#derek handova

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Social Media can benefit from Predictive lead Scoring

What's Predictive Lead Scoring and how can it help your social media marketing methodologies?

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Community Management Important as Content? One White Paper Makes the case

While content is king for marketing, there is more to it than that. You'll need an audience to take up all your pithy observations on the B2B landscape. One white paper attempts to illustrate how to scale your audience to consume all your content. This blog post will examine that white paper.

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5 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Effectiveness

A new report has come out on five ways to measure content marketing effectiveness. Come back soon for a review on that report.

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Eight Ways to Generate Publicity?

What do you think? Are there more or less than eight ways to generate publicity? Stay tuned and find out soon!

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What do Dante and Email Marketing have in Common?

"Derek Handova's Social Media Review" says that SendGrid's email marketing white paper Highway to Hell details the pitfalls of the Seven Deadly Sins of electronic direct marketing in a manner similar to how Dante illustrated the travails of a trip through Hades in The Inferno. Photo credit: paukrus / Foter / CC BY-SA

As modern-day marketers, we all want to take advantage of the latest and trendiest communications channels, whether they are image-based social channels like Pinterest or text and emoticon-based such as Viber. However, as I have discussed earlier email marketing remains one of the most effective avenues to reach your customer base. But to make the most of your email marketing efforts you must stay out of “email hell” as SendGrid puts it. And as Dante found on his journey through Hell in The Inferno, there are many pitfalls along the way on your journey to Heaven and the Celestial Seat of the Almighty.

SendGrid had the excellent idea to construct their superbly short white paper Highway to Hell: Top 7 Fastest ways to land in the Email Underworld along the lines of the Seven Deadly Sins, which many have familiarity with from the Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman film Seven (1995).

"Derek Handova's Social Media Review" says that SendGrid's white paper Highway to Hell: Top 7 Fastest Ways to land in the Email Underworld will keep your email marketing results heavenly. Screenshot by Derek Handova

Suffice it to say that the greatest danger to your electronic direct marketing efforts can be reduced to greed, envy, sloth, lust, pride, gluttony and anger—but not necessarily in that order. In fact the order in which SendGrid addresses the seven deadly sins of email marketing are :

Sloth

Wrath (anger)

Gluttony

Greed

Lust

Pride

Envy

Sloth: Trusting Third-Party List Management SendGrid advises that no one should be trusted with the quality of your email list except you. Getting lazy (i.e., sloth) with your corporate crown jewels can be the road to ruin as well as the highway to hell. You must do your own due diligence to sanitize and compile your contacts database. While there are legitimate third party mailing databases out there such as vertical publications and trade organizations, direct marketing data providers of other sorts should be looked at with the gimlet-eyed gaze of an auditor from Accenture, Deloitte or PwC.

In any event, purchasing or renting third-party mailing lists is a stopgap measure at best for your direct marketing efforts. The people on these lists may not know anything about your company, let alone your name. They are very likely to mark your messages as spam, gaining you blacklisting by the major email service providers (ESPs) Gmail, Yahoo! and Outlook.com (the former Microsoft Hotmail). Even worse, these same spam labelers may report you to the Federal Trade Commission [email protected] Unsolicited Commercial Email aggregator, which could lead to big legal problems if you continue to spam.

Let’s face it; there is no substitute for building your own contact database the old, slow way with double opt-in protocol. So not only must the subscriber actively sign up for your email messages on your web site and social properties, she must also actively click on the subscription notification in her mailbox when it arrives. SendGrid advises all these safeguards will enable you to avoid the deadly sin of email sloth. Your corporate soul will thank you later.

Wrath: IP Addresses and Sender Reputation Again, getting back to that sticky wicket about the ESPs blacklisting you; given enough time and enough spam flagging of your email, the ESPs will put your email IP address into the lowest circle of Hades, so close to the goat-headed monster that you will be inhaling his sulfur-tinged breath. All of your messages will be flagged automatically and put into the spam or junk folder where they will exist for 30 days or so and then be permanently deleted.

