Notes from B2BCamp

B2BCamp is one of the most valuable events Atlanta has to offer startups or any B2B business. This post shares my notes on today’s event.

Keynote Talk: The 10 Sales and Marketing Mistakes that Stopped Me from Building a $100M Business, by Allen Nance of WhatCounts

Genetics – You need to pay attention to the genetic makeup of your sales and marketing team. You can’t do it all yourself. You need to get others to do the selling and marketing.
Market Wave – If your market is riding a wave, the fact that you have a crappy sales and marketing organization may be hidden by the overall market growth.
Profits – You need to reinvest the company’s profits to grow. From 2000-2012, WhatCounts had $40 million in cumulative free cash flow and only invested 8% of revenue back in sales and marketing. Its competitors were investing 30% of revenue. Success should not necessarily be denoted by “being profitable.”
Leader – Sales leadership is a job. The CEO cannot do it. WhatCounts went 12 years without an awesome VP of Sales. In the last 8 months, the VP of Sales has made dramatic changes by methodically reorganizing the organization into a machine.
Chemistry – Sales organizations should have great chemistry. If it’s an assassin chemistry, everyone needs to be an assassin. If it’s a nurturing chemistry, everyone needs to be a nurturer. Having a “stamped out” team is critical. Sales leaders need to know the profile of a sales person that fits their organization and only hire for that profile.
Specialize – Sales people should specialize: some generate lists, some schedule demos, some do demos, some close, etc.
Centralize – Everyone should work out of the same office. Avoid remote employees.
Measure – Measure at the individual performance level. Measure leads that turnover from marketing to sales. Measure closes. The most critical thing WhatCounts measured and determined to be an influencer was to call someone withint 1 hour of website activity.
Allbound – Warm prospects come to websites, not leads. Outbound will always run circles around inbound in terms of quality of lead generation. Need both inbound and outbound approaches. Need to create a halo effect of all approaches.
Hourly – Sales and marketing management is hourly hand-to-hand combat. You need to blaze through a bunch of “No’s” in order to close deals.

The Top 10 Questions You Should Be Asking on a Sales Call, by Louie Bernstein of Izenda

Who in addition to yourself will be making the decision?
What particular issues are you looking to solve with our product, or one like ours?
When do you need to implement a solution?
Where do you see yourself six months or a year after implementing?
Why are you looking for a product like ours?
How are purchasing decisions made for products like ours?
Where do you think you will find the most benefits from our product?
How is funding approved and has it been approved for this project?
What is driving your interest in our product?
Who will benefit the most from your owning the product?

Rhythm & Cadence (How to Build Content Marketing Machine), by Kyle Porter of SalesLoft

One Page Strategic Plan
Marketing Sprint with Trello
Daily 10-minute Scrum
Daily Blog Posts, with a 1-week plan generated on Sunday evenings pulling ideas from Trello
Weekly Video (number 1 producer of qualified leads per hour of work) – Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz does whiteboard series and gets tons of views
Weekly Infographics not created from scratch
Weekly Slideshares (10-20 slides)
Monthly guest post on salesforce.com – allows them to distribute it to a broad audience
B2BCamp – events are great
Social – 40 tweets per month to pull content from other sources, 40 tweets per month to re-introduce people to content from SalesLoft blog. Click to tweet for email is helpful.
Create a sales dashboard

Content Marketing: Know Exactly What Your Audience Wants to Read, by Jon Birdsong of Rivalry

Use Google keyword tool
Decide whether the search term is worth your time
SEO the heck out of it (Yoast on WordPress)
Use Google rel author
Rivalry is hitting 7-14% clicks on impressions with Google adwords

5 Best Practices of Metrics-Driven Sales Prospecting, by a panel of Flashpoint graduates

Identify your customer
Create a hypothesis to test with customers
Do customer interviews (100 per week)
Prove you are wrong; avoid confirmation bias
There are no facts inside the building
No customer interview is out of reach – Here is a way to do that: “We want to make sure we’re working on the right problem. We don’t have a product yet. We’d just like 10 min of your time to understand if we’re doing the right thing.”
Customers are liars (aka not able to tell you what you need to know; they often don’t understand their own problems)
People will only do that which they cannot not do
You’ll know real pain when you see it; you’ve just got to believe that there is real pain in this world
You did NOT have a great meeting: excitement about the product is a false indicator; you are not trying to feel good about being proven right, you’re trying to be proven wrong. Great meetings are when you walk out discouraged.
Build to the irrationality of the world; dig for the real pains people face
End every customer interview with this, “Who else should I talk to?”
You can ask them to pay, even with no product
Don’t sell; customer discovery is not about selling
Don’t outsource your customer discovery
Don’t do customer interviews via survey; surveys (including emails) are not useful for customer discovery; in-person is best and phone is next best
Don’t ask what they think of the product
Don’t ask questions like, “What do you do?’ and “Why do you do that?” and “What problems do you have?”; these questions are not easily answerable and will provide little useful information
Don’t do customer interviews with family, friends, co-workers, or people who know you

Amazing how many nuggets came out of today’s meeting!

What did you enjoy about today’s B2BCamp?

Related articles

From the conversation

Ernesto

melonakos