Maybe you’re asking yourself, “Self, who should I follow on Twitter?”  Maybe you’ve asked yourself that and have made your way here, to The CRAP Report.  If so, you can check out two posts below to see who I suggested you follow two months ago.  Maybe you’ve followed all of those folks and are looking for more.

I still think the Follow Friday blog post is a good idea.

Here’s my list of B2B all-stars that I think you’ll find yourself glad to follow:

• @mvolpe – Mike Volpe, HubSpot’s VP of Inbound Marketing.  Mike’s also the co-host of HubSpot TV, and the majority of Mike’s tweets are about, what else?  Inbound marketing.  You’ll also get some good SEO knowledge, great blogging tips, marketing data, and some lead gen stuff, too.  Check out Mike’s blog Marketing with Mike for blog articles.
• @keenan – Jim Keenan, VP of Sales Strategy at 2Wire.  Jim always offers great sales advice, and does so with a personal touch through his blog, A Sales Guy.  Jim tweets about sales issues, sales management issues, and sales processes.
• @paulcastain – Paul Castain is the VP of Sales Development for Consolidated Graphics.  Paul’s whole M.O. is to make people better, whether it’s a better sales rock star or a better sales Jedi.  Regardless of what you want to become, Paul wants to help, and one way he does so is through his blog Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook.
• @MackCollier – Mack Collier is a social media consultant, trainer, and speaker.  His tweets are going to be full of these, except on Sunday nights, when he runs a blog chat through Twitter.  Mack knows about building a community and it’s evident if you read through a blog chat transcript.  Mack’s blog, The Viral Garden, is one to read for thoughts on any of the topics above.
• @HolgerSchulze – Holger Schulze is a technology marketing guy from Washington, D.C.  Holger tweets really relevant articles regarding B2B Sales and Marketing, and you should read his blog, Everything Technology Marketing. Holger’s articles are typically about trends and issues surrounding, yup – you guessed it, technology marketing.
• @justinlevy – Justin Levy is the Director of Business Development, Corporate Strategy, and Client Services at New Marketing Labs.  Justin is a prolific tweeter and his tweets are often a mix between the personal and business, but they’re always good.  Justin has a blog, Justin Levy, which explores social media and its impact in the business world.  Justin is also a partner at Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse.
• @iannarino – S. Anthony Iannarino is a B2B Sales coach, and his tweets reflect that.  The majority of his tweets are ways to improve B2B sales reps/teams.  His blog, The Sales Blog, is chock full of articles on becoming a better sales person.  Check it out.

Hopefully I’ve been able to share someone new with you.  If you want, feel free to leave some more recommendations in the comments below!

Photo Credit:  Rosaura Ochoa via Flickr

In response to Chris Brogan’s tweet and subsequent blog post about turning Twitter’s Follow Friday into a more expanded blog entry, detailing why you think people should follow your recommendations, here’s my entry – The CRAP Report’s #FollowFriday list: 

• @dmscott – C’mon, you knew that David Meerman Scott was going to be on this list, didn’t you?  I mean, the guy is a marketing genius, and if you’re not following him, I’d be really curious as to why.

 

• @funnelholic – Craig Rosenberg, the Funnelholic, offers great demand generation information, and presents it in a way that I find really enjoyable to read.  Plus, he’s got GREAT taste in music.

 

• @abneedles – Adam Needles, from SilverPop, offers fantastic data and stats on B2B marketing.  The guy is all over the US running SilverPop’s B2B Marketing University.  He’s like the hardest working guy in marketing.

 

• @gerhard20 – Gerhard Gschwandtner shares great info on Sales topics, from his recent posts about using his iPad for business to Sales 2.0 discussions.

 

• @FearlessSelling – Kelley Robertson, Sales trainer, is always offering ways to be a better sales rep.

 

• @B2Bbloggers – Jeremy Victor’s fantastic website where readers can find tons of different information on marketing insights.

 

• @StephanieTilton – B2B content marketing wiz.  ‘Nuff said.

 

• @bridgegroupinc – Trish Bertuzzi, shares tons of inside sales tips and tactics, straight from The Bridge Group’s blog, Inside Sales Experts.

 

• @damphoux – Mike Damphousse, appointment setting braniac.  You want to know about Unified Demand Gen, follow Mike.

 

• @paul_mccord – Paul McCord, Business Development Strategist and all around nice guy.  For the last couple of weeks, Paul has been on a mission to raise the value of quality sales and marketing content by suggesting people for his Twitter followers to follow, one at a time.

 

• @ardath421 – Ardath Albee, B2B marketing strategist and author of the book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.  You can learn TONS from Ardath. 
• @rapril – This is my boss, Richard April.  He told me that he has to go on this list.

If you read The CRAP Report, I really don’t think I’m sharing anything new with you here.  If you’re not following these folks, you should be.  This list is by no means exhaustive; there are a ton of other folks that you should follow as well.  If you have questions about others, let me know!

As a new feature here on The CRAP Report, I’m going to start posting interviews every so often.  I had the fantastic opportunity to interview marketing expert David Meerman Scott back in February, and although most interviews include short snippets of what the interviewee’s answers are, I thought it was really important that I present to you the full transcript of the interview.  I couldn’t find anything that I thought I should leave on the editing floor, so to speak.  It’s a bit long-ish, but trust me when I tell you, it’s worth the read. 

