One of my favorite thought leaders and {grow} community members is John Bottom, a director at the Base One marketing agency in London.  John and I have had an on-going dialogue about the evolution of socal media and one of his recent comments caught my attention:

The people benefiting most from Twitter right now are obviously in the information businesses.  We are all marketers here and we are sharing views and ideas because that’s what we ultimately sell. If you’re selling something more physical, you need to first create the information-surround market (or at least understand the information-surround market) before you can start to get benefit from Twitter and other social media platforms.

What I mean is that, if you sell power tools, you rely on people talking about power tools online before Twitter starts to have relevance to you – and these people are taking longer to embrace Twitter than the rest of us, because our benefits are more immediate. That doesn’t mean it won’t come, but it makes it harder for us to convince them at those marketing meetings.

In this simple statement John sums up one of the biggest obstacles facing B2B marketers.

As I look at the social media landscape, at least for small and medium businesses, he appears to be correct … at least based in my own experience.  I think there are a couple of important business implications from this simple observation:

1) About 75% of Fortune 100 companies are actively involved in social media. Some of them (Boeing, GE) are industrial B2B’s.  Small businesses can learn from them to see how their brand-builidng online strategies might parallel their own.

2) This emphasizes the importance of considering social media as just one part of an overall marketing strategy.

3) It also implies the importance of doing a customer audit as part of that strategy development.  Are your customers online? If so, where?  If not, why not?  Don’t spend money in this area if the customers aren’t there.

4) One key to a successful marketing strategy is finding meaningful points of differentiation. This does not necessarily have to be in the product or service itself. It can be in HOW the goods are marketed and sold. So if competitors are not using the social web as a marketing channel and your customers are there, this can be a wonderful opportunity.

Of course this is all predicated on an assumption that B2B customers will eventually pick up on social media. I’m wondering what the timeframe will be … I have to tell you I still see a lot of blank stares at meetings with industrial clients!  What do you think about this?  Will we see a day when a larger diversity of products will benefit from the social web?

At one point in my career, I had one of the largest (if not THE largest!) sales positions in the world. I had just one customer and they bought more than US$1.5 billion of goods and services from my company every year.  That’s what I call Extreme B2B. Long sales cycle. High stakes. Extraordinary power in the hands of the buyer.

Is there a place for social media marketing even in “Extreme B2B?” Before applying any tactic like social media — in any situation — you first need to consider the strategy. In my position, there were four strategies I employed to keep and grow this mega-customer:

Apply high-touch throughout the organization. With a customer that large, you can imagine that operations were dispersed throughout the world. So my contacts were broad … and they were also deep – from the CEO to the machine operator on the floor, from Purchasing to R&D. There were dozens of people who influenced the purchasing decision and I had to earn trust with all of them! It was also a challenge connecting all the communication synapses between the two companies: executive, manufacturing, R&D, etc.

Raise switching costs through service innovations. Not only did I want to grow my business at this customer, I wanted to do it at the most profitable plant locations. To achieve this, I wanted to provide some extraordinary service that would make it painful for the plant to switch to a competitor. For example, at our most profitable customer location, we designed a special truck that could haul away their waste material after delivering a shipment of finished product, saving them waste hauling fees. Those trucks made us a lot of money!

Improve profitability through incremental cost savings. With an account that large, the purchasing power is extreme and that keeps margins low. It was always a challenge to find small ways to save money, especially if it also provided a win for the customer. With revenues that large, even an improvement of a fraction of a cent per unit could have a dramatic impact on profitability.

Listen better, act faster. Listening to my customer was serious business. We actually conducted formal “listen to the customer” visits using trained facilitators. Information from these visits, conducted throughout the world, was carefully compiled, thoroughly analyzed and used to create our marketing and R&D plans.

In summary, my strategy was: Be accessible, innovate through service, lower costs, and listen effectively. Hmmm … doesn’t that sound like a PERFECT business case for social media applications? Even in a case of extreme B2B there are likely applications for these new tools, right?

Yes … and no. I’m sure you can think of many great social web applications to support these strategies, but that doesn’t mean that B2B companies will necessarily act on them. Why not?

Even with a strong business case, there may be very good reasons why a B2B company should reject social media marketing (gasp!). More on that in the next post!

a) If you don’t know if this trend is applicable to you (hint: it probably is), it’s important to find out! Tap into your existing data to discover core users and trends. If you’re not a data person, I know two people who can do this type of analysis quickly and affordably. Drop me a note or call me and let me know if you need a reference.

b) Word of mouth is 4X more effective than personal selling and 7X more effective than most types of traditional advertising. If your fanatics are driving sales better than any marketing effort you could dream of, what are you doing to make it easy for them? Wouldn’t fanatic-focused marketing be the most effective ad dollars you can spend?

c) Surround your 4 percent with the tools to help them recruit others to your brand. Ideas – special deals, gifts, logo-clothes, programs available for them to pass on to friends.

d) These people want to give back to your brand. How do you engage them, encourage them, and listen to them in a special and personalized way? Ideas: Invite them to special one-on-one sessions with company employees and executives; develop personal portal websites where they can submit ideas, stories, photos; feature them in your ads and promotions.

e) If you are building your brand with a limited budget, don’t focus your marketing dollars on the masses. Start small with your core fanatics.

f) Now that you have identified and nurtured your core 4 percent, how do you replicate them? Do a simple profiling exercise. Click here for a previous article that will give you ideas on how to do this quickly.

g) Here’s the most important point of all – LISTEN to them. These people are your leading indicators of customer satisfaction and a potentially powerful source of innovation who WANT to help you! Dig deep. Spend time with these people! Show them the love!

