Author: Dave J.

So on Tuesday, I posted a prediction that the next challenge for B2B marketing is integration and tools. Here’s an example:

George Fischer Signet has built a Flash web app System Selection Tool that lets engineers select sensors and instrumentation for their application.

This is simply an automated ‘selection wizard’ that helps confirm you’ve selected the right sensor, then lets you configure it with the correct connectors and outputs. As you select choices in the wizard, the application grays-out those sensors that don’t meet your requirement. Then you add the parts to a virtual order sheet.

It’s Flash, it’s not perfect, but it gets the job done the way a static web page or shopping cart can’t. They also have a nice B2B 1.0 application library that I’ll bet most B2B sites don’t have (mine is pretty lame compared to theirs).

I’ll restate myself from the other day: The bar is being raised!

MarketingVOX:

“There is a very real risk that B2B companies with an online focus limited to marketing via search engine or display advertising will lose out to 2.0-savvy companies committed to internet-enabling everything throughout their organization.”

This final comment comes almost out of nowhere in the article: B2B Putting Money Where The Market Is, but I think it might be prophetic.

Over the years I’ve posted here about bogus B2B telemarketing scams. I even got contacted by a Canadian Mountie once. Looks like another kingpin is going down!

The Caffeine Marketing Blog pointed me to this news: Ontario man sentenced to more than 12 years in prison in telemarketing scam:

“Terrence Croteau, 32, of Welland, Ont., pleaded guilty in May to 20 counts of mail fraud, four counts of wire fraud and a telemarketing-conspiracy charge….

Authorities say that between 2000 and June 2004, Croteau’s employees called businesses, charities, churches, sheriff’s offices and others, offering for as much as $800 to include them in business directory listings, which ultimately were bogus.

Croteau’s employees pretended they were legitimately renewing an existing listing or said they were confirming the business’ correct address to get employees to say the word “yes” on tape.”

Sound familiar to some of you?

Sometimes it seemed as if the government doesn’t really care about these B2B scams because they are white-collar, per-incident value is low, and, of course the difficulty in hunting down the bad guys. That may still be true, its just that Croteau got greedy (the article mentions foot-high phone bills), making him an easier target.

Thank you to the US government for pinning this guy down!

ThomasNet recently published a new white paper titled Industrial Marketing Online with the much more interesting sub-title of “Getting industrial buyers and sellers on the same page”.

One of my readers recommended it. There is good stuff inside. You can download it here. (There is another interesting report there called Supplier Survival in the Information Age that I may review in the future.)

Here are some highlights:

Where buyers first look when researching a new need:

• Search engine (23%)
• Known supplier offline (19%)
• Industrial destination site (17%)
• Known supplier website (11%)

The next data set is where the reality-check of the sub-title comes in…where sellers are ‘meeting the market’ and where the buyers are looking.

The big disparities here are search engines and destination sites.

The search category is probably a bit erroneous because I would assume that organic listings in search engines may be enough without any effort on the marketer. But this data also means that nearly half of industrial marketers aren’t trying to maximize their value where 83% of their prospects will be.

The industrial destination site category is where ThomasNet falls. And these are apparently used more than some folks would think. How they are being used would be an interesting follow-up question.

Overall, the white paper reports that buyers can spend an average of eight hours of research online before making a purchase. Did you get that? Eight hours!!!

The last set of data in the report jabs a well-deserved elbow in the ribs of us B2B marketers: Buyers are looking for, but not finding, the following information on our websites:

• Pricing
• Tech support details
• Shipping
• Ordering online

I could write a post about each of these, but suffice it to say that these are big challenges that may not be practical. The paper acknowledges this, but tells us that the potential customers would be quite grateful if this information were online, as they could remain anonymous. That is half of why this information is NOT online. We want them to call us.

However this data aligns with your marketing methods, I think it is a helpful snapshot for how the buyers are behaving and what they expect. When planning for 2007, I’d keep this information in mind!

I’ve been waiting for Firefox to cross an imaginary line. October 2006 was it:

10.9% of visitors to my company’s site were using Firefox, according to Google Analytics.

When I first posted for January 2005, my stats were at 7.7%. That was using log files which today shows 14.9%. Adoption is slow.

