Here’s my answer:

1. Useful, relevant content is essential to get readership, and to avoid opt-outs. (I recommend aiming for 80 percent or more useful content and 20 percent or less promotional content.)
2. Make sure compelling copy is visible in the upper left corner. (When viewed as HTML with graphics shut off, as well as when viewed as a text email or via a PDA/phone.)
3. Including fewer, shorter articles in more frequent e-newsletters is usually gets better results than including more, longer articles in less frequent e-newsletters. (E-newsletters with fewer, shorter articles are easier to get completed and sent out, and more frequent newsletters help keep your company and its products or services in sight and in mind.)

What best advice would you give your fellow B2B marketers about e-newsletters?

Please add your recommendations by clicking on the word “Comments” in the line below the Share button.

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If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

My guest today is Stephanie Miller, email expert and co-author of Sign me up! A Marketer’s Guide To Email Newsletters That Build Relationships and Boost Sales.

Stephanie describes herself as a customer advocate who, through her work with email performance company Return Path, helps marketers reach the inbox and connect with prospects and customers via email and social marketing.

Recent research sponsored by Google and Forbes found that on average 27.6 percent – more than one in four email messages – never reach the businesspeople they were sent to. Stephanie, why is this happening and what should this blog’s readers do about it?

This study tracks with Return Path’s Deliverability Benchmark Report on the first half of 2009, which is based on the data Return Path manages for ISPs and corporate system administrators.

It found that about 28% of B2B marketing email never reaches the inbox, which is higher than B2C email (20% of that gets blocked). This is true for even the best of marketers.

Remember too that it is not always the same 28% – you will sometimes reach the inbox of a particular subscriber and sometimes not. So you can count on the fact that some portion of your audience is not seeing every email. Witness your own Junk folder. You will see lots of stuff in there you sometimes see in your inbox.

Why?

Put simply, email marketing messages get blocked because they are sent in bulk, which makes them look like spam. This is bad because marketers can get trapped by the same systems put in place to stop spam by the postmasters at ISPs like Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail, and by small business and corporate system administrators.

The way to avoid being blocked is to improve the reputation of your domain as well as the engagement of your subscribers.

The good news: This also optimizes response and revenue. Engage and delight your email recipients and they will respond with clicks, downloads, sharing to their networks and longer session lengths.

The bad news: It’s not about content – so changing words like "Free" or "Click here" won’t make much of a difference.

More bad news: There is a whole gauntlet of filters between "Send" and inbox. There is hardware at the receiving gateway; there is software on those machines; there are reputation-based filtering services like Postini and Cloudmark; and then there are filters in software such as Outlook 2007. Yikes!

What can B2B marketers do?

1. Track your sender reputation. Use a service like Return Path, directly or via your ESP. If you don’t see actual inbox placement data, then ask for it. Inbox placement is a new number – the number representing the difference between what gets reported as "delivered" or "accepted" by your service provider and the open rate. You can get a quick overview of your sender reputation free at www.senderscore.org or dnsstuff.com.
    
2. Map your domain footprint. Know which domains are most important to you. If you have a large percentage of web-based domains on your file or if you market to small businesses you will see a large number of Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail addresses in your file. That is good – because data on inbox placement to those ISPs is readily available and is a good proxy for how the corporate administrators handle your email. We have done this analysis for global marketers and identified the top 20 companies on their file – and then we reach out to each of those companies and find out what sort of filtering is happening and try to become whitelisted. This is a manual but very effective strategy.
    
3. Build your confidence. When a CEO or one of your brand managers says, "Our message went to Junk," or a subscriber says, "I’m not getting your event invites," many B2B marketers feel as if they have been hung out to dry. It’s hard to know how to address that. However, by tracking your ability to get past such filters as Postini, Cloudmark and Outlook 2007, you can say, "Yes, I know the message didn’t reach your particular inbox, but the data shows that we are reaching about xx% of all the inboxes at businesses we target."
    