I was very honored that David was willing to spend an hour with me and answer some questions about his the second edition of his book, The New Rules of PR and Marketing, as well as some questions about marketing and blogging.  The guy is fantastic – he’s really cool and down to earth and says what he thinks.  I like that. 

So, without further adieu, here’s my interview with David Meerman Scott:

What was the impetus for writing “The New Rules of PR and Marketing?”

I’ve been doing a lot of the things in the book before I wrote the book.  Starting in 1997-98 I was VP of Marketing for a couple of different technology companies.  We had great websites built on content.  We were doing online newsletters and press releases to get into search engines.  Not to just to reach the media, but to get into the search engines.  No one was talking about that at that time.  People were talking about search engine marketing, but that sort of started in the late ‘90s.  The company that I was working for, Thompson, fired me in 2002, and I’m like, “Damn it!  This stuff works and I’m going to prove it.”  I started working with a couple of clients to implement the ideas, and they worked really well, so I started to write about it.  I did an eBook called The New Rules of PR that came out in 2006 and that did really well (it had 15,000 downloads in the first month), so I said, “there’s something going on here.”  Then I got a book deal and wrote the book.  In the beginning it was interesting – it came out in hardcover in 2007 (originally in June of 2007) and throughout 2007, there were a few people who gravitated to it really early and started talking it up.  There were some people who were really against the book.  I mean downright hostile.  I believe a lot it came from fear and ignorance – anyway, there was a lot of hostility. 

The other thing that was interesting to me was early on, most universities weren’t paying attention to the book at all.  There were a couple of professors, though, who really early picked up on it.  Steve Quiggly at Boston University is one; Karen Russel at University of Georgia is another.  A couple of rogue professors started to use the book, and then I started getting emails from these students who, like in 2008 and 2009, who said, “I can’t believe I went through four years of education and I never learned any of this stuff.”  There were actually people in tears!  But now, we’re in 2010, I did the second edition which I wrote throughout 2009 (it came out in January of 2010).  Now it’s, I mean, there’s very few people who have hostility towards it.  There are very few universities who don’t consider the book.  There’s about a hundred that I know of who use the book.  The book is out in 24 languages.  I got word from my publisher a couple of weeks ago that it was the number one marketing book in the UK last year, which is interesting because I’m not a British author.  The fact that it’s resonating around the world is interesting because it tells me that these ideas are resonating around the world, which I wasn’t sure if that was the case at the beginning.

What made you want to share the “new rules” with people, as opposed to keeping them to yourself?

I believe marketing is about giving.  I believe that marketing is like love.  People say, like The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, “How can I get people to love me?”  The way you get people to love you, whether you’re young and looking for love, or you’re married or have a significant other or whatever, is to love.  I think the same thing is true about marketing.  That’s why I’m such a huge believer of giving away content.  Publishing eBooks for free, publishing white papers for free, doing videos for free.  Doing what you’re doing now.  You’re not going to charge anyone for this blog post.  The theory is, and I believe there’s a lot of truth around it is – you spend the time driving up here, meeting with me, writing up what you hear into a blog post– that’s four hours work.  Why would you do that?  The reason is that if you give that away, something will come of that.  You don’t know what it is, you don’t know when, but something will come back.  I’ve always felt that way but have only recently been able to articulate it.  To me, it was a lot better to get these ideas out there and share them, and then expect that good things will come back.  They have, as I’m now an in-demand speaker and I travel all over the world.  Just in 2010, and it’s only February, I’ve gone to Tokyo, Amsterdam, and Mumbai.

So, you’re on the Board of Advisors at HubSpot.  You’re talking about giving stuff away for free, and they’re more, “you’ve got to fill out the form” to get content.  How do you feel about that?

I think they’re two different philosophies.  One philosophy is that you want to try to generate leads, sales leads, and I think that’s a fine way to do business, particularly if you have a sales force.  HubSpot has a sales force.  There’s a lot of people who follow up on those leads and educate people.  I’m a believer in the opposite approach, which is “give it all away for free,” and have some kind of secondary offer.  In my case it’s “buy the book.”  I think it’s partly the business model of the company.  Maybe it’s a B2B vs. B2C kind of thing, although I don’t really think there is.  There is some of that.  I think they’re just different philosophies.  No one philosophy is right or one’s wrong.  There’re just sort of different ways to do it.  I actually advocate more of a hybrid model for a lot of companies.  The hybrid model, which is exactly what HubSpot does, is “give a boatload of stuff away for free.  A lot of stuff for free, but where appropriate, ask for an email address, ask for a registration.”  HubSpot’s got a blog, they’ve got HubSpot TV.  They’ve got a lot of stuff that they give away totally for free with no registration, but there is other stuff that does require registration.  That’s a pretty good example of a hybrid approach where you’ve got a little bit of both.

