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In an earlier post, I compared lead generation to dating. I said that many companies take to lead generation like they do the singles scene, except instead of buying drinks and saying hello to strangers, they go around the room asking anyone and everyone to marry them right off the bat. It’s a ridiculous way of doing things, and it hardly ever gets the kinds of results you want or need. Just like no guy/girl is going to accept a marriage proposal from a total stranger (and even if they did, what does that say about them?), no customer is going to get sucked into a complex B2B sale right off the bat.

At the other end of this extreme is what I call the Bachelor Syndrome. The Bachelor is a reality TV show in which the producers set up a guy to look like this prize catch and then parade a bunch of candidates in front of him to see if one of them can win his love. The guy is usually young, studly, and apparently wealthy and quite a catch. The women on these shows are the usual combination of beauty, brains, and what have you–from pretty much all walks of life (except for their inability to resist this kind of denigrating experience, apparently).

Just like companies can’t succeed by running around the room asking total strangers to marry them, they’re not going to succeed by putting on a Bachelor-type competition. If your customers feel like they’re on some kind of gameshow or contest to win your love, then it’s really not lead generation. I’m not sure what you call it, other than counterproductive, but it isn’t in the true spirit of providing valuable information to the marketplace to attract suspects and then nurturing those suspects into prospects and then transacting some business with them at a future time.

How do you know if your programs are more Bachelor game show than actual lead generation?

* If you have to keep reminding people that they need to make a buying decision now, you don’t have a lead generation program. You have a let’s-coerce-them-to-buy program. The analogy: if you tell your dates that you need some kind of next step in the process, then you’re just looking to score, not trying to be with that other person. If the person you’re with thinks you’re worth another date, then whatever it is you’re doing is working.

Try being a bit more subtle. Here’s where an automated lead nurturing program (like you find in Marketo or other tools) really helps. If they sign up for the white paper, invite them to the webinar. If they come to the webinar, invite them to the demo. At the demo, invite them to buy. If they don’t do these things, have different offers for them. Keep them in the loop, but if they don’t express immediate interest, don’t just keep asking them to buy with a louder voice.

* If the only reason you talk to people is to discuss money, a sale, or the status on a transaction or deal, then you don’t have a lead generation program. Listen, you have to spend a lot of time educating people. Giving them the power to make a good decision. We’re talking special reports, podcasts, demos, and the like.

If you’re in the jewelry business, then this won’t relate to you. People either buy or they don’t (at least, to my extremely limited knowledge about jewelry). Same goes for things like cars or groceries. Yes, people may want to research MPG or whether to buy organic or not, but the decision cycles pale in comparison to say, CRM software, where there may be hundreds if not thousands of decision points that need fleshing out.

Therefore….flesh them out! Don’t just hammer away at price or TCO. There’s lots more to talk about!

* If you’re not talking to the 95% of your database that hasn’t purchased yet, then you don’t have a lead generation program. The vast majority of your list will be people in wait and see mode. They’re trying you out. They’re examining your product or service from every angle. They’re talking to others who have bought from you. So why not give them a hand? Talk to them. Answer questions. It doesn’t take a glitzy approach. Just host a teleconference and answer questions. Or hold a workshop and take lots of questions.

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Recession looms, and yes, its more than just some media-inspired (or pundit-inspired) conspiracy. Anyone who has studied economics for more than 5 minutes can tell you that attitudes and behaviors of market participants can have lasting effects on the market itself. In other words, if everyone is scared, it turns the marketplace into a scary place.

Here are three things you can do to get through any recession.

1. STOP THE PANIC MINDSET. Stop rushing about. Stop flip-flopping. Stop making erratic decisions. Stop sampling. Stop the sudden changes in direction every week. Instead, talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Find out what is killin’ them. Find out what is at the heart of their problems. Then offer to help them fix that problem or remove the pain. They will love you for it.

2. Leverage the Web to the hilt. It’s much cheaper to run a blog than to run advertising. It’s cheaper to publish white papers and host a podcast series than to try to get a superbowl ad. It’s better to run free online workshops than to churn out endless amounts of swag. Its easier to leverage your LinkedIn community than to try to cold call 1000 strangers, 80% of whom don’t want to talk to you. It’s more profitable for you to optimize your web site and get incoming links than it is to buy a ton of banners somewhere.