4. Watch rendering. Be sure to know how your message renders – with and without images! – in the various versions of Outlook and on mobile devices. Lotus Notes breaks nearly everything, but it’s worth tracking that too, especially if you have a lot of subscribers at companies that use that system. Be sure to create versions specific to the email clients that are most important to you. A publisher may want to optimize for the lower capabilities of mobile, while a technology company might want to optimize for Outlook.

Stephanie, what tools are available for increasing the deliverability of email and which will make the most difference?

Tracking of inbox placement and rendering. Get this data directly, or ask your ESP to provide it. Also, lots of data can be gained when marketers become certified and placed on various whitelists. This last option is available to only the best senders who qualify.

Can you share some email best practices that B2B marketers should be following?

Here is a quick checklist. See how you rank on all these, and use the results to develop a plan to refresh and update your email program. You’ll quickly see higher results.
 

1. Focus on the subscriber. Mail less frequently but with more value in each message. Tailor messages to the behavior (e.g. recent download) or demographics.
    
2. Track your sender reputation and inbox placement rate. If you don’t get this data from your ESP today, ask for it.
    
3. Make it easy to see what the call to action is.
    
4. Keep it simple – no one has time to read a lengthy newsletter, even if the content is interesting. Break it up into shorter, pithier messages and guide subscribers to the website.
    
5. Get permission and actively engage to ensure that subscribers still want to be in your file.
    
6. Use a Preference Center to give subscribers choices, then communicate that they can visit the Preference Center frequently as their needs change.
    
7. Treat prospects differently from customers. Use unique content and a slower pace.
    
8. Highlight and nurture your most active and most socially networked subscribers. Email and social marketing are natural allies. Use them together to build relationships and encourage dialog.
    
9. Carefully vet the sources of your email file – e.g. are some partners sending data that turns out to be unresponsive?
    
10. Include links to your LinkedIn profile and other social network sites, and encourage subscribers to "Share this" by providing auto-status update links at each article or call to action.

Are there email practices that our readers should avoid?

Avoid high frequency. Avoid all image-HTML messages (your subscribers will see a big gray box instead of your call to action). Avoid lots of links and images if you think your audience is reading email on mobile devices. Avoid generic messages. Avoid sharing lists between brands or companies – treat the permission grant with respect.

The Golden Rule of email marketing is to treat your subscribers the way you would like to be treated – only sending them information that is relevant, timely and helpful.

Stephanie, is B2B lead generation a good application for email? How about lead nurturing and qualification?

Yes and yes. Email is the first and still most widely utilized dialog channel! Email is great for customizing the "storyboard” – aka: sending drip marketing campaigns. For prospecting, keep it very simple and offer a compelling call to action that has a low bar of commitment. “Download a whitepaper” is certainly simple, but may be too ordinary to break through. “Submit three questions to our expert and we’ll provide custom answers in two days” is more compelling.

Email is also great for moving prospects through a sales cycle. Again, customize. For free trial downloaders, send a series that guides them through getting started and then to exploring cool features that you know help close a deal. As the free trial ends, segment by those who have actually opened the software vs. those who did not. Later in the cycle, focus messaging around making a business case for the product purchase, since most B2B expenditures have to be approved by some committee or some executive.

If that sounds like a lot of work, remember that you create this series of messages once and then use it over and over again.

Are there any tips you can give for selecting the right email service provider?

There are so many providers, and it has become a commodity business so you won’t find many big differences between them all. (Note: My employer is NOT in this business, but we do partner with the best ESPs to provide inbox deliverability data.)

My recommendation is to start with an audit of your own needs – is segmentation the most important thing? Data integration? HTML templates? Then seek out four to five of the ESPs who best serve marketers with your size lists and ask them to show you how they would address that most important requirement. They need to be able to show you how they can do the whole service, too, but frankly, almost every one of them can check off every box in your RFP. If you focus on the one factor that drives your email marketing success, you will then have a point of differentiation.

Another deciding factor is to meet the person who will be your internal advocate – both account service and executive levels.

There is lots of buzz about video email. What are your thoughts about it?

I love the idea, but honestly, the only way video in email can be used for any significant reach is via an animated GIF that mimics video and links to a web page for the full experience. Technically, it’s not that cool, but it can be very effective if done well.