Getting to the second edition of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” what’s new this time around?  Facebook and Twitter have their own sections…

I had stuff on social media before, but the tools have changed.  When I wrote the first edition, in 2006, Second Life was really big.  It was very popular then, growing like crazy – it was like what’s happening with Twitter now.  It was this huge growth spurt, and I wrote about it.  I wrote what was appropriate.  A lot of content on it.  It’s still around and there are people still into it, but it didn’t become as huge as most people thought.  They way that people were talking about it, we’d be doing it right now.  But, also in 2006, Facebook was only for students.  You needed a .edu email address and Twitter didn’t even exist.  I got sick of getting emails from people saying, “Hey, have you heard of Twitter?”  Those were some major things that went into the revision – making sure that the tools were accurately reported.  The concepts are the same.  If you were to read the first edition hardcover, then the paperback edition of the first edition, and then the second edition, the concepts don’t change.  The ideas don’t change one bit.  It’s really the tools that have been upgraded for the new tools that are available, and twenty new stories.  I got rid of some the older stories that weren’t appropriate and added some new and interesting ones.

Doc Brown shows up at your house in a time travelling DeLorean and wants to take you to 2013.  What do you think will have changed in marketing over the next three years?

I don’t think these ideas are going to change.  There’s not going to be “The New New Rules” or anything like that.  It’s still going to be fundamental idea that marketing is about publishing content and marketing is about giving gifts.  I believe that.  I don’t think that’s going to change one bit.  I think the biggest change we’re going to see is that a lot more people are going to be focused on mobile devices.  You know, in some countries around the world, like many Asian countries, Japan for example – it’s all about mobile.  Not as many people are active on computers; it’s on mobile devices.  There’s a lot of reasons for that, partly cultural, partly because they’re on trains a lot and there’s not free time.  For some countries it’s expensive to have a computer wired to the Internet versus having a mobile phone with different variable costs.  If your family only makes $8,000 dollars a year, or even $800 a year, you’re talking about some hard decisions to buy a wired computer.  I think worldwide, mobile marketing is going to become more sophisticated. 

I’m really fascinated with the whole geo-locater stuff.  GPS based things; foursquare is a good example of that but there’s others.  My iPhone?  When I turn this sucker on, it knows where I am.  That adds an entirely new dimension to reaching people through marketing.  Just twenty minutes ago while you were grabbing the coffee, I checked in with foursquare; I checked in that I was here and was going to be talking with you.  After I hit send, it said that my friend Derek said that the restaurant across the street, and I eat there all the time as my office is close by, is really great and you should try the bacon turkey sandwich.  I’m like, “Wow!”  That is interesting stuff!  I would say if we’re transported into 2013, I would venture to guess that there’s going to a lot of interesting things going on with mobile.

Why are buyer personas so important, and how long should they take to put together?

The easy answer is that people don’t really care about products and services.  [Holding up his cup of tea] This is a nice cup of tea.  It’s tasty, but that’s not why I’m here.  I’m here because it’s a great place to meet.  When you suggested we meet, I said, “let’s do Starbucks.”  It’s close, it’s easy for you because you can park here and for me because I can walk.  It’s reasonable comfy, you can get a chair, although it’s a little bit crowded today.  What’s the product?  Is it the tea?  If I were a marketing person for Starbucks, I wouldn’t even talk about the drink.  It would be about places to hang out, about free wireless.  A lot of different things I would want to talk about.  The problem is, and it’s a good problem, because if you know about the problem you can solve it, is to do that effectively, to market effectively, you have to understand the motivation of people who are potentially going to do business with you.  In the case of Starbucks, you have to know the motivation of the different buyer personas or the different people who come here. 

I come here, to this particular Starbucks, fairly frequently.  [Pointing to some students] There’s a great example of a buyer persona – it’s high school students.  They come after school.  The high school is right around the corner.  The come in here and grab a tea or a coffee, often with their friends.  There’s one buyer persona.  You’ve got people who’re in-between jobs, who want to get out of the home, have a chance to come and maybe meet somebody, grab some free wireless; they’re in job search mode.  You’ve got people like me, who need a place – I was here yesterday.  I’m probably here twice a week when I’m in town.  I’ll do two or three meetings a week in this Starbucks.  It’s a great place to have business meetings – there’s another buyer persona.  I just rattled off three buyer personas, and there’s probably a dozen in here.  Retired people – they don’t have as much going on every day and they come in here and grab a coffee and read the paper.  If you want to reach those people, talking about coffee isn’t going to do it.  You have to figure out what are the best ways to reach those people.  Maybe it’s creating coupons for one dollar coffees for high school students every Thursday afternoon and distributing them at the high school.  The only way you’re going to figure that out is if you do what I call “buyer persona research.”  How long does that take?  Ha.  The challenge with buyer persona research is that you literally have to interview buyers.  That’s the rub.  You can’t make it up.  You can’t just say, “let’s reach high school students!”  They’re going to say, “Why in the world would you do it on Thursdays?  We’ve all got band practice on Thursdays?  Saturday mornings are the best, that’s when we don’t have anything to do, that’s when we’d come here.”  You can’t make that stuff up.  You need to actually have those interviews, and it takes time.  I think you need to have around 20 interviews to start to get to convergence when you’re talking to people.  An hour per interview and it takes time.  You’ve got to find the people, recruit them, and try to get them to speak with you.  It takes some time.

How do you come up with new topics to blog about?

