Today’s B2B marketing success revolves around the new spirit of collaboration between marketing and sales, and nowhere is this more important than the point where the sales cycle begins – defining the perfect sales lead.

There are myriads of technology choices and philosophies on how to generate, nurture and manage leads. However, any or all of these might end up futile if marketing and sales don’t agree on what defines a qualified lead prior to investing in lead generation activities.

Check out the following 4 tips for defining the perfect sales lead.

1.      Get sales and marketing on board at the start.

Trying to get two teams to agree on the definition of the perfect lead can be difficult, but is essential.

Whether you are well underway in lead generation efforts or just getting going, if you haven’t brought the teams together to discuss and define a sales lead, you should definitely set the foundation here. Once there is a working definition that both teams are comfortable with, the conversation can quickly change to ‘how do we get more, working together’ as opposed to ‘the leads we are getting aren’t qualified’.

Ensuring everyone has a hand in the definition makes everyone more accountable, both now and in the future. Be sure you meet regularly to clarify and fine-tune your lead definition as it may change over time due to, for example, economic and/or product line changes. And finally, don’t forget to put your lead definition in writing, and be sure that upper management is on board.

2.      Ask as many questions as possible.

Cover all your bases by considering the following:

• Which leads have converted quickly in the past?
• What do we know about previous leads that did not convert?
• What are the characteristics of current customers that we want more of, e.g. company size, location, industry?
• What kind of influence do particular leads have in the buying cycle (i.e. an end user, a buyer or influencer)?
• What is the current length of the buying cycle and how can we shorten it?

3.      Anticipate problems your audience is trying to solve.

You need to understand your leads’ unique set of challenges. Knowing these will enable you to intercept them as they research solutions to their challenges.

Prospects will generally fit into 3 buying stages:

New information seekers:  These make up the vast pool of anonymous individuals within your lead universe.  They’ve just begun the research process.
Continuing education:  These prospects have separated themselves from the pack by continuing their quest for further education on your industry or product.  Opportunity knocks:  These buyers are ready to pull the trigger and are looking for reassurance that they are making the right decision.

4.      Don’t stop testing.

Lead generation and lead qualification are dynamic processes. Even though you have a fixed, mutually-agreed-upon definition, be prepared revisit it at regular intervals. Industry changes affect your potential buyers.  If the economy is suffering, most likely your prospects’ buying power is too.

Stay current on the known leads in your database and watch how they perform.  New developments within companies that used to be your ideal leads may take them off the top of the list (i.e., department downsizing, internal budget cuts and management changes).

The B2B marketplace, with its many diverse niche verticals, rewards marketers that know how to target well. Finding the right channels and the right messaging is essential.

And having a viable lead definition makes sales more effective, strengthens marketing’s credibility, and ultimately generates revenue growth.

By:  Andrew Spoeth

Older americans are part of the strong fabric of the workplace. They bring longevity, experience and wisdom. It’s a remarkable experience to see multi-generations working in teams and side-by-side.

Each generation brings their own work history and involvement to the workplace.  All generations are part of the great experience of the workplace, each with defining characteristic and at least one nickname. Potentially five generations will participate in the workforce together.

All successful workforce teams must have the common thread of treating one another with great respect and dignity.

The older employee often faces challenges when job searching later in life. The over 50 job seeker can be overlooked by the employer. Traditionally, much younger candidates are often offered the employment opportunity.

Employers have expressed concerns regarding hiring someone from the older generation. Age can be considered a liability. The employer may be concerned about the potential of longevity of the older employer, wondering how long they will really commit to the job. The employer may be concerned about the physical requirements of the job and how well the older employee may fair.  The employer may also be concerned about the older employee and the cost and potential toll on a health insurance policy and the premiums for the company.

On the very positive side — older workers typically bring great work history and a very strong work ethic. They bring value and character with them to the new employer.

The older workforce often needs much less training when it comes to learning the culture of the new workplace. The older employee has a budget, knows they need a paycheck and they get to work each day, arriving on time and doing what is expected of them.

The older employee offers a unique stability to the team, as they are often not interested in job hopping, but are ready for commitment. They are a great asset, loyal and generally satisfied with where they are in life.

The older applicant should focus on the positive and be prepared to face some potential challenges in the job search. There are no insurmountable challenges.

For starters, consider an update to everything when it comes to the job search. Update your resume. Your resume should not show every job over the last 40 years. Use a resume format that organizes your skills, experience, abilities and education versus listing specifics and details of decades of employment. Never include your age, date of birth, or dates related to your education.  Use your resume as your tool to sell yourself and to be invited to an interview. Don’t allow the resume to eliminate you.