Don’t use video just to use it, however. Without it being central to the call to action, you will find that video can distract subscribers and actually reduce response. Instead, use it when it helps tell your story and close the conversion. Then it can be powerful.

To wrap things up Stephanie, are there any final thoughts about B2B email that you want to share with our readers?

Don’t put your email on autopilot. It’s too important to your revenue and customer engagement and nurturing efforts. Just because it’s easy to hit send and it’s cheap to broadcast, please, please, please don’t neglect your subscribers’ interests. These are your customers! Take the time to engage them. Help them be smarter and more productive, earn more revenue, and look good in front of their boss and they will reward you with more response and revenue.

Stephanie, thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview!

Thank you so much for having me as your guest! Please tell your readers to email me at stephanie DOT miller @ returnpath DOT net, or to reach out to me at @StephanieSAM on Twitter.

Readers, please share:

• Click the Comment link to add your thoughts or suggestions.  
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If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

Are you looking for advice you can use to make your B2B lead generation programs as productive as they can be?

Get the 2009 B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study Report.

It provides metrics and best practices for B2B lead generation.

Please ask yourself these questions:

• Would it be useful to show senior management the big impact that lead generation has on the sales pipelines of other companies that sell their products and services to businesses, institutions or the government?
• Are you interested in knowing how your lead generation budget, tactics and results compare to those of other companies that sell products and servcicesto businesses, institutions or the government?
• Are you wondering what results your B2B lead generation peers are getting from telemarketing, email, their websites, online marketing, social media and other tactics?
• Do you know which lead generation activities your peers are now finding to be the most productive?
• Do you know how your B2B lead generation, follow up, nurturing and qualification processes compare to those of your peers?
• Would you pay only $159, with a money-back satisfaction guarantee, to get these answers and more?

If your answer to the last question was "Yes", click here to buy and immediately download the information-packed 2009 B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study Report.

If you’re still not convinced, consider this…

The 2009 B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study Report gives you the information you need to justify and improve your lead generation programs:

• It shares the lead generation best practices that are now getting the best results for your peers at other companies that sell products or services to businesses, institutions or the government.
• It also includes a detailed recommendations section written by two B2B lead generation experts. (Yes, I’m one of them!)

Please take a look at the Table of Contents.

2010 is just around the corner…

There are only a few months left to generate leads and close sales before the end of 2009. This report will help you figure out what you can do to boost your short term leads and sales results before the year is over.

And if you are starting to plan and budget for next year’s B2B lead generation programs and campaigns, the report will help guide your decisions on how to get the best results in 2010.

Also consider that you might pay thousands in consulting fees for the same advice. Or think about the wasted time, money and the risks you face trying to figure it all out using trial-and error approaches.

Instead you pay only $159 to get this essential information.

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Click here to buy and download your copy of the 2009 B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study Report today.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

The Sales Lead Calculator will help you determine how many new inquiries you need to generate enough qualified sales leads to meet your sales revenue goals. (See Step 5.)

Research conducted on B2B sales lead conversion across industries shows that, of those who buy:

• One in four buys within six months.
• Another one in four buys within the next six months.
• Another one in four buys within the third six months.
• The final one in four buys after eighteen months.

Simply said, three out of four sales opportunities are from the longer-term leads. So even though it may be tempting to create an occasional, dramatic marketing program that drums up a large number of new leads—so you can skim the ones that are ready to buy now—you are actually better off investing in an ongoing series of marketing-for-leads programs.

To get those additional three out of four sales opportunities, use direct marketing to nurture your longer-term sales opportunities until they are sales-ready. Consider creating a series of marketing messages that rotate through, say, the three biggest benefits of your products or services and related offers or calls-to-action. Send them to prospects monthly—one, two, three, repeat—effectively staying in-sight and top-of-mind as prospects move from awareness to inquiry, then from inquiry to consideration and purchase.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

To calculate what you will need, consider using my “Sales Lead Calculator”.

• Online Version – Sales Lead Calculator
• Downloadable XLS – Sales Lead Calculator

This interactive spreadsheet was designed specifically for B2B marketers. It automatically performs a series of calculations based on information you provide about your company’s sales revenue targets, average close rate, sales price and so forth, giving you a realistic number of leads needed to meet your sales objectives.

