You might be wondering how I am going to begin to tie the B2B sales cycle and brand loyalty together. Well, the story starts with a very poor customer service experience I had the other day with a third party merchant and how it affected my brand loyalty overall with the discount company that I purchased the deal from–and the third party of course.

But bigger picture, I want to talk about how each step of the purchase process – from marketing to attention to conversion to delivery is as important as the last, and how missing one step can ruin the entire experience!

Every single step in the B2B sales cycle is crucial to the overall success of the product/service offered and brand loyalty. Let’s dive into the pieces that make up the B2B sales cycle to determine their relevance in a conversion and how one phase affects the other… a domino effect if you will.

The B2B sales cycle is made up of the following steps:

1.  Marketing

Many companies largest budget category is marketing, therefore a B2B – or a B2B2C –  company will want to invest the proper amount on marketing and make sure that their budget is very well spent. Getting the right message in in front of your prospects is key to raising…

2.  Attention

Be sure that your marketing effectively communicates the value and benefit of your product/service to capture your prospects’ attention in a productive manner. Failing to capture the target markets’ attention, means marketing dollars wasted. But if you hit the sweet spot, where your marketing attracts attention that prompts engagement, you can nurture and grow that attention into…

3.  Conversion

Once you are able to get the attention of the target market, you then need to focus on converting that lead to a business transaction. Without the proper lead nurturing/marketing automation and follow-up, closing a deal becomes almost impossible. Keep in mind that marketing and sales are equally important in the sales cycle and there needs to be alignment between who the marketing department targets and the quality of the leads that the sales department targets. When the process works well, your conversion then leads to…

4.  Delivery

The job doesn’t stop at the conversion phase of the cycle. The delivery phase is the last and most important piece that ties it all together. Whether it be a product or service, the delivery of it must be efficient, consistent, easily accessible and of high quality, but most importantly, exactly what you promised. If your Unique Value Proposition doesn’t line up to what you’ve promised, you quickly lose customers trust, respect, brand loyalty, and ultimately, their future business!

And that’s what happened to me – I traveled the sales cycle smoothly through the first three steps, but when it came time for delivery, everything fell apart and it left a bad taste in my mouth. All of those marketing dollars and lead capture efforts wasted, because I’ll never go back.

Let’s face it, in this economy brand loyalty isn’t an option, it is a necessity. Therefore, make sure your B2B sales cycle is solid! Do you need help building your ladder to B2B sales cycle success? Give us a call at Canyon today!

image credit: Spoken Communications

Nails scratching across a chalkboard…People chewing with their mouths open… Toothpaste remnants in the bathroom sink…People with no manners… Last but not least, SPELLING and GRAMMAR ERRORS!

Can you tell which pet peeve I feel very strongly about?! Ding, ding ding…spelling and grammar errors take the cake!

Growing up I always considered myself pretty good at spelling and grammar, and still do to this day. And, after being in the marketing industry for almost seven years now, I’ve come to realize how important this skill has helped me out, especially when proofreading.

Proofreading is essential when it comes to marketing. The last thing you want to do is send your client a piece that has a spelling error, missing logo, etc. So, over the years, I’ve developed many proofreading techniques that have helped me out immensely and I’m hoping can help others, too.

K-Tips:

• Print out the document and don’t proof it just by viewing an electronic version on your computer monitor. A print-out could show errors that may not appear on the monitor.
• Read the copy out loud to yourself. Sometimes hearing what you’re proofing is more beneficial than reading silently to yourself. Yes, your co-workers may look at you a little funny, but it’s worth it.
• Have at least one other person proof the marketing piece before sending to the client. If you’ve looked at the piece over and over again, you can easily skip past something as simple as an incorrect phone number or website.
• View each proof as if you’ve never seen it before, especially if you’ve been working on the project for a while. As mentioned above, you can easily miss simple errors.
• If you’re proofing a piece that is part of a campaign, compare it to other campaign pieces to make sure the message is consistent.
• Place the original document right next to the revised document and compare the revisions side-by-side.
• Read the copy out of sequence. For example, read it backwards starting with the last sentence.
• If your client emailed you changes, compare the revised proof directly to the email. Even if you noted the client’s changes on a print-out, you could have easily missed a revision which is why it’s always good to go back to the original source.
• Don’t solely rely on spellcheck to catch errors.
• Proof a document at least two times.

Hopefully these “K-Tips” help you as much as they’ve helped me. With that said, if anyone finds a spelling error in this blog post, your next Starbucks is on me!

photo credit: Zazzle.com

European company, Baseone Buyersphere, released their 2011 report on the new B2B Buyer Behavior.  I read it and you can, too.

Tony Ambrito with Customer Think provides a great recap of the report. I really enjoyed reading it and would like to conclude with my own pressure points for B2B marketing professionals:

Buyers Take their Appetite for Information Online

Supplier websites and web searches tested highest for most frequently used source of information overall. They’re searching, which means when your website pops up, whether from a direct, referring or organic hit, it needs to be immaculate.

Satisfy their Hunger with More Content

Not too far behind Supplier websites and Web searches were Industry press, Press Advertising and Online Events/Seminars. Which begs the question – are you pumping out valuable, relevant content in the right channels?

The report also detects that buyers are looking for issue-based content – solutions to issues they’re experiencing, not necessarily a new supplier. Some are even saying that intent and context is the future of e-mail marketing.  Content, content, and more content!

Offline Events Still Influence

Although offline events and seminars received a drop in use, it reported still as the most “influencial”. Meaning in-person experiences are just as important as online user experiences.

Tradeshows shall live on!

Bottom line: perfect your content marketing strategy and everything else will fall into place. Is your B2B content marketing strategy up to snuff?

image credit: Buyersphere

When asking “who visits your website?” the response typically falls in two categories:

1. Visitors are identified by their what – a C-level executive, VP of _________, Manager of such-and-such; or,
2. Visitors are identified by what they do on the site (how they arrived at the site, how many pages they visit, etc.)

Your poor site visitor! They probably thought they were more to you than a page view or a title.  And no wonder your website stinks – do you know how hard it is to write compelling copy for a title who visits 1.9 pages in 32.6 seconds?!

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the website whats.  You’d be hard pressed to find a bigger fan of Google Analytics at Canyon.

So I will ask again, do you know who your site visitors are?  Not who you want them to be; but who they are really.  Do a little digging, and I promise, sometimes the answers will surprise you.

If you’re in the majority of business-to-business marketers, you are likely in the early stages of moving from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.  And the reality is you may not know who your visitors are.  And without knowing the whos, how can you:

1. Know if you are reaching your target audience; or
2. Optimize your site for conversion?

But enough of my bad guy act.  The good news is discovering your website whos can be simple and quick thanks to Bizo – a business targeting platform of rich, anonymous business demographics of 85 million worldwide web users.

• Sign up to get your free Bizo Analyze site tags
• Put the Analyze tags on the pages of your site you want to track
• Within 24 hours, you’ll know the whos of your web audience- by industry, job function, company size, seniority and education.

Soon you too can be wowing your peers with your audience insights and pretty charts.

And even more importantly, you will be empowered to think of your website visitors as more than just another title.

Understanding the business demographics of your web site visitors empowers crucial next steps in optimizing your site for conversion.  Our discussions will quickly migrate to:

• Personas
• User Stories
• Information Architecture
• Content Strategy
• Micro and macro conversion paths

And most importantly, you begin to make strides transforming your marketing (from outbound to inbound) and dramatically increasing marketing ROI.

Aren’t you glad to be speaking to your whos and no longer just the whats?