Inquisitive Marketer - B2B Sales Acceleration | Author ArchivesAldwin Neekon | Inquisitive Marketer

How Can Marketing Help Lead the Business? – with Firmex’s Joel Lessem

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Joel Lessem (CEO of Firmex) tells us how their marketing team has taken on new sales responsibilities and increased their influence on Firmex’s ability to find and close new business.

What out-dated ideas about the abilities and goals of your marketing team are holding your company back? How can you re-invent, re-assign, or re-build your team to do more of what your customers really need?

“Instead of 90% of the business development budget on sales and 10% marketing, it’s 50/50.”

Joel is CEO of Firmex.

From their website:”Our products enable our clients to securely share large volumes of highly confidential and sensitive documents for commercial and financial transactions, litigation, clinical studies, procurement and regulatory compliance.”
“One of the things, when I think about marketing success, you have to think about the context of the business specifically.

So, Firmex is a B2B software-as-a-service [SaaS] business that distributes a niche product, and by its nature distributes it in a very broad geographical range…We also have a very high value product, so it’s a product where people are doing mission critical transactions, or transactions [on] large volumes of highly confidential documents. It’s not typically something someone tries out for free because, you know, the value of the transaction is typically in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and they want to make sure that it’s right. You tend to tune your marketing to the context of the business.

What’s really exciting now, I think for marketers, as opposed to before is the internet is allowing – it’s changed the entire distribution model…It allows you to essentially leverage yourself.

So, in the old days, I worked for a B2B company, the marketing person was good at putting your company name on pens and other chachkas that you could hand out at events, right? Which was generally fairly useless, and it was really left up to the sales people to do the marketing, make phone calls, travel, that type of thing.

Now, what we’re seeing, even here at Firmex, we’re a B2B company, instead of 90% of the business development budget on sales and 10% on marketing, it’s 50/50. Because we do sell around the globe, although we primarily sell into the U.S., we sell in a very broad geographical area. We have an inside sales team, their role has changed to strictly closing the sale. And the marketing role has changed from just making us look, you know, pretty, to actually engaging customers, doing some of the pre-selling.

And what you’re finding is that customers are much more open and comfortable buying from – software anyway – from organizations that they’ve never heard of before that are in some far-distant city, that have compelling information on the internet. They make a lot of their decisions, as far as whether they’re going to evaluate this product, based on that information.

So marketing’s role has in fact I think increased dramatically since the internet has become a primary channel for information about products and services.”

How Do You Overcome Social Media Noise in B2B Marketing? – with KMI’s Matt Airhart

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Now that everyone from the biggest corporation to your local bakery has a social media presence, how do you stand out to those who matter most to you? Matt Airhart of KMI tells us how they did it.

“When we were first, people could find us but now there’s this huge underlying roar of social media information out there…how do you rise above that?”

Matt Airhart is the CEO of KMI. They create employee health and safety software solutions. To quote from their website, they create “web-based software solutions that help companies operate more sustainably, safely, and efficiently” and “enable companies to reduce injuries, increase the effectiveness of regulatory compliance initiatives, perform audits and inspections, manage Greenhouse Gas reporting, and initiate or improve corporate sustainability programs.”

“We were probably the first company in our industry on the social media bandwagon. We got a Twitter account and started doing multiple tweets per day, tried to keep them more or less on topic for what people looking for our software would find interesting. We set up a Facebook page and tried to develop some interesting content there and keep it relatively up to date. We started pushing Friend requests or Like requests on Facebook to all of our customers who we had a good relationship with, to all of our friends and family just to build the awareness as big and as quickly as possible. We also set up a LinkedIn account for the company.

We took a shotgun approach as I said, we covered all of our bases: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. We tried to keep the content fresh enough to have people driving traffic through it, have people recognize it as a place that was worth going. We didn’t have a cohesive strategy. We more just tried to make sure that we were doing it. And that made sense early on.

In the last 6 months what we’ve seen is everyone is doing it now, every bakery down the street has a Facebook account and is Tweeting. Now we’re trying to reassess and figure out, OK when we were first people could find us. But now there’s just this huge underlying roar of social media information out there and how do you rise above that and have it be effective, have it be useful?