Illustration: Cheryy8_15

There are many ways to be prospect-centric, but nurturing leads is one of my favorites. If this a concept that is new to you, read on to understand why this is something you want to consider and what steps you can take to get started.

In general, I think too many marketers are focused on getting proficient at generating leads. Instead, I challenge you to focus your attention on what happens to those leads after the initial contact.

Consider the typical scenario: someone registers on your site when they download a white paper or a webcast, and the leads are then collected into CRM system. Typically, there are a few common approaches to following up with the leads:

• The prospect receives an automatically-generated email thanking them for their download and possibly providing links to additional material a user would find interesting.
• Leads are passed to sales, and they may follow up on a few, but if they don’t get a positive response (which is likely as most people who read a white paper or watch a webcast are not sales-ready), they ignore the rest and believe that what marketing is producing is “junk.”
• Telemarketing contacts individuals to follow up, but, unless you get someone at the exact time the want to buy, they’re probably not going to have much luck.
• Leads sit in a database in case you want to reach out to them at some point.

A much better approach is to nurture your leads, which means having a process in place to continually provide touch points to your prospect to move them along the path to purchase (Note: you need to get the customer’s approval to send them additional emails).

There are ways you can make your nurturing programs very sophisticated and use tools to help you automate the process, but you can also start simply. Making a few changes at a time will continually improve your organization’s interactions with prospects; small steps OK! If you are new to lead nurturing, I suggest this two-step approach:

Step 1: Map out your typical buying process and the key people involved in the purchase decision. Then, determine what content would be useful for each person at each stage of the buying cycle, filling in gaps by creating content to use for each person at each stage. (It all comes back to really understanding your prospects.)

Step 2: Create the actual nurturing program, which includes deciding how long you want to communicate with your prospect (ideally, it should be as long as the typical buying process) and developing the customer touch points throughout the process (e.g. emails, direct mail, possible phone calls, etc). In short, you want to continually provide your prospects with targeted content that moves them through the buying process and keeps you top of mind.

Want to learn more?

There is a ton of information available on lead nurturing, but here are a few of my favorite posts on the subject to help you get started (I’d recommend all of these blogs as well):

Unleash Your House Database with Lead Nurturing (Marketo)

Detecting Buyer Roles in B2B Marketing (Digital Body Language by Steve Woods)

Payoff for B2B Content Marketing is Movement (Marketing Interactions by Ardath Albee)

Losing Touch with Leads? 7 Suggestions for Nurturing Programs (This is a post I wrote for my blog, Savvy B2B Marketing)

This is a picture of me building business relationships in Italy during World Cup. Well sort of.

Let me relate three quick stories that took place in the last 24 hours:

• Yesterday morning, I went to a networking meeting and recognized somebody from his Twitter picture — a fellow I had followed for several months. Even though I had never spoken to this person before, he greeted me like an old friend, asking me about a common interest I had discussed on my tweets.
• In the afternoon, I had a conference call with a potential customer from California. She had read some of my posts on Linked-in forums and was interested enough to go to my website (where she read some of my longer articles) and my blog. Based on my web and social media content alone, she was convinced I was the right marketing “voice” for her company and offered me a significant new business opportunity.
• In the afternoon I received a call off my website. This young entrepreneur had also gotten to know me through Linked-in discussion boards and he referred to recent blog articles. We agreed to meet next week and discuss a new business engagement.

I’m not telling these tales to demonstrate my good fortune on this particular day. I’m providing examples of how a social media strategy can be used to attract potential customers and “pre-populate” business relationships.

What do I mean by this? In normal business relationships, it might take weeks or months of discussions and meetings for a new potential client to know and trust you. Through original web-based content and participation in forums related to my profession, these nice people felt they had a personal relationship with me — before they even made a single phone call.

In effect, I was able to pre-populate the business relationship with my life, talents, hobbies, opinions –and probably a few flaws — to significantly expedite the sales cycle.

Here’s an important point. In NONE of these cases did I actually try to sell something to somebody. One pundit likened social media to a dinner party. If you stand there and simply talk about yourself and your product, people will quickly try to get away from you. But if you offer something of interest, they’ll listen, seek you out, and perhaps become a new friend.

What are your experiences with this topic? Does it make sense to you? How is pre-populating sales leads relevant to your business situation?