"Derek Handova's Social Media Review" says that Gmail, Yahoo! and Outlook.com will automatically put your marketing email in the spam folder if you earn a bad IP reputation, as detailed by SendGrid's white paper. Photo credit: notoriousxl / Foter / CC BY-SA

So more than you being punished as an angry email bomber, you will be punished as you feel the wrath of the technology titans. SendGrid says that you have to be especially careful if you are mailing more than 100,000 electronic messages a month because this volume of correspondence can kick in automatic throttling. To combat this tendency you must “warm up” your email IP address first.

Apparently, this means familiarizing the ESPs with your IP. You can do this by gradually increasing the rate of your email deliveries over the course of several days for a single campaign. And you need to use a recent, clean list of addresses not more than one year old. As the ESPs see that your emails are not bouncing and being clicked on at a sufficient rate, you will have begun to establish a good reputation for your email IP address. To keep its reputation intact, you must have a dedicated IP address apart from other email functions of your company or any separate online enterprises.

Gluttony: Forgive me Father, for I have Spammed! Spam is the four-letter word of the email marketing discipline to paraphrase SendGrid. Again, they recommend performing a two-step opt-in procedure to doubly confirm that submitted addresses are actually from your would-be subscribers and not some sort of prank by hackers or other evildoers. Gluttony can also be avoided by abhorring those rented or purchased email lists, according to SendGrid.

And to prevent being labeled a spammer, SendGrid proclaims that thou shalt not send overly graphic-oriented emails. It is a well-known tactic of phish scammers to mail a single large graphic in an email with the text of the message embedded in the image. So avoid the forensics of the spam filters, act like a human and write a normal amount of textual content for your email sales pitches.

SendGrid’s final tip regarding ducking being labeled a spammer echoes a sentiment I covered in “Most Dangerous Job in Marketing: Firing Dormant Subscribers Hurts but Necessary” about deleting email subscribers from your database if they have not opened one of your emails within the last three months. These types of passive subscribers are the most likely to flag your marketing emails, of which the ESPs will take note. And why would you keep these names in your contact list? They are not doing anything for you.

Greed: Frequency One of the greatest temptations in all of marketing is the desire to overindulge in exploiting your email list. And while excessive touches to your corporate contact list are to be avoided, as SendGrid rightly touts, it is as great or even a greater business sin to underutilize your mail database, which they do not point out. If the elapsed time between mailings is too great, subscribers could very well forget who you are and again flag you for spam.

A good solution is to set up an email preference center, according to SendGrid. This self-service method of email management allows customers to select their own level of engagement and can avert complete removal. This tip is very important for online retailers who email every single day. Even the most enthusiastic subscriber may become weary of an epistle a day from you hawking wares or promoting contests. Let them select a three times a week email alternative or an end of the week digest email. This last option is very popular with LinkedIn groups, especially very active ones with myriad postings.

Lust: Engagement One of the deadliest of the seven sins of email marketing is lusting after those subscribers you do not have. Or so counsels SendGrid. Do not go chasing the one that got away. Stay faithful to your existing list of email contacts.

You need to nurture your contacts along the lead generation funnel until they are ready to buy. But you have to do it the right way—with care and tenderness. You will have to closely monitor the type of content to which your subscribers respond. If you are still not receiving the response you desire, adjust the day of week and time of day you mail and the frequency with which you email.

And do not treat your subscribers like strangers. Skip sending your marketing email from the ominous “[email protected].” You want to encourage engagement, not alienate your followers. Lastly, if some subscribers have been dormant for some time, retarget them with a special prompt to re-opt in. They will either become re-engaged and an active lead again or they will do you the favor of scrubbing themselves off your list, saving you time and grief in the future.