Everywhere I go I come up with something.  Just thinking of a topic right now, “Buyer Personas at Starbucks.”  That is something people can relate to.  Everyone can relate to Starbucks, no matter where in the world you are.  I don’t know if I’ll do that, but I have a file on my computer where I put ideas.  The funny thing is I almost never get to go back and do a post about those ideas because I’ll think of something I like better and I’ll crank that out instead.  I probably have 50 blog posts queued up as ideas that I think I might write about someday.  And that’s really only when I’m like, “Oh shoot!  I haven’t done a post in five days.  I should crank something out but I don’t know what.”  Then I’ll open that file.  Most of the time it’s thinking of something you’re interested in or that you like, and relating it back to marketing.  I basically just dictated a blog post on buyer personas, because that’s how I would have done it about high school students.  In my case, after a while, generating ideas is really easy.  I can come up with tons of ideas, it’s finding the time to write them that becomes the harder part.

Do you think blogging equals “thought leadership?”

No, I don’t believe that.  I don’t think that because there are a lot of crappy blogs out there.  I think a blog becomes thought leadership when the blogger is truly reaching people not for their own ego but to give valuable stuff away.  That’s a difficult transition for a lot of people to make.  People who are trained as marketers and PR people just have this desire to hype their products.  They end up creating a blog that’s all about, or three quarters or two thirds about their stupid products and nobody cares.  If I were working at Starbucks and wanted to create a blog, there’s a whole bunch of topics you can write about that have nothing to do with coffee.  As soon as you start writing about coffee, it’s like, it’s not interesting anymore.  It might be to some coffee aficionado types, but that’s just one buyer persona for Starbucks.  It only becomes thought leadership when people are eager to read it and they’re sharing it with their friends, when you start to get comments, because that’s when you know you’re relating to someone.  That’s when you know you’re creating something that people value.  And that’s when it turns, in my opinion, into thought leadership.  Also, by the way, there are other forms of thought leadership – photographs, charts, graphs, video, audio; all kinds of different ways that an organization or individual can express thought leadership other than by text.

What are some of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make and how can they remedy them?

One is copying other bloggers.  One is, and it’s the biggest one and we’ve already talked about it, is prattling on about your damn product that nobody cares about.  I think obsessing over, “I’ve got to blog right now!” or “Oh my God it’s been three days; I’ve got to do something!”  I think if it’s not going to be enjoyable it’s hard to keep it up.  There’s not right or wrong quantity.  Seth Godin and Chris Brogan blog every single day.  I can’t do that.  I’m – a good week is three posts, an okay week is two posts.  Sometimes I’ll do four.  If I go five days and haven’t blogged, I feel like I should but I don’t beat myself up if I don’t.  I don’t think that there’s a hard and fast rule.  I know there’s plenty of bloggers who do it once a month, and that’s okay.  I interviewed the CIO of the United Kingdom a couple of weeks ago, and he’s got a blog.  I’m like, “well that’s cool!”  It IS cool, but he only blogs once a month.  Is that wrong?  Of course not, it’s cool, he’s blogging.  Consistency is pretty important.  If you’re blogging once a week, you should try to average once a week.  Don’t go three months without blogging.  Every day is hard.  The two people that I follow, as I said, that do it every day are Seth Godin and Chris Brogan.  They always have consistently good blog posts.

I saw your webinar on corporate comedy with Tim Washer.  How far do you think is too far when it comes to corporate comedy?

I think it depends on the company.  It’s partly dependant on corporate culture.  I think the line varies significantly based on your corporate culture and depending on who you’re trying to reach, whatever kinds of marketing you do.  If you’re JP Morgan Chase Bank, the line for what kind of comedy you can conceivably do in a YouTube video is going to be pretty darn different than if you’re Quicksilver surfing gear.  I think you should offend one percent of prospects.  I’m okay with that.  I’ve done videos that have offended people, but those have been my most popular videos.  I don’t mean offensive as in racial slurs, I mean someone who just says, “Wow, that’s a little out there.”  I think that’s okay.  I don’t know about one percent, I just threw that out there. 

One thing I’ve always found really interesting with book reviews, as a sort of related topic, is they tend to sell really well when they have a whole bunch of four or five star reviews on Amazon, and some one star reviews.  Those books do better than the ones that have threes, fours, and fives consistently with no ones.  I’ve found that with my own work.  There’s two or three percent, or whatever, of my reviews on Amazon where the reviewer says, “This author is full of crap.  His ideas are wrong and it’s just stupid.  I don’t agree with it.”  I think that’s good.  It’s good because if I offend a few people, and they think my ideas are stupid, I think that’s actually a really good thing.  The same is with comedy.  Howard Stern offends a hell of a lot of people, but he’s also incredibly funny.  Not every corporate cultural can pull off offending people.  And that means so much corporate marketing is so dry, and so boring, and so ineffective.  I don’t know what you do about that.

Do you see a need for Outbound Marketing?

Oh yeah.  I think it’s a combination.  I think for most organizations it’s a combination of some form of paid advertising, media relations (working with editors and reporters), and some form of direct sales.  HubSpot is doing direct sales.  They don’t necessarily make cold calls, but they do have sales people on the phones themselves, although Brian and Dharmesh may argue that those guys are just closing deals, and that might be true.  But I think a combination for most organizations is the way to go.  I don’t believe that the world is going to 100% on the web and every form of outbound’s going to disappear.  People will still advertise and for some that will still be effective.