So far we don’t have a perfect answer. What we’ve done so far is we are focusing on Tweeting less and having them be very thoughtful. So we’re not re-Tweeting something, we’re not Tweeting news that you can find in a hundred other places. We’re trying to build a brand of saying things that were developed internally, that make people think, and that make people appreciate the way we think.

That’s a challenge because it takes a while – I mean how hard is it to have a creative thought? And how hard is it to have a creative thought every day? It’s a challenge, but it’s a fun challenge too. The other thing we’re doing is forcing ourselves to focus more on LinkedIn because ultimately, with social media – the general, personal social media space being so full now, it’s hard to be seen, and it’s definitely hard to be seen by somebody who’s actually out looking for a business relationship, out looking for a software purchase or a consulting company. So we’re trying to focus a lot more on LinkedIn, and we’re finding that LinkedIn is becoming a more and more effective place.”

How is B2B Marketing Different for Cloud Software? – with Nulogy’s Jason Tham

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Jason Tham of Nulogy tells us how their cloud software makes it crucial that they continually delight their customers and the impact this has on their products and services.

“You’re our customer now, but what more can we add value to?”

Jason Tham is the CEO of Nulogy. They provide B2B software solutions for manufacturers. Or to be exact, they provide “Software solutions for contract packaging & manufacturing, kitting, assembly, POS, and co-pack of consumer goods.”

“Building the brand, for us, has been satisfying the customer. The inherent nature of software as a service and cloud computing is one that is a long relationship. So we can’t sign a customer, a few hundred thousand dollars, hope you’re happy, walk away. You know, it’s a long trickle, it’s a lot of small taps to open, and by definition we have to satisfy and keep in touch with them.

By definition they like keeping in touch with us because their business is evolving. So as they use us as a service, month to month, we have an account management team – technical account management team – that will field questions, also introduce new modules and new functionality that we have introduced in the marketplace, of which those modules they can certainly purchase, and add on to their current configuration. And that is a continuing sort of – well you’re our customer now, what more can we add value to? How else can we market to you? And that is a very organic way of doing it, but it’s proving effective.”

What Are the Benefits of B2B Social Marketing? – with Palomino System Innovations’ Markus Latzel

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Markus Latzel of Palomino System Innovations tells us how their community helps them build a better product and tell everyone about it.

“They help us get a fresh set of eyes on how we’re presenting our work.”

Markus is CEO of Palomino System Innovations. They have developed B2B software marketing tools for enterprises. Their solutions include the WebPal system, which is “a suite of products designed to centralize control, enhance communication, and facilitate workflow management.”

“One of the efforts that we’re making is to showcase our existing work as much as possible. And that is something where social marketing tools, and potentially external marketing groups, I feel, can actually help out in a very significant way. They see what we’re doing, we can explain to them the type of work that we’re doing, and they help us get a fresh set of eyes on how we’re presenting that work and are giving us feedback on how we can better position the messaging, how we can better position those cases, test cases, that we have previously developed.

Social marketing at this point, in the last year, we have started using for building a bit of a community around our software system, the WebPal content server, and using that community to gain feedback on the functionality of the system. The social marketing and the community is giving us exactly that. It’s allowing us to really understand some of the concerns of some of the users that are looking at our tools, and are saying hey, this is a great tool, I want to start using it, I just need one extra feature in order to make it work for my scenario. And social marketing in that sense is really to reach out to a community of developers out there. Other solution providers that can use that tool, provide us feedback on it and can again engage with Palomino in order to build more complex solutions on the WebPal Server platform.

That is something that is working out really well. We’re getting some of that feedback now, whereas before we were only working with clients directly.”

How is B2B Marketing Changing? – with The Mezzanine Group’s Lisa Shepherd

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

How do you choose where to spend your B2B marketing budget? What do you cut? What do you expand? Lisa Shepherd, CEO of The Mezzanine Group gives us her insights.

“We’ve seen skewing to the high end…and to the local.”

Lisa is CEO of The Mezzanine Group.

They provide marketing outsourcing and consulting to B2B companies and professional associations.

From their website:”The Mezzanine Group’s mission is to make our clients recognized leaders in what they do.”

Almost all my conversations here are with CEOs of B2B software companies, but Lisa is so knowledgeable about B2B marketing in general that I had to ask her to share her insights with us.