"Derek Handova's Social Media Review" says that not only will the U.S. email titans blacklist your marketing email if you spam subscribers so will ESPs in smaller nations such as Austria, Germany and others. Photo credit: Franz & P / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

Pride: Blacklists As far as the ESPs and their spam regulation allies are concerned email marketers are guilty until proven innocent. And if your emails are out of compliance by even a scintilla do not be surprised if they come down swiftly and hard by putting your email IP address into a blacklist. SendGrid says if you have suffered mass deletes or high complaint rates, you may have been blacklisted. You can check your IP address for blacklisting at security companies such as Proofpoint.

Once you know you are blacklisted do not suffer the Classical Greek tragic flaw of hubris, also known as excessive pride, taking your email campaigns down with you. Quickly admit your wrongdoing and make peace with the ESPs and blacklisters to get back into compliance. Then get to know the players and keep up on email marketing compliance trends to stay out of the penalty box.

Envy: Lack of Resources In closing, SendGrid advises to avoid the most pernicious of all the seven deadly sins of email marketing: envy. Do not look at the competition, begrudge them their success and ascribe it to a better toolset. You can get your own envy-making email marketing toolset to keep your messages out of the sin bin. And by coincidence, SendGrid hawks such a toolset.

SendGrid keeps its unique selling proposition and call to action for the very end: to sign up for their free webinar. And if you found any of the content of this blog post interesting, you should sign up for their webinar. It could be the best 60 minutes of your eternal marketing life!

-Derek Handova Social Media Practitioner

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Three Lessons for B2B Marketers from ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic? One Leading Blogger says ‘Yes’

Derek Handova's Social Media Review: "Weird Al" Yankovic is unaccustomed to industry recognition yet charted his first No. 1 Billboard album in July 2014. How he achieved this through social channels can provide valuable lessons for B2B marketers. Photo credit: insidethemagic / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Fresh Perspective Copywriting blogger Rachel Foster created a piece last week on the responsive marketing practices B2B practitioners can learn from veteran music parody artist “Weird Al” Yankovic in the wake of the digital release of his full-length album Mandatory Fun in July. She thought this was significant because “Weird Al” had achieved his first No. 1 Billboard ranked album ever—in fact, it has become the first No. 1 comedy album by anyone since 1963—Allan Sherman hit No. 1 that year with “My Son, the Nut.”

Having had a casual familiarity with “Weird Al” since my high school and early college days, I was curious to see what timely B2B marketing tidbits I might possibly pick up from the man who first made his mark in 1979 with his “My Bologna” sendup of one-time New Wave darlings The Knack. Full disclosure: my older brothers both attended “Weird Al’s” college, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, in California. I do not believe that either of them ever met Al, but commonality of educational institution is no doubt how I first became aware of this great comic genius of our time.

According to Rachel, the three B2B lessons that digital marketers can draw from “Weird Al” include:

Understanding what channels your customers are using

Being responsive

Not using any of the words (from the “Weird Al” video “Mission Statement”)

I’ve been following Rachel’s blog for most of 2014, and I find her takes on B2B marketing insightful and quickly implementable into any anticipated or ongoing B2B corporate campaign. Conciseness is one of her virtues. She doesn’t disappoint on this latest blog. Let me elaborate on exactly what I mean.

Understanding what channels your customers are using As we all know, B2B social and content marketing options are vast and always increasing. Whom 12 months ago was thinking of SnapChat or WhatsApp as a corporate option for publicity or promotion? And 12 months before that, Pinterest and Instagram were but twinkles in the eyes of most CMOs. Rather than drive yourself insane keeping abreast of all the myriad channel options, Rachel advises—and rightly so—B2B marketers can learn from “Weird Al” that you only need to be in the social and content marketing channels where your audience (i.e., customers) is located. For example, Yankovic saw that his niche audience was very active on YouTube and therefore he conceived of the master plan to release eight videos of all eight songs on the Mandatory Fun album over the course of eight consecutive days in July 2014.