Using the dollar figures and percentages you enter, the spreadsheet will automatically calculate the following for you:

• Revenue needed from marketing leads this fiscal year
• New customers needed this fiscal year
• Qualified leads needed
• Total inquiries needed
• Total marketing contacts you need to "touch" in order to meet your goals
• Lead-generation budget
• Lead-generation budget as a percentage of sales
• Average cost per inquiry
• Average cost per qualified lead
• Average cost per sale
• Inquiries needed per salesperson this fiscal year
• Qualified leads needed per salesperson this fiscal year
• Qualified leads needed per salesperson per month

The Sales Lead Calculator not only gives you the total number of contact touches you require to meet your sales goal, it also gives you the number of contact touches needed per quarter and per month. Why? Because contacting 1,000 people twelve times a year will get you more qualified leads than contacting 12,000 people once.

A final consideration about the Sales Lead Calculator is the length of time it takes to close a sale. For example, if you have a six-month sales cycle, you should aim for twice as many leads as the calculator suggests. Why? Because if it takes six months to close a sale to a lead, half the leads you will get this year will close too late to affect the current year’s sales goal.

Consider using the Sales Lead Calculator in a meeting with your top sales and finance executives.

Use it to answer questions like these:

• What lead generation budget will we need to meet our sales revenue goals?
• What impact will spending more per touch have on our lead generation budget?
• How will our average response rate affect our overall results?
• How will the numbers change if we increase our average order size?

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

Your goal as a marketer is to help generate sales. Although there are some steps in closing sales that are out of your control, what you can do is identify qualified sales leads up front. If marketing, management and sales all agree from the start on what a qualified lead is, there is a better chance that you will generate leads that are valuable to the salespeople. It’s important to confirm the definition, in writing, with all parties. The definition of a qualified lead is different for each company, and each must do the work to define its own meaning of a qualified sales lead.

Typical definitions include criteria such as the following:

• Does the prospect have a need or an application for your product or service?
• What is the prospect’s role in the decision-making process?
• What is the prospect’s timing for purchase or implementation?
• What is the status of the prospect’s budget?
• What is the size of the opportunity?

A prospect is a contact at a company who admits to a business problem, either latently or directly, that could be solved by a product and/or service that you are selling. Your role, as a marketer, is to give the prospect hope of solving his/her company’s problem. Here are a few examples:

Problem: The company’s current disparate computer systems require employees to perform redundant data entry, thus wasting time and reducing efficiency.
Solution: Your software product would enable single data entry.

Problem: The company’s managers suspect its truck drivers are wasting time on their routes, but they don’t know for sure.
Solution: Your global positioning system would allow management to track the location of each truck at all times.

Problem: The company relies on face-to-face meetings among employees located in various parts of the country, but it has recently slashed its travel budget. It can’t afford to send the employees to meetings that require air travel.
Solution: Your web-based conferencing service would make it possible for the company’s employees to meet "virtually" in cyberspace.

In addition to having a business problem that you can solve, qualified leads

• Have an established project in play. This is apparent if a solution task force has already been appointed or, for a small company, if the inquirer’s boss asked him/her to find a solution or make a recommendation.
• Have the money to buy a solution, or are in the process of developing a budget.
• Plan to purchase within a reasonable amount of time.
• Have negotiated access to power. In other words, they can get you in front of the appropriate final decision-maker(s) when the time is right.

In addition to defining a qualified lead, you should create a glossary of standard terms defining what your company considers to be a "suspect," a "prospect," an "inquiry," a "response," a "qualified lead," a "qualified suspect," a "qualified prospect" and so forth. Again, sales, marketing and management need to agree on the definition of each term. This will avoid confusion later.

Lead scoring can be a valuable tool as you create your qualification definitions. To score a lead, assign points based on how well the prospect meets each of your lead-qualification criteria. Consider the following example:

To score the lead, add up all the points. Then, for example, those with 20 or more points are determined to be qualified leads; you should send them to your sales force.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

This step in developing your marketing-for-leads plan focuses on determining how many leads your marketing programs need to generate so that the company can meet its sales revenue goals.

