For some types of buyers, outbound marketing is the only way to engage (e.g. direct mail, email, events, teleprospecting).

These buyers require intervention through outbound marketing:

The Unaware Buyer – this buyer is evaluating but is unaware of your solution despite your high level of marketing activity (including inbound marketing). Outbound marketing may be your only option to reach these buyers.

The Puzzled Buyer – this buyer has some misconceptions that have precluded consideration of your solution. By persuading the buyer through direct, interactive, phone or web-based communication, these buyer’s misconceptions can be corrected through dialog.

The Buyer with Unmet Needs – in this case, the buyer may have underlying needs that have not been openly discussed with a third party. Or perhaps, the buyer was unaware of a solution that would address her needs so had not initiated an evaluation. Early stage solutions that are new-to-market often target buyers with latent needs.

The Tuned-out Buyer – not all buyers participate in social media or conduct online searches. Some buyers expect that some vendors must reach out to them as a precondition to considering their solution.

The Buyer at the Tipping Point – B2B marketing is part art & part science. Given the length of the marketing and sales cycle, we can often identify many of the touches that led to a closed sale but we are unable to pinpoint the catalyst that converted the buyer. Perhaps those accounts that closed through online marketing were prompted by the cumulative impact of both online and offline touches through both inbound and outbound marketing.

Through our outbound marketing efforts we have converted these types of buyers into opportunities. Depending on the stage of their evaluation, these buyers can vary in terms of their potential to close.

What results have you seen with these types of buyers?

Photo Credit: henrybloomfield

Today, let’s turn to some examples of how B2B marketers are embracing social media for this purpose.

A few weeks ago, McKinsey & Company released the results of their latest survey on social media: Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results. The buzz on this report included a post from Peter Kim, a fellow Social Media Today blogger.

The McKinsey survey struck a chord with me in that 94% of responding executives deployed Web 2.0 media targeting internal parties versus 87% who interfaced with customers. This indicates an almost equal propensity to use these tools to communicate to both external and internal parties.

In targeting customers, improving customer service and acquiring new customers in internal markets were #1 (73%) and #2 (71%) respectively.

In other words, a significant proportion of survey respondents are using Web 2.0 tools for customer acquisition.

So if organizations are using social media to acquire customers, then how can we measure ROI?

An easy answer lies with blogging – the rainmaker of social media.

If your goal is to attract visitors to your website, blogs are an ideal medium to publish fresh, relevant content with keywords that attract the search engines like bees to honey.

Leads generated from organic or natural search results are of higher quality and are more likely to convert to qualified leads than any other medium. You can ask yourself: what is the value of a page one search result on Google?

Bingo! ROI can be calculated based on the value of qualified leads and closed sales generated through organic search. (Personal note: this week I closed a $20,000 account that found my organization through organic search and whom we never would have targeted with our outbound marketing efforts).

In a much less scientific method than McKinsey, I asked a question on LinkedIn Answers to see if marketers were using blogs to enhance their organic (or SEO) page rank and to gauge the impact on their business development.

Here are the highlights:

• The small direct marketing agency in Silicon Valley who achieves top organic search results in only 24 hours.
• The tech start-up in Austin who has generated substantial lead volume through their social media efforts in only a short period of time.
• A highly ranked blogger on wireless technology who resides in India.
• A web design firm in Ireland who attracts 40 unique visitors a day through blogging and organic search.
• A web design firm in India whose blogging has been so successful in improving their organic search results that the firm has canceled their paid search (PPC) program.

These small organizations have demonstrated high ROI on social media through blogging and can easily quantify the benefits.

Do you know of other organizations who have a similar perspective on generating ROI through social media such as blogging?

The premise of this blog, Acquiring Minds, is that social media, as with other online media, provide B2B marketers with a stellar opportunity to generate qualified leads and to impact ROI.

But wait one minute! It almost seems heretical to sabotage social media by attempting to generate leads. However, there are many organizations who have demonstrated that these two goals are compatible by building their business through social media while adhering to best practices (but more on that shortly).

The discourse on social media or Web 2.0 media almost entirely focuses on communication and collaboration with little discussion on how social media impacts the bottom line. And justly so: the opportunity to innovate, build competitive advantage and cut costs with Enterprise 2.0 tools is compelling (see Andrew McAfee’s blog).

The advent of social media is comparable to other disruptive technologies in the area of collaboration & communication.

When Lotus Notes was launched in 1989, some of you may remember the bewilderment expressed by your organization.

Like social media today, Lotus Notes and other communication and collaboration technology is one of those IT expenditures where payback and ROI are much more difficult to quantify.