Derek Handova's Social Media Review: B2B lesson one from "Weird Al" according to copywriting blogger Rachel Foster is give up the idea of being in every marketing channel and just concentrate on the ones most important to your particular customers. Photo credit: davemc500hats / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

Actually, finding the channels where your customers “hang out,” as Rachel puts it, should not be a gargantuan task. A little active social listening should reveal “where the boys are” as Connie Francis once sang in the song of the same name. Just scan the posts your company receives on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other channels already used by corporate. In addition, make sure to search for any stock ticker symbols (e.g., CHKP for Check Point Software Technologies), shortened company references (e.g., Frost instead of Frost & Sullivan) or official/unofficial acronyms/abbreviations (e.g., PwC for PricewatershouseCoopers, VzW for Verizon Wireless).

Rachel notes that “Weird Al” to this point has concentrated on full album downloads but will be switching to iTunes singles in order to be timelier with his parodies. Yankovic is just following his audience’s lead and its ever-decreasing attention span. He’s probably lucky “Word Crimes,” his parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” from March 2013, was still remembered well enough to be relevant to some of his younger listeners in the summer of 2014.

Similarly, marketers need to follow their customers to the channels on which that they are located. This only makes logical sense. If you are tweeting but your customers are an older demographic that does not use Twitter, it is as if you never said anything at all. A tree that falls in the forest with no one around still makes a sound, but who would ever know it fell in the first place?

Being responsive This brought Rachel to her next observation that “Weird Al” first and foremost was being responsive to fans with this release of all eight videos from Mandatory Fun at virtually the same time. The overlapping buzz developed from the eight videos drove viewership for outlets where Yankovic’s music was featured to new heights—by a factor of 23 in one case. Al and his people—I would hope that Al has an entourage, even though he is goofy and nerdy—had the savvy to see that this strategy could work in the vastly altered aural landscape compared to when he first came on the scene. Each video became a hit in its own right before the release of the full album and can stand alone outside the framework concept. Having proved all his album videos/singles can hold up individually, we can all look forward to more frequent enjoyment of the “Weird Al” experience.

The lesson here is to see what format your customers are demanding. Do they like a lot of small frequent touches such as one, two or three emails per week or multiple Facebook postings in one day? Or would they be satisfied with just a summary wrapup email of the latest happenings in your company and industry at the end of the week, month or quarter, depending on how many activities have occurred and maybe a video montage posted on your company wall? Most of all, as Rachel points out, B2B marketers need to be able to take quick action when opportunity presents itself. For example, newsjacking is a hot way of capitalizing on the news of the day as a leading Eastern US sports club has demonstrated by making it a cornerstone of its overall marketing strategy by poking fun at celebrities and high-profile politicians.

Derek Handova's Social Media Review: Cartoons such as Dilbert and others have long lampooned the mindless clatter that is "corporate speak." Photo credit: ☼zlady / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Not using any of the words (from the “Weird Al” video “Mission Statement”) To wrap up the post, Rachel delves into “Weird Al’s” final Mandatory Fun video, “Mission Statement,” to emphasize some overused words in corporate speak.

While she does not pick out specific words from the video, Yankovic leaves no doubt about his disdain for one word in particular: “synergy.” This video from “Weird Al” is a four-a-half-minute rundown of all the mindless pabulum that overpaid and underperforming beneficiaries of the Peter Principle have conceived over the last 25 years—or since whenever the Dilbert comic strip first appeared to skewer the pompous mental corpulence of American Big Business. (It is no coincidence that “corpulence” and “corporate” both have the same Latin root, corpus).

Other less-than-worthy nominees for most overused and meaningless phrases that “Mission Statement” features include “operationalize,” “monetize” and “core competencies.” The takeaway—I hope that does not qualify as jargon—is to forget the big, vacuous words that customers will see right through and of which they are suspicious. Tell your product story in simple terms by emphasizing what is in it for your customers. For example, how will your product or service make their lives or jobs easier, more lucrative or psychically rewarding? If you can do this, it almost does not matter what else you do to operationalize your marketing solution (irony intended).

To see Rachel’s original piece online, click over to her blog.

