B2B Marketing ROI

In “the one piece of advice you can’t generate leads without”, author Jill Konrath points out that her day is way too hectic as it is, and that taking calls from vendors certainly isn’t high on her list of priorities. Her solution? When you make that sales call, get to the point, and put numbers behind what your software does. It’s the best way to get a lead’s attention.

Even though this particular example applies to salespeople, there’s something here for marketers as well. B2B marketers might not be the ones making the call, but they are most definitely sending out emails, setting up landing pages and forms, and managing entire online marketing campaigns. So when you send a prospect a white paper or email, make sure that you get to the point, and explain exactly what it is that you can do for them.

Make sure that you don’t fall back into the typical marketing meandering. Your emails and white papers should be concise, provide clear value to the lead, and make it very clear what you have done for past clients and what you will be able to do for future clients. You need to take into account that most of your leads have lives at least as hectic and as busy as yours. If you’ve done your research and what you are selling is actually a good fit for your lead, don’t let a watered down message keep you from getting through.

As SalesforceWatch.com points out, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has been named a 2007 Agenda Setter and Top Ten Business Leader by Silicon.com. Benioff has led salesforce.com to be not only the leading on-demand CRM (by far) but also the poster-child for the massive shift to the software as a service (SaaS) model.

10 years ago, few executives would have believed in the end of installed software. Five years ago, companies were still very reluctant to put sensitive data into a hosted platform. Now we are in the age where on-demand applications are actually the preferred platform for marketing solutions. It is only a matter of time before finance/account, ERP, and other typical enterprise platforms follow suit.

As Google has been for many companies, salesforce.com’s platform has been a key enabler to many SaaS vendors, giving them access to  a massive number of potential clients via their AppExchange ecosystem. Salesforce.com users have instant access to roughly 700 AppExchange partners, each with a solution designed to integrate seamlessly with the CRM platform. It remains to be seen how lucrative the ecosystem will be for salesforce.com in terms of direct revenue but it certainly does lend its own services a certain amount of stickiness that rivals Microsoft (on-demand CRM due out in the near future) and NetSuite (who has a similar but much smaller ecosystem) may find difficult to emulate.

The entire list of 2007 Agenda Setters is available at siliconagendasetters.com