3. It’s time to look within…so do it. What processes can you improve internally? What training do you need? Is it time to slow down a bit? Maybe take a few days off? It sounds counterintuitive, but when things slow down, give yourself a break. The market will pick up in six months or a year, and you’ll be back in the thick of things. When that time comes, are you going to be refreshed or are you going to be whipped?

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About a week ago, I asked my colleagues and network on LinkedIn:

How do you keep marketing and sales moving forward during a downturn/recession?

I was curious to see what they had to say about it, because there’s lots that can be learned from our colleagues. In any case, there were a ton of enlightening responses. My favorite was from Brian Massey who basically said, don’t assume that your clients will participate in a recession–you have to know if they are or not.

That’s basically the answer I got from a lot of folks…..you can only make good decisions if you have good metrics and data. You can’t just guess. You can’t just be erratic. You can’t just wander from one thing to the next in hopes of making something work. Customers in a recession are like customers at any time–if you give them value, and present the case properly, they will buy from you.

Here is a collection of answers to my question on LinkedIn.

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Designers….learn it, use it, love it.

Grid systems bring visual structure and balance to site design. As a tool grids are useful for organizing and presenting information. Used properly, they can enhance the user experience by creating predictable patterns for users to follow. From designer’s point of view they allow for an organized methodology for planning systematic layouts.

After creating a well-structured and usable grid, consider allowing it to breath. A page without a grid is a usability nightmare. On the other hand, a grid that has creatively overlapping, escaping, or energizing columns leads to a more enjoyable user experience. Discovering or planning areas of the design that will have some freedom will lead to more interesting and appealing design solutions.

Article includes case studies and examples. I’ll certainly be using this idea more as it brings some sense of stability into front-end design considerations.

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The good folks at paidContent.org are reporting alternative media spending will grow in 2008 by 20% or more–to 88 billion US dollars. For those of you who are not clear on what “alternative media spending” encompasses online advertising, mobile advertising, digital-at-home (ie, interactive TV, DVR ads, video games, etc), and other ad buys.

– Taking a closer look at online and mobile advertising - which includes search and lead generation, online classifieds and displays, e-media, online video and rich media, internet yellow pages and consumer-generated ads - spending jumped 29.1 percent to $29.94 billion in 2007. That collective category also experienced CAGR of 31.4 percent from 2002 to 2007. And while PQ’s forecast serves as a balm for alternative media, its research provides more angst for traditional media, as the former’s growth was driven was driven by a direct shift away from the latter.

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In the last seven years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with, talking to, and working alongside some really terrific people across a variety of companies. I’ve worked with solo entrepreneurs, startup companies, Fortune 500 giants with titanic budgets, and SMBs with tight pursestrings and big dreams.

Across all of these situations and environments, there’s one thing in common: about 9 times out of 10, when I ask about marketing, I usually end up having a conversation about “brochures” and “swag and tchotkes.” In other, guarded moments with people outside of marketing (say, in Sales, or IT), conversations about the marketers usually devolve into three things:

• They’re helpless when it comes to technology.
• They couldn’t identify a lead if one showed up with a wheelbarrow full of money.
• They’re only good at printing up brochures and hiring booth babes for the convention.

All of these statements (and many more like them) are patently unfair, of course–but let’s face it guys, marketing practitioners have always had a bit of a self-esteem problem. We know we’re among the first to get the axe once bad times roll around–but we’re not willing to do the hard work of establishing ourselves as grownups at the revenue table. We accept the fact that our activities cost money–but we don’t take credit when all of our communication efforts and follow-ups turn into a plausible lead in the pipeline (and later, a sale). We know that we’re not experts in all the technical things required to feed a Web 2.0 effort, but then again we don’t fight like crazy for the kind of headcount we need to stay competitive.