"Why Bother With a Marketing Plan? We’ve Got a Sales Team."

Some people may get involved in an old argument, "Why do we need marketing? We have a robust sales force that is capable of bringing in sales. Why bother with a complicated marketing plan?" The fact is, even with a capable, motivated sales team—which includes a combination of salespeople, distributors, resellers and reps—you are generating less sales revenue than you could be if you relied on the efforts of the marketing team to find new business opportunities. In addition, if you depend only on the sales team, your cost of selling is probably higher than it needs to be.

In any business-to-business sales situation, salespeople typically find, on their own, about 40 percent of the new business opportunities needed to meet their company’s sales revenue goal. They develop sales opportunities through referrals, additional projects from past customers, potential customers they meet at networking events and past customers who have moved to new companies.

All of that works well for generating sales up to a point. Salespeople working on their own don’t generally reach the other 60 percent of sales potential for some very good reasons:

• Salespeople’s quotas and compensation programs reward them for bringing in short-term sales—this week, this month, this quarter. Therefore, they have little incentive to work the longer-term opportunities.
• Most people generally hate the rejection that results from cold calling. Salespeople are no different. They prefer to spend time with prospects that are ready to buy now, even though in reality those buyers represent only a fraction of sales opportunities.
• Salespeople tend to spend most of their time with current customers.

So how can marketing for leads be used to identify the other 60 percent of sales opportunities and make the sales team more efficient overall? Lead-generation tactics such as direct mail, telemarketing and events are ideal for finding qualified sales leads so that salespeople can spend each sales call where it is most likely to generate revenue. Online marketing via websites that cater to your target audience is another cost-effective way to generate leads.

What is the cost of a business-to-business sales call?

The average business-to-business sales call cost $329 in 2001, according to Cahners Research. This figure is based on responses from 23,341 businesses. Additional key findings of Cahners’ study include the following facts:

1. A typical business-to-business sale that exceeds $35,000 takes an average of 5.12 sales calls to close.
2. Less than 20 percent of sales efforts focus on prospective new clients.
3. The average number of sales calls taken by customers over the phone is 4.61 per week.
4. On average, customers have only 1.81 in-person meetings per week with salespeople.
5. Seventy-five percent of the companies studied say that making a sale valued at more than $35,000 requires a combination of direct and indirect sales efforts.

With the cost of a business-to-business sales call rising each year, companies cannot ignore the price tag associated with calling on prospects. By using the most efficient techniques to generate leads and investing in personal sales calls only when they have a greater potential to bring you closer to a closed sale, you automatically lower the cost of sales. The role of marketing for leads is to identify and nurture leads, moving them along to a point where the cost of a personal sales call, or a series of sales calls, becomes an investment in an actual sale.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

If your corporate goal is a twenty percent increase in sales, how much new business do you need to secure to meet that goal?

Say your annual sales revenue currently totals $10 million. At first, it may appear that you only need an additional $2 million in sales to meet your new goal for next year. However, if you also need to replace twenty percent of your sales revenue every year because of non-recurring sales, you will need to find an additional $2 million in sales during the next year just to stay even. So you will actually need an additional $4 million in new sales revenue to meet your goal.

The new-business-needed calculation

The following calculation will help you to determine the amount of sales revenue from new business your company will need to generate from marketing leads to meet its revenue goals.

• Your company’s current annual sales revenue $ _______.
• The percentage of business you typically lose during the course of the year
  x ________%.
• The sales revenue from new business your company must generate during the next year just to stay even = $ ________.
• Additional sales revenue from new business needed to meet your new target sales revenue goal + $ ________.
• Total new business revenue needed to meet your target sales revenue goal
  = $ ________.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

Have you ever read something that was completely contrary to your own experience with the subject, causing you to doubt its accuracy?

That’s what happened to me when I read Aberdeen Group’s recent report, B2B TeleServices: The 2008 Buyer’s Guide.