Lotus Notes
<=== So, how did you explain the value of this to your boss in 1989?

Social media creates the same befuddlement in executive decision-makers as do other communication and collaboration technologies.

You may be talking but your executives are hearing this:

“Gee, we are not quite sure on ROI but here is something different: we’re giving a public voice to the ‘unwashed masses’ in our organization and let’s not forget our disgruntled customers.”

Is it any wonder that so few Fortune 500 organizations encourage their employees to blog?

Where social media happily deviate from their fellow communication and collaboration tools is their unique ability to dialog with not only internal but also external parties and to publish fresh content featuring keywords that attract search engines to your website.

In summary, let`s move beyond collaboration and communication and try to understand better how the B2B community is leveraging social media or Web 2.0 tools for lead generation. We all need to sell internally the value of marketing. Lead generation through social media will provide you with that ammunition.

Tell me – how are you using social media for lead generation?

On my next post, I will provide some success stories from B2B marketers.

At the same time, Ann Handley was a welcome visitor to ye old blog.

A surprise for me: all of the comments were positive and relevant (except for the guy trying to sell me on doing business on Costa Rica).

Before we take a closer look at some of the comments, I wanted to share with you the question that I asked during the Forrester webinar and Laura Ramos` interesting response.

Q: Robert Lesser: It appears that smaller B2B companies are more successful with their social media marketing than large B2B marketers. Is this showing up in the data? If yes, why?

A: Laura Ramos: We have not looked at the data from this perspective, but it is possible to do so if interested in exploring this further. Anecdotally, we have seen social media and online tactics favor smaller companies in general because small companies are more agile, less constrained by legacy, and able to “look bigger” than they are in the digital realm (emphasis provided).

So it seems that we all are in agreement, at least at a conceptual level, on why small businesses are excelling at social media.

And now let`s feature some of the top reasons submitted from those who read the blog:

• Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
  “Got passion? (Actually, this could be considered a part of the “megaphone” and “sweat equity” reasons, too.) But so many small business owners have real passion for what they are doing, and that converts into the energy and authenticity necessary to commit to doing social media right.”
• Ann Kingman, Blogger, Books on the Night Stand CEOs are the Public Face – “In most small businesses, the founder/CEO *is* the company, or there are a few key employees who play that role, and so it’s much easier to put a human face on the organization than if it were a huge multinational corporation.

• Giles Crouch, Partner & CEO, MediaBadger / Blogger, Webconomist
  “Building Loyalty: Small biz can engage customers more directly, leading to product innovations and increased loyalty through conversations.”

The seminar was chock full of interesting facts on social media usage by B2B marketers and by B2B decision-makers.

For both B2B vendors and the buyers of those solutions, social media is considered a second tier marketing medium.

Last month, Laura Ramos released a report entitled: How to Derive Value from B2B Blogging. A survey of 189 Forrester customers revealed the number of blogs started by these B2B organizations `plummeted` in 2007 from 2006 as the results from these blogs did not meet expectations.

Laura attributes part of this to using `warmed-over press releases` on blogs.

Another attendee and I leveraged the WebEx chat to ask questions on how the usage of social media varied by the size of the organization.

Anu Venkitaraman, Managing Partner of ReThink Marketing of Addison,TX and I, conducted a private chat discussing why small B2B marketers have embraced social media in a stronger way than their bigger B2B sisters and brothers.

Here are our top 10 (in no particular order and actually there are only 8):

1. Give me a Megaphone - For B2B start-ups evangelizing is a way of life to attract the attention of investors, partners and customers.
2. Talking about My Generation - Younger professionals are already well-versed in social networking and have a huge appetite for expressing themselves.
3. A Clean Slate – With little to no marketing infrastructure, a small B2B marketer can leapfrog to a web presence that includes social media. Witness the number of firms that use blogs as their website backbone.
4. The Big Squeeze – Hard dollars are in short supply for small firms. The cost of entry for social media in hard budget dollars is close to zero.
5. Sweat Equity – The greatest resource for a small firm is the hard labor that staff will invest to make their equity real. The production of relevant social media content requires this dedication and investment.
6. Risk / Reward – The small B2B marketer recognizes that the rewards associated with engaging in public customer dialog outweigh the risk of losing control of the marketing message.
7. Inverse Relationship of Press Releases - the number of parties who must approve a press release is inversely related to that organization`s embrace of social media. In other words, the more bureaucracy associated with marketing communications, the less likelihood that the wild west of social media will be approved by senior executives.
8. Let`s fail and try again - Smaller organizations are more likely to experiment with marketing media and social media is another option to test.

Are there any other reasons? Help me round off the number to 10!