Marketing Machine Gotchas and Tips

Are you inadvertently hurting your chances of obtaining sales-ready leads?

For small B2B services companies

Sales-ready lead focused marketing machines for B2B services companies are complex (even the sentence is complex 😊).

There are lots of ways for the machine to fail to start or get sand in its gears and grind to a halt. Some heavy hitters (with tips for improvement):

Focusing on trying to find the silver bullet over doing the hard work.
Being unrealistic about your position in the market.
Consistently pushing off content creation.
Not consistently tracking lead source info in your CRM.
Focusing on quantity of articles over quality.
Lacking patience.
Outsourcing the creation of thought-leadership content.
Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.
Watching the water around you turn red, and not swimming in a different direction.
Not being empathetic enough.
Putting all your eggs in any one basket / sales channel.

Focusing on trying to find the silver bullet over doing the hard work.

This one drives me nuts. Yes, of course there are better and worse ways of doing things, and in some ways you’re playing a game.

What I’m talking about is when someone is focused more on looking for the shortcut / silver bullet than doing the hard work.

Tip: most shortcuts aren’t worth it, at least not for significant lengths of time. Focus more on the hard work than playing the games.

What is the hard work?

Empathy – understanding what the market /your potential customers care most about / find most valuable.
Execution – doing the work where you add the most value for your customers.
Patience – sticking with the long slog of real marketing, consistently developing and refining proof points and useful content.

Being unrealistic about your position in the market

For whatever niches you want to focus on, you need to stand out in the market.

Sometimes standing out just means being visible in ways that others aren’t.

Sometimes it means having an uncommon point of view.

Sometimes it means being better than the alternatives in some way that the market cares about.

Other times it means having a less common business model.

If you have no way of differentiating yourself in the market, that’s likely going to be a problem for your business. If not now, eventually.

Consistently pushing off content creation.

You’re right. That client does need your help today and tomorrow.

And yes, you should help them.

But that doesn’t mean you can keep pushing off creating that article or case study indefinitely for every client that needs you.

Tip: look out a week or two in your calendar and you’ll probably find that life doesn’t look so crazy anymore. Find a few open blocks of time and add “draft article on [X]” to your calendar. Then actually treat those blocks of time like they’re a priority.

Not consistently tracking lead source info in your CRM.

I know it’s not the most fun thing to do in the world, but you’re going to want to gain some level of understanding about where your good, and bad, leads are coming from.

If you don’t track this in your CRM you’re more likely to be anchored by various biases (e.g. anomalies & recency) and miss some important patterns that could emerge when you look at the data set more holistically.

It’s not that your data won’t be messy/noisy. It will. But it’ll likely be more useful than what’ll fall out of your head trying to think back over the course of the last couple/few years.

Tip: you need to make lead source info tracking a habit. It needs to be part of your routine. Make it part of your sales process.

When your sales process kicks off, force yourself to try to understand where your leads are coming from as soon as possible.

That might be right when the potential customer reaches out, or it might be during your first conversation.

You don’t want to have to go back three weeks later and asked them: “hey how did you hear about us again?”. It’s awkward, and while they may recall broadly how they found you (especially if it was something like a referral), the details in their mind are likely to get fuzzy real quick.

Check out What data to capture in your CRM, and why for more.

Focusing on quantity of articles over quality.

You probably agree that you need to talk about the things you know about in the form of articles on your website.

That’s good.

However, if you then extrapolate that into thinking you need to say as much as you can as quickly as possible so that you can get back to the “real work”, that’s bad.

This is a disaster waiting to happen.

Why?

Because almost anyone can jam out mediocre content.

That is not what the world needs currently.

Tip: To focus on article quality, you want to:

find the right topics
create content that’s useful for your intended reader.

If you’re not satisfying these two criteria, don’t even bother writing the article (or recording the video).

Lacking patience

A lot of marketing efforts take a long time.

It’s frustrating.

It can make you want to change things up significantly every ~year or so. That’s a problem. To do any marketing well takes time to find your stride.

So how do you know if you’re on the right path before you get there?

You don’t. At least not with any degree of certainty.

However, there are usually leading indicators that suggest you’re on a reasonable path. It’s a matter of tracking those indicators, following your instincts, doing more of what’s working, and less of what’s not.

It’s also worth noting that in the earliest stages, the focus should be more on iterating to find alignment with the market, which means that you’re likely to experiment with a bunch of things that flop. That’s ok. Learning what isn’t working for you is useful as well. It helps you decide where not to focus your energy.

Outsourcing the creation of thought-leadership content.

Thought leadership content is essentially an article / video / webinar with the primary intent of teaching something that your target audience wants to learn about.

If you outsource the development of this type of content, you’re at a competitive disadvantage.

Why?

Because you’re trying to share your (at least semi-unique) perspective with the world. Presumably you’re going to talk about complicated and nuanced topics.

Now if you (as the SME) go and create an article yourself, while a similar company outsources it to a freelance writer, who’s content do you think has a higher probability of being higher quality?

Tip: it’s not that you can’t get outside help to facilitate this process (you can), it’s just that the core content needs to mainly come from your head.

Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.

“Good enough” is a tricky aspect of marketing. You obviously don’t want to come across as sloppy or convey things that are just plain wrong.

But you do want to maintain a balance.

Every extra iteration you take updating unimportant details in a piece of content slows down the process of getting it out to the world.

Every time you update unimportant details in published content is energy not focused on something else.

Tip: if you find yourself (as a pattern) noticing a lot of unimportant details, take a step back and try to adjust.

Re-evaluate which aspects are important, and which are not.

If you attempt to adjust a few times and still can’t seem to get out of your own way, consider pulling someone else in from your team to handle that part of the process.

Watching the water around you turning red, and not swimming in a different direction.

I’m generally not a huge fan of worrying much about competition. At some level, competition is validation that you’re in a viable market.

I also think you can end up focusing too much on what others are doing, distracting you from what you think you should be doing. It can create a copycat scenario.

That’s partly why I like the blue ocean strategy concept / philosophy. It encourages you to think about how to separate yourself from the crowd.

Tip: go learn about the concept of blue ocean strategy. There’s a book on the topic and a lot of follow-on articles around it have been created as well.

Check out Assessing the health of a B2B services business for other ways to assess the health of your business.

Not being empathetic enough.

No one cares how great you think you are. Get off the soap box. Stop blabbing about how great your company is.

Tip: instead, show them what you know, and what you don’t.

You need to find out what your customers care most about, and then show them how you can help with those things.

Stop using the word “we” in your content. “We do this….” “In our experience….”

It’s not that you can’t tell customers what you think. Go ahead and tell them. But make it about them, not you.

What do they care about?

What do they need to do to work through their problems?

Putting all your eggs in any one basket / sales channel.

It’s true that you’re likely going to have a primary channel that works better than the rest. I just wouldn’t suggest relying on that one channel exclusively.

Tip: Assuming you’ve got a solid repeat business rate, you likely want ~3 channels for new business opportunities in consideration at any point in time:

one that’s working well, humming along – maintain this
another that brings in low quantities of high-quality sales-ready leads – optimize this
and a third that’s mostly experimental or sputters at best – experiment with this.

Some lead source options:

So now what?

Don’t try to fix everything at once. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed, which will cause you to fall back into old habits.

Which 2 gotchas are most important for you to fix right now?

Capture them and make them part of your daily life. Set a reminder. Put a note on your desk. Set them as your desktop background on your laptop.

Work on improving the 2 gotchas for 6 months.

Then select the next 2. Iterate.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like help with your marketing machine.

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