Who plays you in the movie based on your life?

My first book was a novel called Eyeball Wars.  It wasn’t autobiographical but there was a character in that I related to, and I always thought he should be played by Leonardo DiCaprio.  I know that’s not the answer to the question you’re asking, but that’s the first thing that came to my mind.

Okay, Chris here.  I just want to thank David Meerman Scott again, for his time and willingness to sit down with me.  Thanks a lot David!

HubSpot’s blog featured a guest entry yesterday from Sales 2.0 CEO Nigel Edelshain, entitled “What the Heck is Sales 2.0 (& Why Should I Care)?”  Nigel, as I found out in the article, is the man who coined the term “Sales 2.0:”

Sales 2.0 is about sales people using Web 2.0 tools and social media to sell more effectively

In the entry, Nigel goes on to make the analogy that inbound marketing and Sales 2.0 are like children who size each other up before playing together; slow to get along at first, but when playtime is over, nobody wants to leave one another.  The article is great, but of particular interest to me was this, when talking about businesses that sell something very expensive and have a small prospecting pool from which to generate leads from:

“I always imagine a sales rep in this scenario whose boss comes to him and says ‘how are we getting on penetrating GE’ and the rep who loves inbound marketing too much says ‘we’re waiting for them to hit our website and download a white paper.’”

Inbound marketing certainly makes it easier for an organization to be found, but I believe there is still a need for teleprospecting teams to find qualified sales opportunities.  As marketing and sales teams become more synchronous, I think that teleprospecting can play a great part in helping to bridge the current gap, and then be a part of the grease that makes the unified team run smoother.  Go and check it out, then let me know what you think!

*Photo Credit:  ralphbijker via Flickr

On Tuesday I shared with you a link to lead generation expert The Funnelholic’s The Marketing Hipster Dictionary, Part I.  Today, he posted part two with some help of folks like The Lord of The Leads Tom Scearce (on Twitter @TLOTL) and Chris Jablonski (on Twitter @cjablonski).  The Funnelholic certainly more than gets by with a little help from his friends, adding words like “Return on Contribution” and “Buyer Engagement.” 

My favorite: 

49.  Trapping the chicken in the courtyard:  A semi-obscure “Rocky II” reference/metaphor describing the relentless and often frustrating pursuit of repeatable marketing and sales success. “I feel like a Kentucky Fried idiot.” — Rocky Balboa (@TLOTL)

You can check out The Marketing Hipster Dictionary, Part II here.

Nice work guys!

Hey everybody!

Been real busy today, so unfortunately I have nothing original to share with you. 

Do not fret, though! 

Craig Rosenberg, marketing and lead generation expert also known as the Funnelholic, has come to the rescue!  Today, Craig posted a great blog article over at his site, where he is creating The Marketing Hipster Dictionary.  What a great idea!  Basically, what he’s doing over the course of a couple of different entries (today and next Thursday), is compiling a list of terms that are used not only on his site, but throughout the sales and marketing space.  From defining the term “Marketing Hipster” to “Maven Marketing,” Craig covers it all and offers up some great examples of folks to follow (on Twitter) in appropriate categories.  If you’re not, you can follow Craig on Twitter at @funnelholic.

You can check out The Marketing Hipster Dictionary here.  One thing is for sure:  someday, when I grow up, I want to make it on the list and be a Marketing Hipster myself.

Great job, Craig!

So you’re thinking about building an in-house teleprospecting team, huh? I mean, someone has to follow up on all of those inbound leads you’re getting, right? Maybe you’re hosting webinars and need those attendees followed up on, right? The most logical thing to do would be to build some sort of qualification machine to follow up on all the contacts you’ve got from all of the marketing programs/events/campaigns you’ve run (and more than likely never got around to getting in touch with). You could give them to your sales guys, no doubt. Trish Bertuzzi, President and Chief Strategist over at the inside sales consulting firm, The Bridge Group, blogged about this with some help from Kirko Papjanis over at her blog, Inside Sales Experts Blog, where Kirko urges folks to put their sales reps in front of prospects sooner. While I agree with him, it’s been my experience that not all sales reps are willing to be put in front of prospects without having them fully qualified, nor are they as effective. So, if you’re thinking about building an in-house teleprospecting team to generate sales qualified leads, there are some things you need to think of.

Running a B2B lead generation team may or may not be as easy/difficult as you may think it to be. It all depends on what your background is. Sales prospecting may be a passion of yours, it may not. Regardless, if you’re in the position where you’re determining whether or not you should build one, I think that there are three things you need to seriously consider before taking the leap to have your own inside teleprospecting team:

1. Do you know how to qualify a lead over the phone? Have you done it before?
2. Do you know the type of candidate who makes the best teleprospecting rep?
3. Do you know how to measure a teleprospecting team’s success?

