What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

A friend of mine is a HUGE fan, of many things, but mostly movies and music – especially the stars and musicians. And he always has a knack for bumping into famous people on the street – I love when he shares pictures of his latest impromptu meet-and-greet. We jokingly call him ‘Superfan Graham’ – and it is the PERFECT nickname for him!

I’ve compared B2B customers and leads to fans before, and I’m doing it again today… because ultimately, I believe that’s what they are!

Give this song by the Band (RIP Robbie Robertson) a listen as we see what the experts are saying this week.

Finding Your B2B Fans

Would you consider your largest customer a ‘fan’? Do you even understand who your biggest fans are?

One challenge remains common for businesses of any size, sector, or location: building a successful sales strategy. If your sales team is struggling to connect with your customers, an ideal customer profile (ICP) just might be the missing ingredient. Our friends from breadcrumbs.io show how having an ICP is crucial for businesses and provide a guide to building one, if you haven’t already.

If you do it right, you’ll reap the benefits:

1. Shortened sales cycle
2. Personalized marketing
3. Increased customer lifetime value (CLV)
4. Improved account-based marketing

Maybe you already have an established ICP. But things change fast! If you’re not seeing these benefits, use this guide to revisit it (spoiler: ‘Review and Revise’ is the last step). You may find something you missed!

Connecting with Your Superfans

I recently read about ‘superfans’ and have seen data from the likes of Luminate and Goldman Sachs looking at the percentage of fans who qualify for that specific term. Something grates on me about institutions attempting to quantify the term, as if to identify a new market segment and tell everyone we need to focus on that now.

The reality, of course, is that these fans have always been there! If you’re only now learning about superfans and why you should focus on them more, well, you’re really, really late to the party. The best fan relationship is one in which an artist/brand is making serious money and the fans themselves are absolutely happy to be spending their money on that artist or brand.

People spending money on you and your work is not inherently a gouge. It can be (Taylor Swift’s eight Folklore album covers???), but the best practitioners effectively see fans throwing money at them and loving every second of it. This, to me anyway, is just entrepreneurialism, or good business, and might be something we’re not seeing enough of in music.

Some 14 years later, I’d argue Mike Masnick’s equation about the fan relationship and monetizing it still rings true:

connect with fans + reason to buy = $$$

Wow – sounds a lot like B2B, doesn’t it?

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello!

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Who Are Your B2B Superfans? appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

Do you remember when…?

Many conversations start this way – especially when reconnecting with past friends or colleagues. And as they dig up memories, those conversations are often emotionally driven. Don’t you wish you could bottle that response? And don’t you wish your customers or employees had that when engaging with your brand?

Let’s get back to this song by the Beatles as we see what the experts are saying this week…

Get Back to Your Best Leads

I was asked to speak at #dreamforce a few years back with the folks at Pardot and data.com. We had a great time discussing marketing strategies for small businesses. In particular, we focused on what we called ‘recommended accounts’ and leveraging data to develop more effective campaigns.

How often do you look at your leads and opportunities and analyze the best accounts to target? Look at your past ‘best’ leads (and this can be defined in a number of ways) and leverage data to develop targeted accounts – in other words, who were your best leads and who else is like them?

Sure, this should be part of your ABM strategy – something you leverage when developing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). But how can you most efficiently use data (and automation) to develop these high-value target account lists? Sometimes getting back to basics and focusing on those best targets can help you hit your numbers!

And if you are interested, here (and here) is some of the content from those presentations with Pardot and Salesforce.

Get Back to Your Personal Playlist

When Paul McCartney wrote “Get Back,” he probably never guessed how useful the song could one day be for music therapists.

We’ve discussed the importance of music with folks that suffer from dementia before, and recent research continues to show how music engages the brain in ways that are different from anything else. Music with personal connections seems to show high levels of engagement, especially with older adults.

Do you listen to music at work? Music’s ability to calm is well-documented, but what’s less known is how and to what extent music can help improve memory, cognition, and executive function.

Are there any ways you can leverage those emotional responses in your relationships with your customers? What about your employees? How can you get back to where you once belonged and be their priority?