Once you are invited to the interview, forget your actual age. Focus on a professional demeanor. Present yourself in an updated manner. Confidently let the employer know that you are extremely valuable as a potential employee. Present yourself as a viable candidate; demonstrate your appeal and your desirable contributions. Update your wardrobe for interviewing. Update your hair color and style. If you want to be a serious contender, competing with generations of candidates, you’ll need to show the employer you are older, but still have a lot to offer. Do not focus on anything you cannot change.

By: Kathryn Harris

Are you a better coach or manager?  As a sales manager you are directing, supervising, managing, delegating, appropriating and reporting.  While these are important tasks, they may not lead directly to sales.  In some of my previous articles we discussed how important it is to coach your salespeople and how little time and training you may actually have to do that.  This article will give you some tips on how you can build your coaching skills and spend more time coaching.  Let’s start by defining coach.

Defining Coach

“A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.”

Tom Landry

Coaching is an interactive process that helps individuals and organizations develop more rapidly and produce more satisfying results.

Professional coaches are trained to:

• Listen and observe
• Customize their approach to the individual’s needs
• Elicit solutions and strategies from the individual

As a result of coaching, salespeople:

• Set better goals
• Take more action
• Make better decisions
• More fully use their natural strengths

Coaches believe that the salesperson is naturally creative and resourceful and that the coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the salesperson already has.

While the coach provides feedback and an objective perspective, the salesperson is responsible for taking the steps to produce the results he or she desires. (Modified from the Official ICF-International Coaching Federation definition.)

Are you a better manager or a coach?

What types of activities are you engaged in daily?

Coaches:

• Help salespeople set goals and then make a plan to reach those goals.
• Ask salespeople to stretch more than they would have on their own and give them the encouragement to do so.
• Focus salespeople on productivity not activity so that they produce results more quickly.
• Provide salespeople with tools, support and structure to efficient and effective.

Many sales managers feel they only have time to tell their salespeople what they want them to do and what they expect.  Most sales managers need to have more time to show salespeople and plan with them.  This will change behaviors, which will increase results rapidly. Too many times managers assume that salespeople can get the expected results, but in reality they are not sure how.

Let’s say you tell your salespeople to increase their sales by 20%.  They all agree.  The next thing you know several of them have increased sales but the rest of them have not and in fact sales have decreased for some of them.  How can this be?

Most high performers respond to a challenge and have the natural ability to increase sales.  The majority of salespeople will try to increase sales but little of their activities will pay off because they are already doing the best they can.  The ones that have had a decrease in sales are probably already struggling and de-motivated by the expectation to increase sales when they can’t even keep their sales steady.

When you set an expectation to increase sales, your salespeople will benefit from specific instructions on how to do so.  Part of this can be done in a sales meeting and the rest in one-on-one coaching.  For example, explain at the sales meeting where you expect the increase to come from.  It could be that the increase should come from a mix of new business and existing customers.  If that is the case explain that they should start with existing customers because the easiest business to get is more business with satisfied customers.

• Have each salesperson choose 10 customers with whom they feel they can increase business.
• Ask them to create a plan for increasing business with each customer.
• Discuss some of things that will need to be done, like checking on current satisfaction levels, asking questions to learn of needs, educating the customers on ways you can serve them and closing the deal.
• Then meet with them one-on-one to determine how they will execute their plan and how that will be measured.
• Check in with them weekly to see how their plans are working and give them coaching if they are stuck.

Once they feel they have exhausted getting more business from current customers help them make a plan to get new customers.  Since the easiest way to get new customers is through referrals, develop a referral process with them that they can all use. Put a timeline in place for implementing the referral process and coach them to stick to it by helping them prioritize their work.  Of course, there are many other ways to get new business and they should not be penalized for those, especially if they work, but do reward them when they implement the plan you have coached them on.

Closing is a crucial area where salespeople need coaching.  How many of your salespeople have deals that are stuck?  What type of coaching do you give them to help them move the sale forward?  Each week, provide time as a team or one-on-one to help salespeople close business.

Definitely spend time coaching your less productive salespeople but don’t let them consume you.  You will get the most results from coaching your productive salespeople because even the best salespeople get better with coaching

By:  Alice Heiman

This year’s crop of newly minted college graduates — and the parents who love and bankroll them — can look forward to the best job market for new grads since before the financial crisis began. According to a new survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), businesses are gearing up to hire nearly 20 percent more college grads in 2011 than they did last year.

As the table below shows, employers’ hiring plans have experienced a big jump from just this past fall, when they expected to hire 13.5 percent more college grads than the previous year. And the anticipated 19.3 percent hiring jump over last year would be the best since 2007.

While the pickup in hiring expectations is an oh-so-welcome bit of good news, the reality is that the job market remains incredibly competitive. For starters, just look at that table again; there are a whole lot of 2009 and 2010 college grads still angling to get a permanent foot in the door given the abysmal market they had the misfortune of graduating into.