“I think one of the challenges for B2B companies, probably every company, and the CEOs and the marketing directors when they’re looking at how do we develop our marketing budget for next year and how do we make decisions about where are we going to allocate our dollars – there are so many new marketing tactics they can choose. Social media is the biggest one, lots of dollars shifting into that space. So if you’ve got a limited budget, and everybody does, figuring out which ones are you going to drop is an exercise they have to do.

The trend is definitely towards taking spend away from print. You know, print advertising, I think the jury’s out on what does it do, particularly for small to mid-sized B2B companies. The issues [is] that it’s very difficult to measure. That’s a challenge. How do we know what this is doing for us. Trade shows are incredibly expensive and what we’ve seen since the recession is a lot of, I think, skewing to the high end and to the low end – not low end, more local. So companies will choose to go to the big international shows that they really have to be at or they’ll choose to go to very local events where they can have good connections.

We’re even starting to see what are we going to spend on and what are we not going to spend on in digital tactics now. So, pay-per-click. Paid search as opposed to search engine optimization. A lot of companies are dropping or changing their budget on paid search. If they’re realizing you know, our ROI is really so much better on search engine optimization, we’re going to go for organic. We’re going to spend our money on optimizing our website, optimizing our experience, rather than paying for ads.

So there’s no easy way to make cuts. Every company has to figure out, based on what they’re trying to accomplish, which tactics are going to get them there.”

Does Your Company’s Culture Matter to Your B2B Customers? – with KMI’s Matt Airhart

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Matt Airhart, CEO of KMI, talks about how his team shares their company culture with their prospects and customers, and what this means to their customers and prospects.

“We find that the more our employees engage with our clients, the more our clients understand what KMI is all about, and see why we’re so much different than anybody else in our industry.”

Matt Airhart is the CEO of KMI. They create employee health and safety software solutions. To quote from their website, they create “web-based software solutions that help companies operate more sustainably, safely, and efficiently” and “enable companies to reduce injuries, increase the effectiveness of regulatory compliance initiatives, perform audits and inspections, manage Greenhouse Gas reporting, and initiate or improve corporate sustainability programs.”

“We have a company newsletter that we put out once a quarter, and we look at it differently than, I think, the newsletters that I get, certainly, by email from other companies. For us it’s more about engaging with our user community, with our clients, and also with our internal employees.

We try very hard to have a company, and a company culture, that’s very positive. The people who work at KMI don’t just work here because it’s a software company, they work here because it’s an opportunity to make the world a better place. We say right in our vision statement that what we’re trying to do is make the world safer for workers, more sustainable, less environmental impact from industry. We’re actually trying to help companies do that by using our software to make a difference…and we find that the more our employees engage with our clients, the more our clients understand what KMI is all about, and see why we’re so much different than anybody else in our industry.

So the newsletter is an opportunity for us to provide clients a snapshot into what it’s like in KMI on a day to day basis. So rather than have it be, you know, links to industry articles or technical information that they can already get from our website or anywhere else, for us the newsletter is at least 50% geared toward what our employees are doing, so the volunteer work that they’ve done, either individually, or we’ve done, you know, we’ll take a day off as a company, go plant trees or go clean up a park…

We really try to give our clients an opportunity to get to know us better, at least once a quarter. Anybody who is a user of ours is basically automatically signed up for it. I think our unsubscribe rate is next to zero, so it’s obviously well-suited for that group.

We also send it to people that we consider to be leads, and for us, we’re not a sales heavy organization, we’re not cold-calling people trying to force our solution down their throats. For us it’s more about getting the message out through creative marketing so we want people who are looking for a software system to help them make a difference, to help them be safer and more sustainable.

We want them to find us, and then we want them to learn as much about us as possible, and have us learn about them, and then determine that it’s a good fit. That they do actually have the same goals as we’ve designed our software for and as what we in the company want to do.

So those people, the leads we have are generally a little bit better known than in a traditional cold-calling or outbound marketing organization. So we’ll typically sign them up for the newsletters as well. Again, with the understanding that the newsletter is not really designed to sell, explicitly, but because that we think that our culture and our passion for what we do and the personality of our team members is a big selling point for us, we want our leads to see that, to recognize early on that we’re a different kind of company.”