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I’ve created a Squidoo page with sample content from my O’Reilly Shortcut. Check it out.

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Cisco Systems Michael Metz, addressing a recent B2B marketing conference, talked quite a bit about how the networking giant is using Web 2.0 technologies to help sell product. I was most interested in their use of click to chat and how it was deployed in smart ways to really make those prospects convert to customers:

Metz was most enthusiastic about new “click to chat” functionality, which was added in November. “We started on 15 low-traffic pages,” he said, noting that customers who engaged a live call center agent in a “Chat with a Cisco expert” chat window had a conversion rate of 43%.

When Cisco targeted the chat window with business rules—for instance, only offering it to customers who visited the pages three times in a week, made product comparisons or spent more than 45 seconds on a page—the number of sessions with the same high conversion rate doubled.

Here’s the whole piece: Multiple Home Runs from Web 2.0

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Doesn’t matter what you do–spinal surgeon, marketing consultant, iPod hacker, speech coach–you’ve probably experienced a common problem at cocktail parties and networking meetings. There you are trying to get to know people (or just plain relax with a drink) and you get someone who comes up to you and wants free advice.

If you’re a doctor, and someone asks you for medical advice, you can always tell them, “Fine, just take off your clothes and I’ll examine you.” Doesn’t work so well for the rest of us. Neither does wearing a t-shirt that says, “No I won’t fix your computer right &^%*#! now” if you’re a geek. The polite brush-off is just something that will ultimately hurt your business in the long run, so what you need are some strategies. (For more on this, check out an interesting article in the NYT, which unfortunately doesn’t go far enough in giving practical advice on the lead gen front.)

The first thing I do when people approach me about how to fix an online marketing problem is to start asking them questions. I usually start with who they’re trying to reach, what product or service offering they’re trying to communicate, and what they’ve found to be the most effective hot buttons. By the time I get to about the third or fourth question the person who has approached me starts to realize that their request is pretty complicated. I time it such that just as the little light bulb goes off I hand them my business card and encourage them to contact me at my office the next business day.

For others, I encourage them to go to my web site and sign up at our newsletter. There are already lots of articles on there, with more coming via email every 2-3 weeks or so. They can also register for free teleseminars, read my blog postings, take a free email course, and even become a member at our Lead Generation Center.

The point is, have something ready for the curious. Give them a little taste of your process–think of it as a sample. But have some solid boundaries in place. Reserve the in-depth discussions for business hours, or get them to sign up at your web site. (By the way, I tell people directly, “Go to our web site and sign up for our FREE newsletter.” I give them a specific call to action, not “Go to our web site.”)

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Playing the lead generation game means dealing with folks who are window shopping. All they’re doing is downloading your white paper or tip sheet and trying to figure out who you are and what you do. They’re at the very beginning of their quest for understanding or decision-making.

How can we do a better job of speeding up some of that decision making? Simple. Take a page from the pet store owners. What do they do? They put the puppies in the window. There you are walking along the street with your kid and you pass a pet store. In the window is a pile of fuzzy, wiggling, yawning, squirming cute little puppies. This movement and cuteness factor draws you into the store.

You as the parent are probably not wanting a new puppy, but your kid is enthralled. What does the sales clerk do? Take a puppy out of the pile, of course, and in no time, your whole family is interacting with a little fuzzy love monster that’s licking fingers and getting its belly petted.

Whether you like it or not, the path of least resistance is to get the puppy, because now everyone is completely in love with this little creature.

Movement in the window gets your attention, cuteness gets you in the door, interaction and closeness closes the deal. What can you do in your business to make something like this happen?

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We’ve all had this happen to us: we get ready for a trade show or other event. We prepare banners, have CDs to handout chock full of demos and other useful information, we get white papers printed out, have testimonials and customer success stories memorized, and then we arrive at the event. By all accounts, its a smashing success, with lots of folks at our booth and lots of business cards collected over several days.

The trade show team gets back to HQ and then they get busy with other stuff. Those leads, so hopeful and glimmering just a few days ago, get very cold. After a few weeks, some action is taken on them, but nobody can remember what the conversation was all about. Unfortunately, this happens a lot.

Here are some ideas to turn this thing around. It all comes down to effective lead scoring. On a web site or with tools like Eloqua, you can drive very specific lead scoring techniques that take into account a whole bunch of parameters and vectors. For the kind I’m talking about, you’re going to use some simple rules of thumbs (heuristics) and your trade show or event team. This kind of thing has to work five minutes after the event starts, when everyone is fresh, and be just as effective on the last day of a weeklong marathon.

First of all, you have to have a plan going in. Your trade show team has to know how to evaluate the people they talk to. They have to know, for example, that you are targeting C-level marketing executives at companies with $500 million in revenue (and up) who are looking to purchase in the next 6-9 months. That’s the first tier. Second tier are the people who work for those C-level marketing execs. Third tier are other C-level executives who might have the ear of that first tier (such as the CFO or CIO). Fourth tier is everyone else.

Without this knowledge, your team is flying blind. They won’t know how to categorize the people who visit their booth or talk to them at a networking event.

Once your team is in place, they have to act differently along two vectors: who the person is (as identified by our tiers above) and what their level of interaction is. Don’t assume that just because they are in the third or fourth tier that they are somehow a bad lead.

Let me give you an example. Your team is at their booth, and their perfect tier 1 prospect walks up: a CMO at a $700 million dollar company who self-identifies a need to move within the next quarter or two using your solution. However, he doesn’t linger to talk seriously, nor does he take a Demo CD or schedule a demo later on in the show. He just leaves his business card and walks away. Predictably, you never do get an appointment.

Later on in the same day, though, a lower level marketing manager at a somewhat smaller firm ($300 million) comes by and asks a lot of questions. They sign up for the very next demo at your booth in an hour, stays after for more questions, then leaves not only their own business card but their bosses’ card as well. They want you to call so he can introduce you to the CMO and the CFO (who must sign off on all capital purchases of software).

Who do you think is a hotter lead? Obviously, it’s the second one. The lower-level manager’s level of interaction pushed them up higher in the list.

My suggestion is to keep track of all this activity with a simple system of note-taking. Those visitors who drop by and just leave a business card after minimal interaction get nothing jotted on the back of their card. If they ask general questions about your product or service and take literature, put a star on the back of their card. If they ask specific questions about their own situation and seem to want some kind of assessment, put them down for two stars. If they ask for a demo right at the show, or take a demo CD with them, put them down for three stars. Finally, if they’re seeking a post-event call or want to talk with you further at a happy hour before the show is over, put them down for four stars.

Combine this star rating with what you know about what tier they are in. To me, the more stars, the better (regardless of tier), but let your instinct guide you. It may be possible that a lukewarm tier one prospect might be better for you than a red-hot tier three (as the latter may have no signing authority, ultimately) but at least you have some way, with your star notation, to prioritize trade show leads.

Another suggestion: at the end of each day, enter your business card data into a database along with notes on your interactions (you may have to do this a few times a day to keep your memory from going soft). Urgent or red-hot leads can then get special treatment, like emails to set up calls or meetings, right away, and you can stop worrying that you won’t get to them after the show.

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