Here’s what new college grads  –  and their parents eager to help them launch out into the real world need to focus on:

1. Better doesn’t mean great. According to the NACE, employers are seeing 21 applications for every job opening. Sure, that’s  much better than the 40.5 to 1 ratio of a year ago, but if you’re a college grad — or the supportive parent wanting to help in any which way to get them launched in the real world — you need to bring your A+ game to beat out the 20 other college grads applying for the same job.

2. Get geographic. Hey, you’ve yet to put roots down, so maybe you might want to head to where the hiring looks the most promising. According to the NACE survey, employers in the Northeast expect to hire 25 percent more college grads this year compared to 2010, followed by the Midwest at 20 percent and the West at 19 percent. And it looks like the Southeast could be the toughest slog for new grads, with employers in that region expecting to boost their college grad hires by just 8 percent.

3. Listen to Warren Buffett. Yes, he’s an old codger, but he’s a smart old codger. Turns out, Dale Carnegie, not Ben Graham, is the secret to Warren Buffett’s success. Buffett says the most valuable thing he ever did was enroll in a Dale Carnegie course to help burnish the social skills that are such an important complement to business skills. (You can download an e-version of Carnegie’s influential 1937 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People at Amazon. MoneyWatch’s Robert Pagliarini also has some great social-skills advice that goes a few steps beyond Carnegie’s approach.)

Sound impossibly old-fashioned? You could not be more wrong. In the NACE survey, employers said the most important trait they want to see in job candidates is the “ability to verbally communicate with persons inside and outside the organization.” That outranked computer skills, analytical skills, and technical skills. A recent CareerBuilder survey said much the same: strong written and verbal skills were the most important skill employers are looking for in new hires, cited by 69 percent of the survey respondents.

5. Remember your manners. In another recent CareerBuilder survey, more than 1 in 5 hiring managers said they would toss out any candidate from the pool if they didn’t follow up an interview with a thank you note. You don’t necessarily have to go the old pen to paper to stamp route; nearly 9 in 10 managers said an email thank you was just fine. But take the time to think through what might resonate with the person you just interviewed with. No surprise, IT managers want it via email. But if you catch the vibe that the hiring manager might appreciate a handwritten snail mail note, that’s a really easy and smart way to differentiate yourself from everyone else who will probably take the easier way out with an email.

6. Stay on top of your student loans. Regardless of how long your job search takes, your student loan lender is expecting you to start repayment pretty fast. If you have a federal Stafford loan, you get just a six month grace period between leaving school and when the lender expects the first payment. (It’s nine months for Perkins.) You can apply for a deferment, but you must make an official request. Ignorance is so not bliss here. If you just ignore it, your loans are heading for default, and this is one immensely costly mistake. It messes up your credit score. And just in case you’re wondering: even if you file for bankruptcy, your student loans won’t be dismissed. Think super glue. For more on this, be sure to check out 5 Student Loan Repayment Tips offered up by MoneyWatch’s Lynn O’Shaughnessy.

7. Yes, you need health insurance. Let’s keep this short: Crap happens, even to the youngest and healthiest among us. If your first job doesn’t automatically offer you health coverage — or you’re not yet working — talk to your parents. A new law allows adult children to stay on a parent’s employer-based health plan until age 26. That can be less expensive than getting your own coverage (you can shop around through ehealthinsurance.com). But if you’re living in a different state, have Mom or Dad double check if the plan coverage is the same for you — not all are. If you do piggyback on a parent’s plan, offer to cover the monthly premium. (See tip # 9 for more.)

8. Don’t overthink the grad school route. If you’ve got your eye on becoming a doctor or lawyer, an advanced degree is a must. But for everyone else, you’ve got a choice to make. According to the NACE survey, 90 percent of employers that are hiring will be adding grads with just bachelor’s degrees. Just half of the new hires are expected to be MBAs and other Master’s degree holders; less than one in four expect to hire a Ph.D. Before you think about grad school, talk to hiring managers in your specific field to understand how important another diploma really is to getting hired. You can always go back to school later, possibly with the boss footing some of the bill.

9. Be good to your parents. Ever since the financial crisis hit, more and more college grads have boomeranged back to living with their parents. It’s not just the grads that haven’t found a solid job. When you’re starting at a lowish starting salary and staring at big student loan payments, returning to the fold begins to look a lot better than sharing a two-bedroom apartment with five other roommates. But you’re no longer a kid and your parents are no longer responsible for taking care of you. Moving back in requires a careful and respectful negotiation.

By:  Carla Fried

Businesses have been told for years they need to spruce up their websites with high-quality pictures and other material to increase their sales, but there’s one element that’s becoming more important than ever – videos.