-Derek Handova Social Media Practitioner

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Can PR Tips be too obvious? These 8 from CMI could be

Screenshot by Derek Handova. Content Marketing Institute's 8 PR tips are just too obvious to be any help.

Cross-disciplinary marketing efforts can really supercharge your business development and add more ROI to the bottom line. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) dedicates itself to integrated marketing in order to amplify the content marketing story by promoting it through other channels, such as public relations (PR). As of this writing CMI has been in business under this name for about six years. The modern practice of PR as guru Edward L. Bernays formulated it in his groundbreaking book Crystallizing Public Opinion has been in existence since 1923. So the practice of PR has it on the concept of content marketing by approximately 85 years.

In all that time do you figure that maybe anyone in PR would have thought to compile the eight very basic PR tips that CMI has published in its June 2014 article “8 Ways Public Relations Can Fuel Successful Content Marketing”? I don’t know. But I have been around the PR game long enough to recognize information that is so familiar as to be dumbfounded that anyone would think this was worthy of a special listing. But these are just content marketing guys and PR newbies. So you cannot expect them to get too deep into the long, distinguished and effective history of PR.

Not to belabor the point—but I am probably doing that—the eight PR tips that CMI wants to take unnecessary pride in delivering for your consideration are:

Build a media database

Pull editorial calendar information

Pitch story ideas to relevant media contacts

Identify bylined article and guest post opportunities

Conduct influencer outreach

Consider partnerships

Pursue speaking engagements

Submit your content for industry awards

Build a media database What CMI is telling us is be aware of what publications cover your industry. This sounds like a good place to start. If you operate a trash hauling company, you probably shouldn’t put Better Homes and Gardens on your mailing list. Seems obvious enough. But they don’t want to take any chances. CMI has enough sagaciousness to tell us to create a spreadsheet that includes outlet name, organization, phone, email, social profile links, areas of interest/beat and notes.

I do detect one omission in the list, however. What’s that you query? Hmm, how about the name(s) of the reporter(s). News articles are written by people. You’re only going to get news coverage if you know who the reporters and editors are at your publications. Then they drop the bomb and say you should upload all this information into a customer relationship management (CRM) program. Beside the point that there are not that many B2B industries that have so many publications covering them that they require an automated information storage and retrieval system to keep organized there is also the flawed logic that treats journalists and bloggers like prospective leads that need to be converted.

Journalists are not your customers. Journalists are impartial third parties that stand as gatekeepers between your company and your customers. They serve the invaluable function of adjudicating the merits of your products and market messaging and communicating their accumulated wisdom to their readers (i.e., your customers). Good coverage could make your product. Bad coverage can break your career. I’m conjecturing, but CMI could have meant that you should upload your press contact information into a content management system (CMS). That seems a more appropriate conclusion.

"Derek Handova's Social Media Review": Publications don't keep editorial calendars hidden unlike the secret menu at McDonald's that's beneath the counter until you ask for it. They are usually online near the ad kit. Photo credit: avlxyz / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Pull editorial calendar information Just about every publication—online and offline—will have an editorial calendar outlining in broadbrush strokes what they will be covering and in what time frame, usually over the course of the calendar year. These will often be packaged together with the publication’s advertising kit. The publication will make it easy for you to find this and even recommend to you that you should contact their editorial department with appropriate information to help their reporters prepare the stories they’re planning. CMI seems to think this is a big secret like the hidden menu at McDonald’s that you have to ask for from behind the counter. Really, there’s no conspiracy. You can find the editorial calendar right online such as for Chief Executive.

"Derek Handova's Social Media Review": While Dean Martin was happy to be hit with the moon in his eye like a big pizza pie, being slapped upside the head with CMI's super-self-evident PR tips such as the deep "pitch relevant story ideas to relevant media" may not be your thing. Photo credit: Foter / Public domain

Pitch story ideas to relevant media contacts In reality, this third tip sounds like tip 1B. Know the relevant publications that cover your industry. Pitch relevant story ideas to the relevant media. Again, nothing like letting something the size of the moon hit you smack in the face like a big pizza pie, but unlike Dean Martin, you may not think that’s amore. Super extra special hint from CMI: look for keyword synonyms in your pitch and in the content the publication covers. For example, Maggots Weekly may be a good match for your white paper on “Larva Control in 5 Easy Steps.” Nice advice.

