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Subscribe in a readerB2B Email Marketing Best Practices eBook
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Email Marketing | August 28th, 2009
Our new eBook:
- Features more than 130 best practices, strategies, and tips for B2B email marketing
Focuses on the most popular type of B2B email marketing—content marketing, such as email newsletters
Goes beyond the email itself, discussing how to integrate and leverage social media, web analytics, and search engine optimization
Covers general email marketing issues, as well as those specific to B2B marketing
Hot off the press, our new, 58-page eBook is a comprehensive guide to improving your B2B email marketing practices. We put this book together to help our clients and friends improve the results of email marketing to other businesses. (more…)
2009 Big List of B2B Marketing and Sales Blogs
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Social Media | August 28th, 2009
With all the micro-blogging, I’ve often wondered whether the number of bloggers who actually create original, substantial content is decreasing. Don’t get me wrong, you can create meaningful thought in 140 characters, but it’s a lot easier to write 140 characters (no matter how well crafted) than it is to consistently create original content for a blog. And that ease may have driven many to abandon blogging or not even consider blogging when there is a relatively easy way to start “blogging” on Twitter.
It’s been more than two years since anyone had tried to pull together a list of B2B marketing and sales blogs. Jon Miller of Marketo did it in early 2007. When we reviewed that list, we found a lot of those blogs were no longer active.
So we went searching…
And we found some really great B2B blogs. More than 200 of them. Hats off to all who made the list! Thanks for your continuing contribution. (more…)
B2B Selling. It’s About Relationships, Right?
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Selling | August 17th, 2009
In short, no.
Growing your existing business with a particular customer or client may very well be about cultivating the relationship, but getting customers in the first place is not. While relationships with referral sources can lead to referrals, relationships with prospects will often only create a sale if everything else is equal.
Consider the following scenario. A prospect you would really like to land is doing business with another company like yours. Common wisdom suggests the first thing to do is establish a relationship with the prospect. Let him get to know your company. Get some face time. Build some trust. Then, you’ll get an opportunity to quote or present a proposal.
So you send him something. You have a telephone conversation. Engage in social media activities. Get a meeting. Have lunch. Take him golfing.
Then, after several months, you get the opportunity to make a presentation. The presentation goes well, and you feel you have established a rapport with the prospect. Afterwards, you keep in contact with the prospect, periodically calling him or sending him things to show you’re thinking of him and his business.
Finally, after about six or eight months, the prospect gives you the chance to quote on something.
This is your big chance! If you do well here, you not only have a shot at getting this sale, but also the rest of his business. You and your team spend countless hours responding to the RFQ or RFP. You check the specifications. You identify areas where you can save them money. You carefully craft responses to their questions. Several internal meetings are devoted to establishing the right pricing and estimates. Then you send it off, go have a beer with your tired team, and hope.
Later you learn that you didn’t get the job. The prospect is cordial. He sincerely thanks you for your time and says you did fine, but they chose to go with their existing provider. You ask some questions to help you understand why they chose not to go with you. The prospect gives you some feedback and assures you you’ll get another chance.
A few months pass and, sure enough, there’s another opportunity. Using what you learned, you go through the same process again. This time, however, you sharpen your pencil a bit more. You say, “Let’s just get the job. Once they work with us, they’ll see how we’re different, and we’ll do lots more work with them.”
Finally after a few more proposals, you get the good news. You got the job! Quick. Marshall the resources. Put the team together. Make sure we do a great job—and make sure we over serve them so there’s no way they’ll go back to their old provider.
The job goes well, great even—from your perspective. And sure enough, you get the opportunity to propose on the next opportunity—along with a host of competitors.
What Happened???
What happened is simply all too common. (more…)