As a consultant who specializes in B2B sales leads, I’m frequently asked by clients to help them select outsourced telemarketing companies, and to implement or improve their outsourced telemarketing lead generation, follow-up and qualification programs. So I was looking forward to reading Aberdeen’s report, thinking it would be a useful resource.

However, I quickly turned from an eager reader to true skeptic as I read some of the findings and conclusions of the report.

For example, the report stated that the companies included in Aberdeen’s study were spending an average of 33 percent of their total lead generation budget on B2B teleservices. And those companies which Aberdeen determined were “best in class” were spending an average of 44 percent.

Based on my own, first-hand experience working on B2B sales lead programs for dozens of leading companies–large, mid-sized and small–these percentages seemed way too high.

So, to check my sanity, I informally polled a number of other industry experts. This included a few CEOs of B2B call centers, a handful B2B marketers who outsource their telemarketing for lead generation, follow up and qualification, and a few other consultants who work in and around B2B telemarketing. I asked them to read the report and let me know if they thought about those particular numbers.

What were the results of my small, informal poll?

While some of the numbers in the report appeared to be more realistic, 100 percent of those I polled agreed that Aberdeen’s percentage of lead generation budget numbers were way too high.

The B2B telemarketing company CEOs wished that their clients actually were actually spending 33 percent to 44 percent of their lead generation budgets on outsourced teleservices. Instead, they reported that their clients are spending far less.

In the opinion of fellow consultant and friend, Michael A. Brown, the Business to Business By Phone® expert, “The Aberdeen numbers (about the percentage of lead generation budgets spent on outsourced teleservices) can’t be correct. They just don’t ring true.”

The sampling of B2B marketers I polled, all users of outsourced telemarketing services as part of their lead generation, follow-up and qualification programs, said that the budget percentage numbers reported by Aberdeen were significantly higher than their own spending.

Michael Brown polled a few of his own clients too. They told him that they believe that the average B2B lead generation budget percentages for outsourced teleservices should be less than half those reported by Aberdeen.

Although my own small, informal poll isn’t statistically valid, perhaps the sampling of companies that Aberdeen studied wasn’t truly representative either. Or perhaps those surveyed by Aberdeen exaggerated their spending. Who knows?

Regardless, I’m sad to say that my skepticism of the high lead generation budget percentage numbers reported by Aberdeen causes me to question all the other numbers in their buyer’s guide as well.

How about you?

What percentage of your B2B lead generation budget is allocated for outsourced teleservices?

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

B2B marketing, marketing plans, marketing strategy, marketing

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

Let me show you how I walk through developing a marketing plan. The primary goal of a “marketing for leads” marketing plan is to stimulate prospects or customers to declare themselves interested in your company’s products or services; to generate sales leads that are opportunities for new sales and/or additional sales to existing customers.

Branding and awareness building is important too, but has different metrics. Blend your branding plan with the marketing-for-leads program for a cohesive strategy. Or let your brand messages come along for the ride with your lead generation messages.

Is there a specific format for a marketing plan?

In general, the format of your marketing plan depends on which audience it needs to communicate to. A simple on-screen presentation may be good enough when it is only being used as an internal working document. However, if you’re presenting to potential investors who you need to impress and who want to see all the thinking that went into your plan, you may opt for something as advanced as a multi-faceted document with tables of contents and numerous graphics and attached spreadsheets.

What information needs to be in it?

A typical marketing plan is written in this order:

• Executive Summary
• Mission Statement
• Situation Analysis
• Goals
• Marketing Strategies
• Marketing communications Tactics
• Resource and Budget Requirements
• Implementation Plan
• Supplementary Information

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary distills the key points from the entire plan into a one-page overview. Keep it readable. Although it appears at the beginning of the plan, write this section last because your plan will go through changes as you write it.

Mission Statement

The mission statement expresses the overall objectives of the marketing plan. Make your objectives succinct and measurable, not just hot air about being “the best.”

For example: “The mission of this marketing plan is to identify the best marketing strategies and tactics to increase our company’s sales revenue 25 percent in the next 12 months.”