Identify bylined article and guest post opportunities Never ones to let stones go unturned, CMI tells us to pitch contributed articles in the names of our executives and marketers. This tip is not quite as obvious as some of the others we’ve covered thus far. And it does require a bit of creative thinking to examine what has been covered in your target publication of choice in the here and now and what seams of coverage have been undone that you can sew up with an adjunct piece or perhaps even a rebuttal.

Conduct influencer outreach This particular tip is a bit murky. CMI could mean reaching out to analysts regarding your content marketing. An incomplete on this one.

Consider partnerships This time CMI’s tip is not even in the PR sphere. Getting your content in the emails, web sites and webinars of trade associations would be considered an in-kind trade promotion at best and sponsorship (read: advertising) at worst—not that there’s anything wrong with that! It’s just not PR. Publicity is the act of getting your message through the media for no charge. Pay for play is not that.

Pursue speaking engagements CMI has a good tip here in booking speaking engagements for corporate leaders. This is a great way to get some ink for your company. However, it takes very enlightened leadership to be able to make this an effective strategy for PR—at least for keynotes and other solo speaking slots. I have found that company execs and subject matter experts are much more amenable to panel sessions where they are not burdened with carrying the entire load and the structure is more free form and often aided by a facilitator or host. And if you are lucky, you can take the prepared speaking notes or a transcript of the panel session so as to be able to repurpose the content into something else like a contributed article or a blog entry.

Submit your content for industry awards Sorry, CMI this last tip is a real clunker and a bit self-serving—you run the Content Marketing Awards—but at least you tried to sneak a call to action in there. Just a bit ham-fisted. But truly, no PR department that is actively doing its job has time for such frivolous pursuits like applying for industry awards. And if they were going to apply for awards, they would probably go for a pure PR award like the Gold Anvil. Only if you are 100 percent in the content marketing agency field should you consider this. Otherwise, your CMO is going to take a dim view of your next weekly report.

"Derek Handova's Social Media Review": Any public relations intern worth her weight in column-inches could figure out half of CMI's PR tips in her sleep. Photo credit: Niuton may / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Leave PR to the publicity professionals While well intentioned, CMI’s “8 Ways Public Relations Can Fuel Successful Content Marketing” is just too obvious to be helpful for any serious PR campaign. Any PR student intern worth her weight in column-inches should be able to come up with at least half of these tips in her sleep. Content marketers should stick to content marketing. Leave public relations to the publicity professionals. If you have ghosts, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! If you need PR, click the Public Relations Society of America for a good agency referral. Division of labor is what makes modern life possible. No one can be knowledgeable of everything, much less good at everything.

-Derek Handova Social Media Practitioner

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All over the map with Citrix’s Backward-looking Content Marketing and Consultative Selling Info

Screenshot by Derek Handova. The Citrix white paper "Best Practices for Content Marketers and Salespeople in the Social Era" advises an informational, consultative subject matter expert approach to marketing and sales to combat customer wariness of hard sell tactics. 

Citrix is a big successful virtualization software company. And now they are pushing their Citrix Online subsidiary’s GoToWebinar online seminar hosting platform as a marketing solution. In that effort, they have enlisted top-of-the-line social marketing “experts.” However, some of the advice, tips and best practices these experts recommend border on the chauvinistic norms of the “Mad Men” era of three-martini-lunch marketing and not the 21stst century social solutions they claim to espouse.

In any event, their white paper/solutions brief “Best Practices for Content Marketers and Salespeople in the Social Era” covers a lot of ground and offers some valid points if you can get around the “been there done that attitude” of the authors.