Do you know how to qualify a lead over the phone? Have you done it before? These are important questions that you need to ask yourself, and I believe that if the answer is no, you need to rethink this idea altogether. If you’ve never spent time qualifying a prospect and expect to lead people who are going to do that for you, you really have your work cut out for you. I’m not saying that you need to be some sort of a cold calling guru, but you need to have actually done the job you’re putting a team together to do. You can’t lead people to places you’ve never been, and on top of that, if your own qualification skills are at a 3 (on a scale of 1 – 10, with 10 being tops), you’re never going to be able to train your team to be better than a 3.  John Maxwell calls it the Law of the Lid in his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – “…your organization or business will not rise beyond the level your leadership allows.” I’m not saying you can’t do it, I’m saying that if you’re going to, you’ve got a lot to learn.

Do you know the type of candidate who makes the best teleprospecting rep? You need to think about this question, too. You can’t hire just anybody to qualify sales opportunities for you. Like Charlie Bowdre said in Young Guns, “..you can’t be any geek off the street. Gotta be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean? Earn your keep.” Sure, in this case I’m substituting qualification skills for a gun, but the sentence is no less true. Hire someone who’s done it before and they may bring in poor habits from someone else who trained them. Hire someone who’s too green, and they’re going to get eaten alive by rude or obnoxious prospects (not that they exist, right?). If you’re going to build a team in-house, you’ve got to know who the best candidate is before you can start.

Do you know how to measure a teleprospecting team’s success?  Teleprospecting is more than just making phone calls and qualifying leads. Those are the two most important aspects of it, yes, but a team’s success is more than just the number of dials made and the number of leads passed. You’ve got to think of other things like connect rates, lead rates, feedback percentages, leads to forecast percentage, etc. If you’ve never worked IN business development from a teleprospecting perspective, then how do you know what metrics are the most important? You’ve got a lot of research to do there. Again, I’m not saying that you can’t do it, you just need to prepare. A lot. You also don’t want someone else in your organization telling you what they’re going to be measuring your team’s success on – you need to set the tone for that. If sales prospecting falls under marketing’s direction, you don’t want poor sales follow up to be a detriment to your success, and if you fall under sales’ direction, you don’t want poor marketing efforts to do the same.

Have I missed anything? What do you think? Also, please feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about building a team yourself.

Do you know the definition of what a “vicious circle” is?  According to dictionary.com it’s, “a situation in which effort to solve a given problem results in aggravation of the problem or the creation of a worse problem.”  Maybe you’ve seen it comically played out in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.  Spoiler alert for those of you who’ve never seen it in the last ten years, but there was a character in it named Fat Bastard, a Scottish hit man, played by Mike Meyers.  Per his name, he really is a fat guy under the employ of the movie’s main antagonist, Dr. Evil.  Near the end of the film, Fat Bastard tries to kill Austin Powers and his co-spy in the movie, Felicity Shagwell, by pretending to be a UPS delivery guy.  Fat Bastard crashes through their front door and tries to kill them, and eventually breaks down in tears and admits that, “I eat because I’m unhappy, and I’m unhappy because I eat. It’s a vicious cycle. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone I need to get in touch with and forgive: meself.”  If you find yourself thinking that you don’t have any budget to put towards teleprospecting in 2010, I think you’re going to find yourself falling into the same vicious circle that got you to that point in the first place.

Budgets are tight, right?  I mean, that’s a given.  In fact, who says, “Hey, I’ve got tons of cash to throw around at any and everything I can think of?”  Not many.  I can’t think of anyone who’s come to me and said that about adding additional headcount to a teleprospecting effort.  Understanding that budgets are more constricted now than they ever have been, let’s think about how they got there.  At a very rudimentary level, they got there because not enough sales closed the year before for that budget number to increase.  If sales closes “x” number of deals, most departments get “y” dollars more in their budget to spend next year.  Remember, I said rudimentary!  Here are three questions that you should ask yourself before you say that you don’t have enough budget for teleprospecting in 2010: 

1. How are you going to get more qualified sales opportunities into your sales reps hands?
2. How do you plan on reaching all of your inbound marketing hand-raisers?
3. How do you plan on supporting a potentially faulty non teleprospecting supported marketing campaign?

How are you going to get more qualified sales opportunities into your sales reps hands?  Your sales reps certainly aren’t going to do that, and even if you task them to do so, you don’t want them doing that.  Qualifying potential sales opportunities is not what sales reps do best, nor should they be doing it because it takes them away from what their skilled at – closing business.  Your sales reps need to have more sales qualified leads in front of them in 2010 more than ever.  Prospects are holding on to their money more now, too.  Sure, they’re more interested in talking, but not necessarily with parting with their money.  If you don’t build an in-house lead generation team or partner with a teleprospecting firm to separate the “buying” wheat from the “tire kicking” chaff, someone in your organization is going to have to do that, and having that fall under the responsibility of sales is a poor choice.  You don’t want the folks you have in place to close business, to bring in more corporate dollars, to have to generate their own opportunities.  Think of it like this – if you were brought on as the CMO for your organization, chances are you wouldn’t task yourself with writing and sending your quarterly campaign mass emails.  You can do it, sure, but that’s not what you’re best suited for.  The same thing goes for your sales reps.  Give them more qualified sales opportunities to close more business.

