T are the four most dangerous letters in B2B marketing.”
Implicit is far Better
I recently spent some time with a sales team developing their lead qualification model when the discussion of BANT arose. As usual some were for it and others had some serious questions. The EVP of Sales broke the tie when he stated “if we can get the right demographic criteria and understand how they are behaving and interacting with us, I will leave it to my rep’s to help them build the business case, show the need and help their prospect get the needed budget.” Case closed.
What this EVP of sales understood is that speaking to the right person who has shown through their “digital body language” that they are interested and have a potential need, is far better than having one give a criteria that could be faulty. This underscores the need for a well-defined lead qualification process between marketing and sales based on implicit and explicit criteria. Ultimately, this will produce a much more qualified lead than BANT.
Group Thinking
One of the other key characteristics of the B2B buying cycle today is that buyers purchase in groups. Very rarely is there one sole decision maker who approves buying decisions. The need to appeal to and message to a buying group including all levels of management is vital. As a result, each of these group members will have a unique perspective on the buying process and this perspective cannot be identified with BANT as the qualification barometer.
While we have entered this new age of modern marketing and moving away from traditional means of qualification, this is not something that marketers should dread. This change is good! It allows us to better identify our buyers, provide better information to sales and deliver more relevant content to our buyers enabling them to make a more informed buying process.
If you have not killed BANT in your lead qualification process, do it now. Start smart and begin focusing on the buying signals and behavior to get a more qualified lead and ultimately more conversions for sales. BANT is dead!
.
.
.
This article originally appeared in The Annutas Group – Lead Management Outlet Blog on August 28, 2012.
.
.
.
Follow On The Web!