The real problem with this white paper is trying to do too much at once. The very title offers a clue to this issue. A white paper designed to serve the needs of two distinct audiences—even ones that have adjacent interests such as Sales and Marketing—is not going to be able to service both well and more than likely will serve neither adequately. What follows are the relevant sections of the white paper, discussion of the contents and critique.

Sales funnel shift Customers now do the majority of their product research before you ever get in contact with them. In the old days, cold calls and unsolicited commercial messages could generate enough leads to justify their existence. Now customers avoid them like the plague. I know I do. I gave Citrix my Microsoft Lync phone number instead of my real number in order to download this white paper. They can call all they want; I’ll never answer and there is no voice mail.

Citrix says the answer to this dilemma is content marketing. The customers will read your content marketing as researching consumers are wont to do. This will prep them, and you can deliver better warm leads to your sales department.

As seen on "Derek Handova's Social Media Review," Citrix takes the position that consultative selling has emerged as a de rigueur approach if company representatives are to become part of the solution to their customers' hard-sell wariness. Photo credit: bpedro / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Consultative selling a new concept? Next, Citrix makes the proposition that consultative selling is a new concept, but that seems a bit far-fetched. I believe that sales people have been talking about a consultative approach to sales for at least the last 15 years. This would put it at the beginning of Citrix’s time frame. But I guess it’s not a stretch to suppose that it is going to take several years for such a transition to occur across a broad enough swath of the selling landscape.

Rise of the objective salesperson Then there is the revolutionary idea that a salesperson will be objective and recognize if a prospective customer is not a good fit for her company’s product lineup. Citrix says that she should refer this prospect to another company that will be able to fulfill the customer’s needs. Sounds like the Progressive Direct Comparison Tool with which Flo works.

According to "Derek Handova's Social Media Review," the consultative salesperson will focus on the right sale and not be afraid to recommend others for the non-right sale, just like Progressive's Flo shows the best insurance deal, even if it is with a competitor. Photo credit: anyjazz65 / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Me-thinks you think too much! An acknowledgement does escape from Citrix’s position in saying that thought leadership is not a new concept. The way Citrix sees it, there have always been thought leaders in every niche. Some have authored articles or other expertise-setting pieces. Or knowing how things work, these pieces could have been ghostwritten by others, but the point is that the salesperson’s name is on the byline and she gets credit for it.

Your customers know more than ever This might be news to some if they have been on vacation for seven years or more, but social media has become a dominant force in the marketplace. And your customers are using it to talk among themselves, exchanging information and forming opinions. If you are not out there talking to them, they will fill the vacuum of your absence of presence and it may not be complimentary to your company’s sales and marketing objectives.

Via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook they lie in wait. The best way to approach them is with content marketing designed to inform and entertain them. Properly armed, your salesperson can effectively engage these pre-educated customers. Citrix suggests that your salespeople can join groups on LinkedIn or Facebook to meet and greet these prospects and distribute your content marketing. The only danger here, at least in the case of LinkedIn, is becoming overextended with groups. Your salesperson must pick and choose her groups wisely and watch and wait patiently for the opportune time to engage.

Cultivation is the name of the game. This requires a laser focus and not a shotgun approach to business development. And on LinkedIn, she must not resort to anything that even remotely resembles self-serving spammy comments. The best way to build a consultative selling profile is to let the customer come to you in search of your established expertise. After they come to her, collect their information and warm them up for a lead and do not dump into the cold call list.

The content marketing toolbox For content marketing to succeed, a marketer or salesperson must have a complete complement of tools at her disposal. In addition to collateral pieces, Citrix says that she will need webinars, recorded webcasts, videos, case studies, infographics, blah, blah, blah. I believe Citrix thinks that by calling several versions of the same thing by different names, they can pad out their list of implements. This is not to say that they are not valid tools, but let’s be a little more succinct, huh, fellas! However, they are right in that you will constantly need to feed the beast of social media, so all these different types of content will be called into action.

