Welcome to The Relationship Marketer

Welcome to The Relationship Marketer. As I kickoff this conversation, I hope to share my passions on the topic and to connect with all of you who are dealing with the challenges of B2B marketing in the high tech software industry.

 

Today I start off with my initial piece on the topic of Relationship Marketing in the form of a white paper. I am writing from San Francisco where later today I will be speaking on the topic at the Software Business 2008 conference. I will follow up over the weekend with a short update on my impressions of the conference and key takeaways.

 

Expect me to be asking many questions of you on this topic as I am anxious to hear how you are dealing with the challenges in marketing to B2B buyers, especially with the distressed business climate of the past few months. Stay tuned for more. Thank you for joining me.

Comments

[Rick Schwartz]

Henry,

Great new website and an outstanding, down to Earth white paper on a subject that is so often overcomplicated. Here's what I took away from an old manager of mine many years ago (hint-hint.)

Lead gen is about capturing, qualifying and sorting inquires into pre-defined buckets and then, treating each lead in each bucket with a pre-defined process that maximizes the potential and moves all leads along their path(s) towards the ultimate goal - generating revenue.

Today, as a Realtor in a depreciating market, I still apply that basic process to every inquiry I receive regardless of the source.

[rockannand]

Thank you Rick for your comments and especially for the kind words. You forget that you have spent much time in your career as a sales person. The challenge for most marketers is thinking and acting like a sales rep. What is intuitively obvious for you is not so for most others. I believe that is one of the reasons why the topic of lead management becomes somewhat over-complicated.

Needless to say there are many aspects of this topic that I will be exploring in the weeks/months/years to come. Again, thank you for your interest and continuation of the conversation. I hope that the commentary measures up to those that tune in.

Much much more to follow.

[mark]

Henry,

I have been reading through some of your content on your site. I liked your piece on relationship marketing. One thing I would be interested to hear about is the step before a business can even start building the relationship. User acquisition is the never ending challenges. I live in the software world and we are now developing a SaaS application targeted at SMBs. One of the major areas that people like to pick apart in our business plan is "how do you get to the users in a cost efficient way?" SaaS solutions are typically lower in cost than traditional enterprise software solutions so it requires a much lower cost of acquisition in order to be successful. We are challenged with figuring out these new and unique ways to get to users without doing the standard - go to the tradeshow, go to the usergroups etc.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts and strategies on this?

Thanks

Mark

[rockannand]

Thanks Mark for your comments and question. You have posed a great question that is applicable to all, but especially for solution providers with the SaaS/On demand delivery option. This software business model places a premium on building community. Since the revenue model means much lower first year revenues, the cost model for sales and marketing requires that the entire evaluation process be conducted online and ideally with a self-service approach.

The strategy involves executing online campaigns against permission-based contacts using content that demonstrates your thought leadership first and foremost. The key is the development of a solid house list. Since it sounds like you are challenged with the development of a permission-based list, part of the campaign strategy involves assessing media partners that possess large permission-based lists that you can pay to use in the execution of your various thought leadership campaigns.

Trade shows are a poor investment for this type of house list building activity, but targeted media players for key trade publications in your market space as well as analyst firms can assist you in the effort. To give you an example of what is possible, one of my older clients was able to build their permission0based house list from 4000 contacts to 12,000 in a year through a very intelligent use of both analyst firm and trade publication house list in their execution of webcasts and white paper promotions. The total investment was reasonable when measured against the value of that enlarged house list.

I hope that helps. I will be writing more on these tactics as part of what I feel marketers should be focusing on 2009 to overcome the impact of this economy.