Not only do they give your business a more professional tone – if done correctly and with enough care – but data shows they will actually increase conversions and inquiries.

“Increasing traffic and so on is not just about having transactional websites,” says Viocorp chief executive Ian Gardiner. “It’s about how to get your message across about what you do.”

“That can be a hard task, but that’s where video moves into its own as a tool you can use.”

The data is quite clear Australians are keen video watchers. In fact, 70% of Australians have accessed audio or video content online in the past 12 months, according to Nielsen, and 30% look at online video weekly.

YouTube product manager David King told SmartCompany last year that small businesses need to start looking at the site as an alternative marketing channel.

“There are a lot of smaller to medium-sized businesses which have really operated with a focus of specifically gearing themselves towards publishing on YouTube, and they really make a go of it – and we give them a global audience to do so.”

If you’re not working with video, the evidence is clear – you should be.

The benefits of video

The internet has now become a haven for video watchers.

Nowhere else is this more evident than on YouTube. It is by far one of the most popular sites in the world – and has stayed there for years – and Australians flock to it every day for both entertainment and research.

Recent data from ComScore shows 80% of Australian internet users watched video online in October, with each user viewing nearly eight hours each. A total of 961 million videos were watched, and YouTube accounted for 503 million of those.

So what is the attraction? OzHut marketing manager Ivan Lim says users are far more able and willing to share videos than they are text.

“Videos are far more interactive than just text. It’s a form that is much easier for people to share, and people share things a lot more when it’s in video form.”

“Instead of reading long pieces of text, people are now sharing videos, and that’s become one of the main forms of content now.”

Reseo chief executive Chris Thomas says videos are increasingly becoming more important for retail businesses, especially in the fashion industry.

“We really want our clients to start using video. They spend a fortune taking photos, hiring models and so on. But we ask them if anybody thought to take a video of the entire experience, and they say no.”

Thomas says videos are particularly important with fashion – pictures can show a customer how a product looks, but a video will give more information on how a particular piece of clothing actually wears.

“A lot of cameras these days have HD video capability – it’s not a big stretch to get your talent to spin around and show off that product,” he says. “They’re much, much different from just a product description.”

The bottom line, customers feel safer and more comfortable when they’re shown a video of the product they’re about to purchase. It gives them clarity on its weight, quality and feel.

Lim says OzHut has actually recorded a drop in return rates due to using videos. “People don’t feel so unsure about how something works, so people have more realistic expectations about what the actual product is,” he says.

But these experts say not only do videos keep customers comfortable, but they actually increase conversion rates.

“Once someone sees how a product has performed, they tend to be more convinced, and as a result the conversion rate increases. We’ve experienced an increase in inquiries and conversions as a result of using video,” Lim says.

eStore general manager Davin Miller says his company has seen between a 10-30% increase in conversions since adding video tutorials on product pages.

“The data is not exact, but we’ve seen that when we run different products and add video tutorials, we’ll see the conversions are higher when those videos are there.”

Since eStore started using videos two years ago, over 90 have been added with a total of 260,000 views.

“We think it’s better to provide customers with much deeper experience than just reading texts and images. We want to provide a full shopping experience, and we’ve been able to increase our reach far beyond existing customers by being on YouTube.”

Videos make buyers comfortable

So how do you determine what type of videos you should be using?

The consensus is that if you’re in a retail business, you should be adding videos on your product pages alongside keyword-rich descriptions and high-quality photography. These allow the reader instant access to a realistic depiction of how the product moves – not just what it looks like.

One of Australia’s largest online retailers, eStore.com.au, has about 90 product tutorials on its store. An employee sits in front of a camera for two or three minutes, shows off the product and describes some of the features to the viewer. They aren’t comprehensive reviews, but Miller argues they don’t need to be.

“We think it’s a key differentiator for us, and it’s important to improve our product experience. I wouldn’t say they’re on every product, but many.”

OzHut uses videos on its product pages – but it doesn’t make them. Instead, Lim says the company sources videos from manufacturers and puts them alongside the product to save the user the trouble of switching to YouTube anyway.

“These videos aren’t just user-generated content, we take them from the actual source of the product.”

American company Ceilume users YouTube demonstrations to show off its ceiling tile products, and even has a “how-to” section of its site that uses videos as well.

Perhaps one of the best is the new YouTube channel created by fashion label French Connection UK. Users are able to go to the channel itself, and then interact with all the videos that show off different fashion items from that season’s line-up.

All the videos show off different products, with a presenter describing the various benefits of each one. At the end of some videos, interactive buttons allow the user to choose which video they would like to see next.

But the company’s use of video goes far beyond that – it actually integrates eCommerce. When users watch a “Show me how to” video, they can actually click on an item and be taken to the company’s online shopping basket.

By:  Patrick Stafford