I think the overemphasis on webcasts, webinars, etc. plays into Citrix’s online meeting platform GoToWebinar. Citrix claims that GoToWebinar is the perfect venue for customers to interact with your consultative selling expert and get all your content marketing sorted out with her by their sides. Citrix says this is a low-pressure environment. But whether it was GoToWebinar or Cisco WebEx or ON24 or a hosted event on an in-house platform, I’ve experienced some very Over-the-Top (OTT) hard-selling techniques with the pure content marketing being interrupted with completely spammy self-serving “look-at-me” statements. One of my former marketing directors used to call this chest pounding.

One of the worst recent perpetrators of this type of online marketing misbehavior has been George Washington University. On their webinar for prospective students looking for more information about their online-based master of strategic public relations, they frontloaded all the sales info before ever getting to the carrot of the presentation. I think I sat through about 20 minutes of this before disconnecting. I should have known better. GWU is not known as a leading academic institution and only as a place to fill out your Rolodex of contacts when it comes time to get in with the political power structure of Washington, D.C. I wonder what our first president would think of his namesake center of higher learning?

On the barricades of sales For all the revolutionary action taking place with content marketing and social media, there are still a lot of obstacles facing the modern consultative selling expert, according to Citrix. Chief among these are:

Attention and signal vs. noise—your marketing must rise to the “top of mind”

Differentiation from online competition—large competitors like Google and Apple are crowding their niches leaving only 10 to 30 percent market share for everyone else (combat this with a 15-20 word elevator pitch that includes your unique selling proposition to win the right business for your company)

Quickly adapting opponents—if you’re not doing content marketing and consultative selling you can be sure that your enemies are

Employees slow on the uptake—your personnel need to keep up with the fast-moving changes in social media prospecting, content marketing and consultative sales—this means you must dedicate time for them to read blog posts, attend webinars and brainstorm together monthly

Lack of real people skills—a successful consultative salesperson will not just be an order taker but an order maker, by asking questions of the customer and getting “real” with her—but I have to wonder what Citrix is saying when they recommend flattering your customer: “Buyers are people, too, and like anyone else, can be vulnerable to the personal touch, flattery and humor.” Huh? Shallow flattery is for con men and sycophants!

Unless you’re Amazon, a salesforce is still relevant—even if you’re pure e-commerce—marketing cannot do everything to drag in customers; a real person must still close the sale, even if it’s just a bunch of fresh-faced college grads cold calling your list of warm leads

Voice of experience For the solutions and best practices section of this document, Citrix quotes a bunch of sales experts from the field. This section primarily focuses on LinkedIn as a medium for B2B social sales. To warm up sales leads, contact prospects via social media. Keep messages short and focused on the customer’s needs. Do not get trapped in the feature hype cycle. Just give them a taste of what you have to offer to entice them to respond.

Moreover, this section gives examples of how to establish credibility on LinkedIn by sending personalized messages and using your own and other Groups to contact leads. Be careful to closely observe individual Group rules. Do not sell directly. Establish credibility by participating in discussions, asking questions and being interesting—remember, inform and entertain. And as a reminder, the novelty of social media is still new enough that customers have not become completely wary of it and may still respond to unsolicited input. But always research your customers’ profiles on social media before contact. Only use what’s relevant to the sale and customer’s fears and hopes.

As seen on "Derek Handova's Social Media Review," the Citrix white paper "Best Practices for Content Marketers and Salespeople in the Social Era" never gets down to selling, so you may not be sold. Photo credit: Matt_Lodi / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

A bloated piece with some interesting stuff at the beginning Overall, the Citrix white paper “Best Practices for Content Marketers and Salespeople in the Social Era” is an overstuffed, bloated piece that is okay on the content marketing side. However, it falls short on the social selling section and degenerates into individual anecdotes from some selected experts. While I cannot completely recommend you spend time with this piece, if you do download it, save your effort and read just the first six pages.

-Derek Handova Social Media Practitioner