Why is that? I don’t know. But it’s got to end. Marketing is really the only way that companies stay alive. Yes, sales brings in the money, but if sales had to draw their attention away from selling to communicating (yeah, that really long tail of informing, educating, empowering and talking to the customer [in print, online, at events, via webinars, white papers, case studies, conference calls…..etc etc etc] way before and during and after the sale is made) then you would see sales plummet….and in fact, there would be other second-order effects because really, you hire a salesperson to sell, not to figure out messaging strategy or build web sites or write white papers. They would do these things so badly that they would not only be selling less, but screwing up the fewer sales they would get.

With that in mind, read a few blog posts below and assert yourself.

• Earn a seat at the Revenue Table, Part 1
• Earn a seat at the Revenue Table, part 2

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If you’re anything like me, you manage team members (employees, contractors, freelancers) and customers. Given enough people you interact with, you start having to process a lot of voice and email communication–and a lot of that stuff contains either status updates or action items. Unfortunately, a vast amount of that stuff is long and convoluted, each beginning with an explanation about what happened and finally meandering to a closing that summarizes the problem and maybe offering some kind of solution or way out of the problem.

Often times, you have to read the whole message in order to figure out if there’s a problem or an action item in there somewhere. It can get pretty frustrating, particularly if you’re in the heat of the moment and receiving 20-30 such emails every few hours. Such is life in the fast lane, right?

Not necessarily!

As my good friend Ian Stahl once said to me in the middle of the DotCom madness, “Stop coming to me with problems….bring me a problem and a solution.”

Here’s a nice little template for making status communications run smoother:

1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers. “Milestone 4 wasn’t hit on time, and we didn’t start Task 8 as planned.” Or, “Received charter approval as planned.”
2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project. “Because of the missed milestone, the critical path has been delayed five days.”
3. Next steps: The solution, if any. “I will be able to make up three days during the next two weeks but will still be behind by two days.”
4. Explanation: The reason behind the punch line. “Two of the five days’ delay is due to late discovery of a hardware interface problem, and the remaining three days’ delay is due to being called to help the customer support staff for a production problem.”

Notice that this template is in reverse order of how we normally get status information, but it is a heck of a lot more efficient for everyone involved because of the reversal.

You can read the whole story (and the story behind this blog post’s headline) at computerworld.com.

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I gave a talk at TechBA (a program that’s part of the University of Texas–basically they nurture and grow tech companies from Mexico) a few weeks ago. Each slide in my Keynote presentation consisted of 1-2 words. I had two slides in there that featured diagrams that I built up with transitional effects, but that was it for complexity.

Each word was in like 96 point font on a plain black background. The topic of the talk was “Marketing 2.0″ and the focus was on the fact that Marketing 2.0 is really about getting back to the basics of Marketing, where marketing was before Advertising (and Advertising Agencies) turned marketing into an exercise in shouting at the top of your lungs over and over and over again until somebody purchased your stuff.

In any case, after reading Presentation Zen and Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Powerpoint rule I’m happy to say that I’m finally on the cutting edge of something or other.

Listen, all of you who think that each slide should contain 6-7 bullet points (and each bullet point should feature 6-7 words)…there’s this thing called “cognitive overload.” If you present us with a ton of words on the screen and start talking about those words, we will only be able to focus on one or the other. When we figure out that you are simply reading from the slides, then we’ll just read the slides.

Guess what? We can read faster than you can talk. So there’s no point in your being up there, right? Just email us your word-packed presentation (or what some call “slide-umentation”) and be off with you.

My personal goal? That you can’t understand my slide presentation without my presence (or at least, my voice). I use 1-2 words per slide, or an arresting image, and use those words and images to bolster what it is I’m talking about. And I get a lot more engagement out of the audience. I used the word WTF on a slide behind me as I talk about “what your target market shouldn’t be thinking when they encounter your marketing.” Even a bunch of software guys from another culture got what I was saying–the titters and laughter said it all.

Am I saying that I’m the next Tony Robbins. Hell no. But at the very least I can make a presentation enjoyable and dynamic and try to erase some of the collective pain being inflicted on business audiences every day.

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InsideCRM.com has just posted a fabulous article called “101 Five Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve your Web Site“.