Situation Analysis

Describe the current market environment your company is facing, including competition, economic and regulatory. Describe how your company’s abilities (internal) fit into the broader market environment (external.)

A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis will illustrate the gap between your current strengths/weaknesses and where you need to be.

Strengths include:

• expertise,
• employees,
• financial security and
• reputation in the marketplace.

Weaknesses include:

• what your company is not good at doing and
• resources your company doesn’t have available.

Here’s your chance to review past marketing activities, define the range of products you are marketing, and address changes in the customer base (e.g., a major merger or acquisition.)

Goals

Describe your company’s goals. Consider including sales revenue goals at three levels: minimum, target and stretch.

• Minimum goal: the sales revenue needed to stay in business without layoffs
• Target goal: where senior management would like your company’s sales revenue to be
• Stretch goal: matches your management’s most aggressive revenue targets

Key points to include…

• The percentage of revenue that needs to come from new business;
• The percentage of new business revenue that needs to come from marketing generated leads;
• A definition of a qualified lead;
• The number of qualified leads from marketing that you need to meet your goals;
• The number of new inquiries you need so you can identify the required number of qualified leads; and
• The number of marketing touches you need to generate enough inquiries.

Keep in mind, your objective is to answer the most important questions in this marketing plan. It takes effort to get these metrics, but when you have them, it shows you have a pulse on what’s really going on.

Marketing Strategies

Explain the strategies you developed to meet the sales goals listed in the previous section. Discuss the business problems your products and services address and your company’s solutions. Identify the companies, contacts, and vertical or horizontal markets which are the best targets.

Marketing Communications Tactics

These are the steps needed to implement the strategies and achieve the company’s goals. How will you communicate with your target audiences? Talk about:

• your list sources
• detailed communications media including direct marketing, online marketing, events, or print advertising
• offers including how-to guides, buying guides, white papers, information kits, live demos, or invitations to events
• relationship marketing techniques including newsletters, events, direct mail letters, phone calls, emails, or faxes
• sales tools including items like PowerPoint presentations and proposal templates
• online demonstrations or events
• leave-behinds
• templates
• case studies
• reference stories

Resource and Budget Requirements

What do you have to work with? What do you need to get the job done? Include in-house and third party resources such as

• marketing communications experts,
• graphic designers,
• event coordinators,
• telemarketing companies,
• temporary or contract workers,
• college interns.

Also describe any training you need, like technical or vertical-market training.

Don’t forget to tie the budget needed to how your marketing plan will help your company meet its sales revenue goal. It also helps to get budget approval if you explain how you will measure your marketing programs and communicate the results to management.

Implementation Plan

Explain the proposed schedule of marketing activities as well as who will be responsible for each. A simple spreadsheet that lists each activity and target due dates will suffice.

Supplementary Information to Include

Attach items that support your marketing plan and its objectives. Some examples:

• spreadsheets of budget and calendar information
• information on tradeshows mentioned in the plan
• samples of competitors’ ads or other marketing materials
• samples of marketing materials that need to be updates
• a survey of the salespeople that shows what kinds of sales tools and/or marketing programs they need to be more effective in the field

Summary

If you follow the steps outlined here, you’ll find that your marketing plan almost writes itself. And next year it will be even easier, as you can simply update this year’s plan, making necessary changes or additions to bring it up to date.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

• Most companies report that they lose between 10% and 20% of their business each year due to competition, mergers and acquisitions, customers moving, going out of business, etc.
• Most companies report that marketing is responsible for finding 40-60% of the new business sales revenue opportunities, and that salespeople are responsible for finding the remainder on their own.

Take these facts and your internal estimates and use this simple calculation form to find a practical revenue amount your marketing efforts need to achieve.

If you don’t have the answers on the tip of your tongue, this can give you a jump-start toward understanding your numbers in more detail. This accountability can change marketing from looking like a “black hole” into being viewed as a fundamental investment that reaps rewards.

Download New Business Needed Worksheet

New Business Needed Worksheet

104 KB Excel spreadsheet

To download: Right-click or CTRL-click or just click to view in your browser or with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

 

Download Worksheet

marketing, B2B marketing, B2B sales, marketing strategy

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.