The new Firefox is great for automatic spell check alone. Beats Blogger’s spell check that still doesn’t recognize the words blog and Google. Really!

(BTW: already 2% of visitors using IE were using version 7, while 4.5% of Firefox users were using version 2)

(YAD= Yet Another Directory)
John Blossom, in his excellent marketing/publishing/communications news blog, lets us know about a new B2B search/directory called Zibb. His review reveals that Zibb was created by Reed Business Publishing to make their trade pubs’ contents easily available on the web, but was expanded to include much more information. “The result is a portal that provides content from leading B2B trade publications as well as product and company content from KellySearch and content from weblogs and Web sites”, John summarizes.

Read more from John: Zibb Jab: Business Search Engines Take on Google and Enterprise Aggregators

Okay, Zibb may not technically qualify as YAD because it is more than a directory. But, like John, I see potential and flaws. Of course, the biggest problem for YADs is getting users. InfoCommerce recently pointed to SourceTool.com (a previously reviewed YAD) as being successful, while Alexa shows that after initial hype, the site traffic has dropped way off.

I like to be a master of my computer toolbox. So I post a link to the article Give your résumé a face lift at LifeClever (found via LifeHacker.org) simply because it is a good lesson in taking a typical Word document and making it look professional. The techniques offered here are great for product spec sheets, feature lists, and other documents that normally wouldn’t be given much attention.

“You can improve almost all résumés with four steps:

1. Pick a better typeface
2. Remove extra indentations
3. Make it easy to skim
4. Apply typographic detailing”

(At the end, he posts the final Word file, which makes a great style template if you are working on a resume.)

Just after I finished the previous post, I found this slam against sales managers, pondering why the average tenure of a sales manager is 19 months:

“Think about this: The sales department of most organizations lags other departments in the areas of compliance in documented processes (think GAAP for accounting and ISO 9000 for manufacturing), performance measurement, technology support, and in many cases the employment of best practices.”

So, if you take the fact from part one that salespeople have the wrong approach to making sales, this part puts the blame on the sales manager.

My take: You try to be the sales manager to make and enforce new rules/processes for an entrenched sales force and see if your tenue is longer or shorter than 19 months!

I really enjoy the SalesDog weekly newsletter. The authors vary but the quality is the same. Even so, with information being so free and all these days, today’s piece, High-Tech Selling: Is It Really That Difficult?, seemed especially unique and powerful. Take a peek:

“3. Premature selling efforts leave a lasting negative impression, and dramatically reduce the odds of ever doing business with that prospect.

‘Forced’ appointments and communications result in closed sales less than 14 percent of the time. When feeling pressured, prospects who do not commit to doing business on the first visit are even less likely to ever buy. The probability of ever getting the sale drops to five percent.”

The author, Jacques Werth, has a book and (surprise) consulting service for his sales approach, called High Probability Selling. He wraps up his article with this rip:

“High-tech salespeople who are strong on product knowledge and weak on the one-to-one sales process help perpetuate the myth that high-tech sales is difficult. The truth is that selling high-tech products and services is easy when an effective selling process is utilized with each and every individual involved in the buying decision.”

Wow, salespeople strong on product knowledge make high-tech sales look difficult??? In B2B, haven’t we all assumed that product knowledge is #1 for an effective salesperson? Have we been that stupid?

Here’s an interesting brainstorm from Dana VanDen Heuvel on how Web 2.0 is enabling Sales 2.0. Not everything applies to every situation, but certainly these are creeping into our (pro-active) salespeoples’ lives.

“Areas affected by Sales 2.0:
– Voice communications (VOIP, cell, Skype)
– Sales rep availability (always on)
– Conference calling (free)
– Sales force automation (web based)
– Customer communication (blogging, email)
– Customer community (wiki, jotspot)
– Project management
– Messaging
– email (mobile)
– IM (in office, sidekick, etc)
– Pre-call planning / customer research
– Collaboration (internal blogs, wikis, IM)
– Collateral (real time, PDF, POD (print on demand)
– Document authoring (web document authoring)”

The above is just one section of a long post of ideas and observations. And if this is how our salespeople are going to be selling, what does Marketing 2.0 look like? Hmmm.

Read more: Starting the conversation on Sales 2.0