david schultz dot org(dot com was taken)

If your company’s product or service is a B2B play, and sales are flat or declining here are a few potential reasons why:

1. The CEO / board / investors
Look up the food chain. Are they here to manage EBITDA and sell the company or increase sales? What is their background? Why are they really here?

2. Risk Aversion.
In the words of the great Seth Godin, “it is risky to be safe”. If you need 100% certainity of the outcome before you execute in marketing you’re doomed. It’s exceedingly rare to knock it out of the park intentionally. The best marketing ideas are usually the result of experimentation and trying new approaches.

3. ‘leads’ as a measurement of effectiveness
I once worked at a company that doubled leads year over year, but sales remained flat. Leads & opportunities are two very different things. Marketing can buy a salesperson a lead very easily – it’s called the phonebook. What can’t be bought are real opportunities. Yet, marketing executives continue to use this as a measurement of marketing’s effectiveness. Why? As traditional ‘push’ marketing strategies continue to wither & die, investors will start holding marketing executives more accountable. Why not measure success by increases in inbound inquiries instead? (i.e phone calls / website inquiries / etc…).

4. Assuming you know your audience
Marketing people like to make snap assumptions about what turns their audience on (or off). Most of the time no real research has been done aside from maybe asking someone with a similar job title at your own company. B2B marketing is still human to human. If you don’t understand what makes your customers tick you’re in deep trouble, and if you assume you do you’re probably wrong.

5. Marketing 1.0
If your company is currently trying to get it’s big win with boring ads, email marketing, or the occasional tradeshow or webcast i bet you are dissapointed. You’re probably getting mediocre results and using ‘leads generated’ as your measurement of success (“hey we got 300 leads, we did our job”). To make things even more difficult once in awhile you’ll get an opportunity from one of these approaches, which makes it harder to ‘cut the cord’. The problem is, with less time and more choices than ever before – you are invisible to your prospects. So what to do? I say you should focus on generating good content. You need to start turning your prospects into subscribers. I’m not talking about email newsletter subscribers, but subscribers of what you have to say. Leverage communication tools like podcasts / blogs / ebooks & speaking engagements to do this. Keep product placement out of it at this stage. Win their hearts & minds first and the money will come.

6. Crappy copywriting
“Our next generation solution features a world class, easy to use combination of extensible api’s for your mission critical applications”. You’re marketing to humans not robots so stop talking out of your ass. Hire a copywriter who doesn’t suck! Also, check out copyblogger to learn how to stop sucking.

7. Not knowing when to let fires burn
Be careful about how much time you spend on new logos, branding or other mostly pointless exercises. Focus on the stuff that matters. Good time management is letting 20% of your fires burn so you can extinguish the 80% that matter. Easy way to check if something is a waste of time; ask yourself the question, “if this was my company and my money – is this what i would be spending my time on?”.

Related Posts:

1. How to: marketing in 2008
2. Word of mouth – the marketers holy grail?
3. How do I convince my boss of the ROI of new marketing?

Tags: marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 PM and is filed under marketing. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.