Tag Archive: B2B Lead Generation


Hope is a Strategy

Filed Under: Messaging by Prairie Sky Group — Leave a comment
May 13, 2012

Marketing, Lead Generation, Minneapolis, St Paul, Minnesota, AtlantaHope is a projection of our past fears or regrets onto the future with the expectation of a better outcome.   It is characteristically human.  The ability to imagine different future outcomes has elevated the human species and driven us to our current position on the food chain.  Hope is also one of the few things that trumps fear.

In today’s marketing and sales, consumption-based, media world, a lot of messaging seems driven by fear.  Tune in at 10 PM to see why soccer moms are selling crack.  The president is destroying America.  Does your computer have a virus?

In sales and marketing, we often have the opportunity to create fear as a buying cause.  But fear, by itself, is not sufficient to create a sale.  You also need to create hope.

Without hope we would be trapped in a set of automatic responses.  So we hope for better lives for our children.  We hope we beat cancer.  We hope we find the right partner.  We even hope to win the lottery.

We think rather than hope if we buy your service or product that you will solve our problem.  This is because hope is intensely personal.  What we really hope for is that our lives will be better.

It’s difficult to have “hope” for a solution to a business problem.  Rather, in sales and marketing, it’s easier to create a “vision” of a solution to a problem.  The two are different.  Hope, is based on a feeling and a projection of what that solution will mean personally.   A vision for a solution is based on thinking about the technical results, and it’s very rational.

Successful marketers and sales people need to ask,  “What is the “hope” driving my prospect, and how can I help them achieve it?”  Is it to be respected, or to earn the love of their families by being successful?  It’s not just to provide a “left-handed crenznut” in order to improve the output of you sales force automation system that will lead to increased sales.

I am impressed by one simple but elegant example of hope-based messaging.  An outsourced printing center moved onsite to corporate campus in order to provide that companies reproduction services.  In the copy rooms of the company they placed a sign above each copier.  It said, “Let us help you go home on time.”

In eight words they accomplished the following things: 1) They acknowledged the hard work people were doing, 2) they connected it to the services they provided 3) they offered help 4) the message was positive and 5) they made it personal by tying it to seeing one’s family.  They provided hope. They could have said, “Are you going to be late again tonight? Call 1-800-WePrint.”

So what hope are you delivering in your messages?   Besides just providing a “solution” or creating a “vision,” can you get your customer to personally imagine what their lives will be like after doing business with you?

It’s hard work, but just imagine how you will be admired if….

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Clarity in Sales and Marketing

Filed Under: B2B Lead Generation, Framing, Messaging, Personal Marketing Skills, Sales by Prairie Sky Group — Leave a comment
March 30, 2012

Marketing and Lead Generation, Minneapolis, St Paul, Minnesota, AtlantaClarity is your most powerful tool in sales and marketing.  It confers sincerity, and sincerity, along with competence, builds trust.

Our political discourse today is full of smoke.  As a result, no one trusts politicians.   The same occurs with sales and marketing.  We talk too much, we obfuscate, which (irony intended) means we don’t say what we mean.

We are often uncomfortable with the truth, so not saying what we mean is and attempt to make us feel comfortable, but it is really a form of dishonesty.

The best sales and marketing people are those that are honest and direct.  You can hear it in what they say and write.  They are clear.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
Prairie Sky Group
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Values and Goals

Filed Under: Management, Management and Motivation, Managing and Motivating, Messaging by Prairie Sky Group — 2 Comments
March 6, 2012

Marketing and Lead Generation, Minneapolis, St Paul, Minnesota, AtlantaI was talking with the COO of a small professional services firm the other day that had experienced 100% growth over the last year.  When I asked him how he managed that spectacular growth, he said he’d hired thirty-one people during the year.  He might have interviewed three or four times that many.

How did he do it?  His answer was succinct and direct.  He couldn’t always interview for specific skills or experience.  Others in his company could help him with that.  Instead, he said, he interviewed for the right values.  If he could find people with the right values, then he could worry about putting the right butts in the right seats.

The interesting thing was that the values for his company were written on a large sign in the lobby where his employees and guests could see them.  The list of five began with, “Always Add Value,” and ended with “Do the Right Thing.”

Values are different than business goals.  A goal is what you want to achieve.  Values are guidelines that we use for how we will behave and make decisions, especially when there is a conflict.

It seems to me that corporations don’t have values in themselves, but rather the people in them do.  When you put them on the wall, you are saying… this is how we expect you to make your decisions and conduct yourselves.  It helps hold others to the same code.

The test comes of course when really tough decisions have to be made or there’s some conflict between values.  In that case, you’d better have tested your own values beforehand.  Many companies simply put them up as they would office decoration.  Or they put up their business goals.  The real difference is can you live your values?

This is a time when positive impressions of business in America are at an all time low.  It’s easy to be cynical about corporate values when the company doesn’t live them or live up to them.  When this happens, it’s a huge demotivator and saps productivity and trust, both with employees and with customers.  However, this COO understood the value of values in creating a company that could grow at 100%.  Good values lead to good growth.  Values precede business goals.

Marketing and sales also own a big piece of the values for their organizations because they have the principle responsibility for communicating with clients, customers and prospects.   So what are you values?  Do you interview for them?  And how do you do that?

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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SEO, it’s snot.

Filed Under: B2B Lead Generation, Web Strategy by Prairie Sky Group — Leave a comment
February 29, 2012

Inbound Marketing and Lead Generation, Minneapolis, St Paul, Minnesota, Atlanta SEO. It’s…

Snot link farms.

Snot keyword loading.

Snot listing on hundreds of directories.

Snot coding all content with H1 tags.

Snot solved by loading alt tags.

Snot hiring blog farms.

Snot copying your competitor’s keywords.

Snot forgetting 301 redirects when redoing your pages or site.

Snot traffic for traffic’s sake.

Snot always something you tell a new acquaintance at a party that you do for a living.

Snot easy.

Snot a one time fix.  (It’s a process.  It takes a while.)

Happy Leap Day.  Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Five Objectives for Search Engine Strategy

Filed Under: B2B Lead Generation, Clients, Customers, Web Strategy by Prairie Sky Group — Leave a comment
February 27, 2012

Marketing and Lead Generation, Minneapolis, St Paul, Minnesota, AtlantaIn Web Tactics versus Web Strategy, I emphasized that your web strategy and business strategy may need to become one in the same.  But what is it you should try to accomplish in your web search strategy?

When it comes to organic search, there are a number of objectives on which you should focus.  These are all part of my overcoming resistance theme.

First, of course, is getting found or being discovered by search engine crawlers so you can show up in indexed results.

The second is having a site architecture that is crawler friendly.  You can be discovered, but present unintentional barriers to indexing and ranking your pages.

Once the page is found and accessible, your content needs to be available or extractable.  For example, the image of the webinar blurb you inserted in your sidebar may not help.

With these first three items, it seems like we are responding to search engines rather than people.  So the fourth item becomes the first and most important item.  You need to make the information on your page useful to people you are targeting and easy to read.  One way to do this is to provide Quid pro Nada.  But it’s also important to make content that can be scanned as well as read.  I often see word dense content littered with SEO terms.  (A sin I commit too often.)  My reaction is to flee quickly.  Life is short.  About three seconds short.

One little tool to check out for readability is The Readability Test Tool.

If you’ve done the first four steps, your last step is getting your visitors to take action or convert.

In the end, you are optimizing your page for people, not search engines, because people decide if they want to convert, and they decide whether to become clients or customers.  Create compelling content.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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