How do you plan on reaching all of your inbound marketing hand-raisers?  You’ve probably got a slew of marketing efforts going on right now, and you’re probably planning even better ones for next year.  The thing is this, though – what if all of your campaigns hit their targets?  Think about it.  What if they’re fantastic and you have more inbound prospects than you ever thought possible.  Don’t think it’s possible?  Just check out what Mike Damphousse, CEO of the appointment setting firm Green Leads, is doing with inbound marketing gurus HubSpot to bring in more opportunities.  It is now more likely than ever that you’re inbound marketing efforts can bring in more prospects that you could think of.  If you get all of those hand-raisers, then I ask you, who is going to reach out to them?  They still need to be contacted, and more than just through email.  The same rings true, here, as it did above, in that someone still needs to separate the good from the bad; if you’ve got a lot of inbound leads coming in, a teleprospecting team can get those low hanging fruit in front of sales faster than just handing sales the list of hand-raisers from their territories.  Additionally, they’re not going to nurture them either – they just don’t do that because they’re too busy, but we’ve already established that.

Lastly, how do you plan on supporting a potentially faulty non teleprospecting supported marketing campaign?  Look, let’s face it – maybe those great ideas that you have for 2010 aren’t really as great as you think they are.  They might be, and I hope they are, but what if they’re not?  You should be running a targeted cold calling effort behind all of your marketing efforts just in case.  Every building has a fire alarm in, right?  Think of your cold calling efforts as your Sales and Marketing “break in case of fire” alarm.  Just in case your marketing campaigns don’t, well, don’t hit the mark, if you’re backing that up with a teleprospecting effort, chances are you won’t feel the effects of it too bad.  Just speaking from experience, when I’ve had clients give me their marketing leads and their cold call lists, historically, the cold call lists tend to yield more opportunities.  Now sure, that is most likely because the marketing lists were poor, but hey, isn’t that what we’re talking about?

Just think about it – if you’re telling me that you don’t have any money to spend on teleprospecting, why is that?  If sales prospecting isn’t part of your 2010 plan, I’d love to know why, but you’ve got to give me something better than, “We don’t have the budget.”

I’m sure around the holidays that you, like me, will have a good number of parties to attend.  Now, some may be family affairs while others may be for work, but for the most part those holiday parties typically have the same thing in common – food.  Wherever you go, I’m sure that there’ll be plenty of food to eat.  Folks will have spent time preparing and cooking great appetizers and main dishes, and desserts, too.  One of the things that may run through your mind while you’re at an event, and probably while you’re eating, is “how can I make this at home?” For a lot of you, though, the better question will be, “how can I make this better at home?”  That’s what cooks, do, right?  They find something they like and then they make it better.  The same thing can be said for your teleprospecting efforts, you know?  You’re sales prospecting machine may be great, but there’s always a way to make it better right?  Of course there is!

Often times business development gets caught somewhere between Sales and Marketing, and though I do believe that teleprospecting bridges the gap between the two.  That being said, and speaking from experience, it typically is a Marketing responsibility.  For the majority of projects that I’ve worked on, both as a BDR and as a Director, my main point of contact has been someone from my client’s Marketing department.  Surprisingly enough, right, that there was little involvement from the Sales side?  I’m here to say, though, that if you want to make your BDR’s better, regardless of whose responsibility B2B lead generation is in your organization, get your sales reps involved.  I see three ways that your sales team can make your BDR’s (or your vendor’s on your behalf) better: 

1. Give them “dream” accounts to call into.
2. Let them listen in on sales calls.
3. Give them feedback on all leads.

You give your teleprospectors marketing lists to call on, sure.  Those names are from tradeshows and webinars, white paper and eBook downloads, and even purchased lists.  That data is great, no doubt, but if you want your sales reps help in making your teleprospectors better, have them give your BDR’s “dream” accounts to call into.  Sales guys all have this list – the name of marquee companies that they want to close, and especially the ones they haven’t even broken into yet.  Giving this list to your BDR’s helps them to be better because it gives them incentive to impress.  If there is one thing that I’ve learned most about the BDR’s that I work with, it’s that money is not always the number one motivator for them.  Maybe it’s their generation, or maybe they’re just better with their money than I am, but for the most part, they would MUCH rather receive recognition for a job well done than extra money (crazy, I know!).  I know that when I was a BDR, if a sales rep told me that he or she “couldn’t” get into Company A, that I busted my ass to make sure that I did.  Getting a list of “dream” accounts to call into made teleprospecting fun for me, and it helped me to raise my game because I understood the importance of getting my sales rep in front of that important account.

Next, your sales team can make your BDR’s better by letting them listen in on sales calls.  I’ve talked a lot about shadowing in on calls with your BDR’s, but they need to shadow your sales reps.  Giving them that opportunity lets your BDR’s hear how objections are handled by the folks in your organization who are the best equipped to handle them.  Listening on sales calls also allows your BDR’s to focus on an important skill without any pressure – listening.  There is a lot of pressure to listen while on a prospecting call.  At the same time you’re supposed to focusing in on listening to a potential sales opportunity, you’re also trying to process what questions they’re posing and what objection they’re throwing at you, and how you’re going to answer them both.  Shadowing in on calls with your sales team affords your BDR’s the chance to just listen.  That’s all they’ve got to do.  It can be a nice break for your teleprospectors while at the same time gives them the chance to learn a lot about the sales process.

