Running a business with long sales cycles can be very frustrating. Cold calling, traditional prospects, and complaining salespeople are great fun dealing with. If you run or work for an office team, high-tech, or other business-to-business sales organization, this book is for you.
Why is this important to me?
I always want to ask you this question as if I’m sitting in your shoes. Will this summary benefit you if you review it? Today’s companies have to innovate to win business. The keyword here is winning. Traditional push or outbound marketing works, but is much less effective today. Push marketing techniques are general advertising, print ads, cold calling, telemarketing, spam, and other intrusive techniques.
Magnetic or attraction marketing is very effective today because prospects are better informed. When they want information, they first go to Google and search for relevant content. Pull marketing techniques include SEO (search engine optimization), social media, blogs, thought leadership websites, videos, podcasts, and a host of other content-generating devices.
There is a lot of excellent information in this book. For the sake of time, I am going to outline three important points.
1. Create content: Most websites are “brochures”, which means that they are simply trying to sell goods and services. Problems with this approach include: 1. product-centric, not customer-centric, 2. no differentiation from competitors, 3. commodity-driven, equating to very little profit. Creating content is about helping your defined customers with their problems in relation to their solutions. This is the case with FAQs, blog posts, white papers, and other relevant content. Relevance of content is critical and should be driven by the customer and not the company. This Ben Franklin quote sums it up: “Either write something worth reading about or do something worth writing about.”
2. Specialists: creating content will allow you to become a leader in your field. Clients want to work with leaders, experts, and specialists. This is the best and fastest way to leave your competition in the dust and differentiate your offering from theirs. The easiest way to start doing this is to read, comment, and share related blog articles. Take your content and turn it into a blog, video, and podcast and send it to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. People want flexibility with content, and when you provide it, they will act and follow you. If you compete against larger organizations, this can be a real advantage. Remember that most people are ticking a clock and if you show passion for your industry, you will be seen as a thought leader and your business will grow.
3. Measure: The best thing about inbound marketing is that you can measure everything. This means you have a working machine that can be adjusted for maximum performance. Google is an unlimited prospecting machine. You can set up a PPC (pay per click) campaign and get feedback in a couple of hours. The goal is to keep what works and discard what doesn’t. Measuring progress will make your inbound lead generation a finely tuned orchestra.
Inbound marketing is the holy grail of lead generation because once you get it right, lead generation gets worse. This is the secret difference between inbound and outbound lead generation. If you use telemarketing, you have to pay people every day to make calls and they will get a percentage of leads. With inbound marketing, you build your following and traffic that starts to increase, which magnifies the word of mouth effect. This is a big problem and the key is to give it plenty of time to pay off.
I hope this short summary has been helpful to you. The key to any new idea is to incorporate it into your daily routine until it becomes a habit. Habits are formed in just 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is that inbound marketing has compounding effects. Capitalization is the secret to growing a tremendously successful organization. Become an inbound marketer and people will pay you the best price for your work.