The list is pretty good, and it conveys a lot of what I believe in and tell clients all the time. I particularly like the following snippets:

Copywriting
* Stress benefits
* Make headlines meaningful
* Offer social proof

Usability
* Offer a short “about” page
* Always have text links
* Ask for feedback

SEO
* Replace underscores with hyphens
* Update content often
* Give pages real names

Accessibility
* Create accessible forms
* Allow text resizing

Design
* Place important information above the fold
* Remove link cloaks
* Reduce graphics

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While I was at SxSW, I couldn’t help but notice how cool and trendy all of us WebGeeks were, with our Macbooks and Twitter accounts and smartphones. We were discussing alternate-reality games, privacy in social networks, use of blogs and podcasting during war time, building strong virtual communities, lead generation on the web (cough), and Second Life.

I got the sense that the world of the web has increasingly become extremely bifurcated between those who practice all this stuff and those who buy these services. I thought a lot about the marketing directors and VPs (and business owners!) I rub shoulders with every day, and I don’t think many of them have quite the handle on these issues that we geeks think they have.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that most of the folks who hire the Triple Dogs of the world really don’t care about all these cool little techno-issues. They care about their businesses, and about dominating a marketplace, or about disseminating a message to the right audience.

So I figured, “Hey, that’s a nice thought, why don’t you ask the community and see what happens?” So I did. A few nights after SxSW I posted the following question onto LinkedIn:

What are the top 3 online issues/problems you face as marketer/business owner?

Let’s face it–web experts live in a pretty rarefied atmosphere. We tweet, blog, and attend virtual conferences. We’re familiar with CSS, content management, and analytics. It’s easy to forget how strange this world is to an outsider looking in. I’m trying to get a sense of what marketing managers and business owners really face out there.

What are the top 3 (or more!) issues, problems, questions, or challenges you face in the online world?

I received about a dozen replies, all of them long, thoughtful, and pretty much hard to summarize in a pithy report. In fact, I won’t even try to summarize them all, nor will I mention them all. I will try to convey to you the sense that I got from them, because they each offered a compelling look inside our collective headspace.

Right away, one particular response (from Shanker Achari) made me pause. It begins:

I think that the biggest separator between marketers and their IT expert colleagues is the perception of what is driving the business. The issues are not usually technological, though it might seem like that. It is important not to lose focus and to only address those online services that will add value to the firm - not to jump onto each and every web-based bandwagon that crosses your doorstep.

I definitely understand what he’s saying here. After 15 years in this business, I’ve definitely crossed some kind of threshold. I’m constantly looking for the WHY instead of just the what and the how. Why is this project important? Why are we doing it? Why aren’t we doing this other thing? Why are we doing it now?

Others, like David Pedragon and Greg Kilgore get down to even brassier tacks: how do we drive traffic to our online sites? Do I have enough bandwidth and resources to handle the traffic? Can I continue to make improvements in content, usability, and other areas to increase response rates? Can I filter out the fluff/noise/chaff to focus on real opportunities? Can someone please add several more hours to each day so we can get everything done? (This sentiment also echoed by many others!)

Angela Brutsche brought up a good point: “Determining when/if to let go of traditional communication mediums.” It’s a scary thing, venturing out into this brave new world, where a storm of tweets at a conference can erase a whole bunch of expensively created brand good will.

Rene Craft hit it on the head when she mused:

Getting used to the new technologies constantly popping up and trying to figure out which ones are useful for business vs. just for kids (ie, anyone under 30).

I remember when I was one of those hotshots under 30, but of course, back then, having a tables-compliant browser was the cool thing. I’m just kidding.

All in all, the sense I’m getting from all these responses is that it’s high time to focus on value. Become really good at a few things within the Web world, and pursue your goals with a passion. Help companies make money with all this stuff instead of bouncing them from one faddish technology to another. Help them start and deepen conversations with their customers with great tools, good usability, and great content, and the rest becomes easy.

In this, as in all things Web, we all have a place at the table–whether we’re copywriters, back-end developers, Ajax scripters, designers, or PHP nerds.

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