Lastly, the very BEST way to get your sales team to make your BDR’s better is to have sales give them feedback on all leads.  This is the closed loop strategy; you’re closing the loop on the opportunities that sales receives.  There is no single better way to shape your BDR’s qualification skills then by having your sales team go over each lead that gets passed to them and detail what the end result was for each.  Was the information that they received initially validated?  What worked well?  What information wasn’t accurate and what information wasn’t provided that really should?  What is the next step in the life cycle of this lead?  All of this feedback only stands to make your BDR’s better.  I know that my BDR’s look forward to each interaction they have with the sales reps that they’re passing leads to because they want to know if what they’re doing is effective.  They want to be better at qualifying leads and when they hear the feedback from the folks who actually follow up on their leads, it spurs them on to achieve success.  My colleague, Lindsay Roberts, talked about having a closed loop strategy earlier this week in a webcast entitled Perspectives in Teleprospecting – A Closed Loop Strategy, and you should check that out here.

There are other ways, I’m sure, that your sales team can make your teleprospecting team better, so tell me what you think we should add to this list?

I’m not too young that I can’t remember Lee Majors as Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man.  Sure, it came out in 1974 and ran until 1978, when I turned five years old, but I know I watched it on reruns.  I even had the really cool Bionic Man action figure; you know, the one where you look through his eye for bionic vision?  That show (and action figure) was awesome!  Here’s this astronaut who is badly injured during a crash and the government comes along and gives him cybernetic parts, and basically turns him into a superhero.  The opening to the show was so cool, too.  “We can make him better than he was before.  Better, stronger, faster.”  How can you do that with your teleprospecting campaigns?  How can you take a sales prospecting effort that’s crashed and burned and rebuild it?

That was the premise of The Six Million Dollar Man – the government took a broken man and made him better.  I believe that you can do that with a B2B lead generation campaign.  Look, whether you’ve got a team of inside reps generating qualified sales opportunities or you’re working with a vendor to provide your sales team with sales qualified leads, at some point, you’re going to have a failing campaign.  Something is not going to go right, and you may just have to go back to the drawing board and “make [the campaign] better than [it] was before.  Better, stronger, faster.”  If you’re going to do that, I’d advise you to focus on the following three improvements for your Bionic Teleprospecting Campaign: 

1. Better sources of data.
2. Open the floodgates of what gets called.
3. Better designed messaging.

First and foremost, if you’re going to rebuild a teleprospecting campaign, start with getting better sources of data.  Where did you get the database of targets that you’re going to have your highly trained BDR’s calling into?  Were they tradeshow attendees from 2006?  Have they just been sitting in your CRM for a few years or a few months?  Seems crazy of me to ask, I know, buy you’d be surprised at what I’ve been asked to have my teleprospectors call on.  One of the keys to a very successful sales prospecting operation is to have a great database in place.  If you’re going to have a great database in place for your BDR’s to call from, you’ve got to spend some time thinking about where that data is going to come from.  Make sure that you’ve spent a good amount of time scrubbing any and all webinar and tradeshow attendees list, any white paper download lists, and every inbound lead you’ve received.  Firm up those names with a personally (okay, doesn’t have to be made by you, but someone who works for you) developed cold calling list.  Build it from scratch – just like pancakes baby, the ones made from scratch are better than any store bought kind.  The better the data your BDR’s have to call on, the greater the likelihood that they’ll be passing highly qualified leads faster. 

Next, when rebuilding your teleprospecting campaign, open the floodgates of what gets called.  I understand that your solution or services may play well in a certain vertical; I can appreciate that.  However, if you’re going to increase the number of qualified sales opportunities that your sales reps see, the name of the game here is to be as limitless (as opposed to limiting) as you can be.  If you can help it, don’t limit territories, either.  Also, make sure that your BDR’s are trained on all of your product offerings so that they don’t miss a potential opportunity when calling for one specific product; help your BDR’s to be better consultants.  If you’re organization’s “sweet spot” is companies with revenue numbers between $50M and $100M and you didn’t hit your teleprospecting numbers, think about broadening your reach up and down those revenue numbers.  You may be more focused than you need to be.  The greater the reach you can give your teleprospectors, the greater the chance they have of passing you qualified opportunities.

Lastly, when rebuilding a failed sales prospecting effort, make sure you have better designed messaging.  Spend time researching the pain points of every one who has the potential to benefit from your product and build individualized messaging and talking points for them.  Review what worked and what didn’t work.  The best sources you have here to help you out are your teleprospectors – or better yet the information they’re documenting from their phone calls.  If your BDR’s are properly utilizing your CRM, you should be able to report on all of the conversations they’ve had.  From there, you can utilize that information to build messaging around the various titles of individuals that they’ve spoken to.  The point here is that although I’m suggesting that you not limit what gets called, I am suggesting that you have targeted messaging for the people that your BDR’s talk with.  To be better equipped teleprospectors, they need to know why a C-level individual cares about your solution/service, and they also need to know why everyone who reports that person cares, too.  This, maybe even more important than building your cold calling list from scratch, is going to be the most time consuming, but the payoff is going to be huge.  Imagine your BDR’s talking to each person along the decision making process and having detailed information on each as to why they need your solution/service?

Those are just a few ways you can make your teleprospecting campaigns “better, faster, and stronger.”  What about you?  What would you do?