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Go Back to Your Sales Basics appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

I started WDBMD back in March of 2020. The plan was to share how sales and marketing leaders were dealing with our new and adjusted reality, and help us get through it by providing inspiration and tactical strategies.

As we approach the end of 2021, some of us feel like we’re living again, and others are still looking to feel like themselves again… So give this song from fellow Canadian icons Blue Rodeo a listen with me as we see what the experts are saying this week…

Tips for Pivoting B2B Businesses

Every company going through a period of upheaval is likely to require a swift, effective marketing strategy overhaul. But how will that affect your customer base? Will they appreciate the change? Or perhaps they’re not ready yet? According to Demand Gen Report, all of us fall into one of these four categories:

1. Sameness
2. Sameness with Exception
3. Sameness with Exception and Difference
4. Difference

Ultimately, the key is to match your marketing to your pivot, ensuring you give your newly refreshed business the best chance to deliver messaging that sticks. Marketing personas and ICPs are important, as they can help guide your marketing team in their communications.

Most pivots will have some element that endures the upheaval. As YOU pivot, will you maintain your traditional and current customer base? If you know what’s passing you by, then perhaps by maintaining a key element, you can use traditional customers to drive change in other areas where the pivot is needed!

Boy Bands and Tech Breakthroughs

You may have heard that Mike Nesmith of the Monkees died this past week. (If you’ve never seen an episode of the show, I suggest you check it out to see how early boy bands compare to today’s outfits!) There have been many articles about him since his death, and Alan Cross does a great job of outlining some of the contributions this man made to music and technology… and some might surprise you!

• He was the ‘real’ musician in the band, writing many of their songs
• He was instrumental in the rise of the music video, being one of the first to create experimental video clips for his songs
• He was the heir to his mother’s Liquid Paper fortune – if you don’t know what that is, google it!
• He was responsible for The Tragically Hip’s name (read the article for the full story!)

Why does this matter? Other than the coolness of the story, Mike’s life and accomplishments show how music, technology, and business can intersect. Perhaps your business has some legacy lines of business that can help fund other new technology initiatives?

I firmly believe there are lessons from music that apply to business and technology. The moments of magic are short, but if you keep an eye out, you may find ways to apply them to B2B!

That’s why I’ve been writing these weekly communications, and why I hope you’ll continue to read, enjoy, and share your own thoughts and ideas!

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post The B2B Pivot and… Boy Bands? appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

Last week was Leo Fender’s birthday (he would have been 112!). He’s known for bringing the first solid body electric guitars to the world way back in the 1950s! The guitar he is most famous for, the Fender Stratocaster, became the favourite for many rock musicians including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore. Would they have written the same music with different instruments? Who knows.

Give this song a listen with me as we see what the experts are saying this week. Every once in a while we just need to listen to a tune about space travel and groovy music, right? Not to mention some smokin’ riffs and vocals!

Fluke or Genius?

Is your product or solution’s success a fluke or a result of genius? Leo Fender is hailed by many to be a genius. However, is it possible that his successes were merely a fluke?

Sure, he was an off-the-wall inventor, but he was neither an engineer nor a guitar player. Some might say that the success of his two most iconic guitars (Telecaster and Stratocaster) was a mere fluke – a lot of luck on Venus.

Others were working on solid body electric guitars when Fender started. Many of his design concepts came from his employees’ feedback or suggestions from working musicians. And initial response to his guitar design was lacklustre.

But he was an obsessive thinker/worker – and he listened to what people wanted and took customer feedback very seriously. He trusted the input of people with talent (he met all the groovy people!), so he surrounded himself with them. Sure, he got a lot wrong at first, but failure is usually found on the path to success. So he made adjustments – and the fact that he had many ‘hits’ (guitars, basses, amplifiers) indicates that he had repeatable success – and that’s no fluke!

Regardless of whether you subscribe to methodologies like The Lean Startup, the importance of customer feedback and building something people want is paramount to success. And when the products we’re bringing to market are needed, it sure is easier for sales and marketing to ensure some Fender-style repeatable success.

The Art of the Mixtape

As a kid, I would pretend to be a DJ. I would listen to my trusty radio/cassette player, wait for those new songs I loved and hit record (sometimes missing the intro)… then I would create tapes of these songs and mix them together. It was so much work! The analog world was painstaking compared to today’s digital.

How about you? Do you remember the mixtape? They weren’t just a collection of songs – they were a statement. You’d make them for your own enjoyment, or to give to others. And great mixtapes had a life of their own – endlessly copied and shared among your friends!

There’s a new documentary on mixtapes coming out this week that you might appreciate, called Analog Love. Watching the trailer made me think about how things have changed in the B2B world. As vendors, we used to provide content to buyers. We’d provide sales collateral, whitepapers, etc. and the buyer relied on the vendor to provide information for their decision. But now the buyer is in control. Before even speaking to a vendor the buyer has already consumed a ton of content and seen reviews of the vendor’s product.

As B2B marketers – is it our job to create the mixtape for our buyers and provide the right mix of content for them? Or do we simply provide the ‘tracks’ and let them create their own mixtape? Perhaps it depends on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and your solution – but in today’s digital world, it’s so easy to consume content, let’s keep on (space) truckin’, and not rely on our own fluke to achieve success!

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post The Mixtape Path to Success appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What Do B2B Marketers Do Now? is an ongoing email. Join the mailing list to be the first to receive these weekly insights!

We’ve passed a few annual milestones recently – spring’s arrival, the end of Q1, first 100 days, and of course: the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 officially being declared a pandemic. As I look at the rest of the year, it’s got me wondering – have we seen the end of the B2B world as we know it?

Give this R.E.M. song a listen as we see what the experts are saying this week:

HubSpot Data Update – Q1 2021

It’s that time again! Let’s look at the HubSpot March 2021 data and see how sales and marketing activities are trending against the benchmark:

• Deals created continued to increase – now up 34%!
• Closed deals increased to 13% – the highest in Q1
• Sales email sends further increased too, but responses remained 30% below
• Marketing email sends remained comfortably at 30% over, with open rates around 11% over

Oddly enough, marketing emails seem to be proving effective and have strong open rates, but the same can’t be said for sales emails. Is it the poor quality of sales emails? Are sales reps relying too much on email? Are messages simply not targeted or relevant? Check this out:

• Sales calls had a big (72%) increase over benchmark
• Active conversation interactions were at 23% over
• Contact growth was also impressive – 32% over

Last month’s data gives us a lot to digest. It seems to prove that success for sales is in conversations – and cutting through all of the email ‘noise’ out there. Seems like the activity for sales calls has increased, so perhaps the lack of sales email response is just showing how a combination of both sales email AND sales call is necessary to be effective – a true multi-channel approach.

This multi-touch/multi-channel approach is even more important in an ABM strategy. It’s imperative to use multiple touches for your demand/buying units – something I discussed at length with Alisa from Forrester/SiriusDecisions in our recent webinar. It’s all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time! Right? Right!

It’s Okay to Let People Think You Suck

I wouldn’t recommend you watch Lee Abrams’ video unless you are having trouble sleeping. But if you do, you’ll learn a lot about your audience.

Abrams helped create FM radio when FM radio mattered, and his hands guided music in the early days of SiriusXM. More recently, he shared a video that won’t win awards for production or drama but does a particularly good job of explaining audiences and how they react to and consume music and other media. Some interesting info, including my key takeaway – to succeed, you need to pick a single fan group to appeal to and everyone else needs to think you suck.

Bob Lefsetz says this isn’t new… this is just ‘marketing in general.’ I agree. As smart marketers we should all know this. We spend so much time talking about Ideal Customer Profiles, Relative Targeting, TAM/SAM/SOM – but I think sometimes we still try to be everything to everyone.

Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline? I hope not – let’s really focus our effort on our ideal customer profile/target market and the viewpoint of this audience. Maybe our work or offer doesn’t need to repel all other groups – but we should certainly not be concerned if they DO think we suck. Just focus on the right target, the right offer, and the right message, and we’ll all feel fine!

As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello.

Looking forward,
Rick

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post The Art of Letting People Think You Suck appeared first on Virtual Causeway.