It is a sad day for demand generation

Two weeks ago I received a telemarketing call from a telecommunications provider (the offender shall remain nameless as the organization is a former client of my firm).

The caller spoke in fractured English and his intonation was flat. At times I was unsure if he was asking me a question or making a rhetorical comment.

The purpose of his call was to win my organization back to his firm. There was no probing as to why our organization canceled our contract. The focus of the discussion was on price.

When I explained to him that one of the reasons that we canceled was due to uncompetitive pricing, he asked us to compare pricing with our new provider.

I reluctantly agreed and suggested that he call back in a week.

One week later, my new friend called me back. I recognized his voice but unfortunately I was unfamiliar to him.

My superficial friend seemed to have suffered amnesia. He asked: Who is the decision-maker at my firm on telecommunication services ? Was he available?

Well I had heard enough. I promptly and politely ended the call.

Here is what the sarcastic B2B marketer will take away from this experience:

• If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, use the same quality of telemarketers and the same approach in B2B as you would in B2C. Focus on the offer (i.e. discounts) and don`t spend any more money on a more professional telemarketer.
• Don`t bother investing in a CRM system for B2B. There is no need to take notes from previous conversations or understand previous touch points. If the prospect gets aggravated after repeating the same conversation from the week before, no problem, there are lots of fish in the sea. Don`t worry about antagonizing people: there is no Do Not Call list for business-to-business.
• Who cares about customer churn! We can always bribe our ex-customers to win them back. They will stay with us as long as we can contractually tie their hands. So if the cycle begins the day after the contract ends, not a problem, we win these guys back (again)!
  

If this experience is reflective of the general state of B2B demand generation, then its time to start looking for a new vocation.

Speech today at Chicago B2B Event

Today I spoke to a group of B2B marketers at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketers (CADM) on the topic of B2B Online Lead Generation and Management.

After presenting here a year ago at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, I welcomed the opportunity to return to Chicago (see my photo below).

The timing was good: the results from our third annual LeadGen Tools Survey will be released in the next week.

The CADM audience received a sneak peek at some of the data (more on that later).

The premise of the presentation was that B2B marketers should join a significant number of their peers in deploying Web 2.0 media in lead generation programs.

Second, leads generated through organic search and social media, are of high quality. Unfortunately, our research shows that B2B marketers face significant obstacles in telequalifying quickly and effectively.

The presentation was well received with questions pertaining to the use of video in marketing programs, the role of Twitter and Blogging in lead generation and what other options exist in order to qualify some markets that are difficult to access via phone (e.g. physicians).

I had a good chat with Garth Moulton, co-founder and VP Community of Jigsaw, the sponsor of the CADM event. As it turns out, Garth does not answer his phone anymore because his contact details are featured in Jigsaw as a working example. Garth explained that with 1.5M hits a month, his name is turning up in many searches and folks are mistakenly phoning him, assuming that he is the designated contact at the companies that they are searching for. Ah….the price of success!

Garth and the two other co-founders of Jigsaw formerly worked at Digital Impact together in sales. Digital Impact, an email marketing service provider now owned by Acxiom, was a client of Direct Impact Marketing. It was interesting to hear Garth describe the evolution of the ultra-competitive email market.

I look forward to my next visit to Chicago.

This is not about marketing

This blog has been quiet of late as my family took a break to tour London, Belgium and France.

Who could ask for a better tonic to a hectic lifestyle than two weeks in Europe?

With the surprisingly good weather and the wonderful hospitality heaped on us by our Belgian hosts in Ghent, the economic crisis and the gyrating stockmarkets seemed far away.

However, a greater sense of perspective was realized gazing out to these broad expanses: the above photo was taken in Normandy, France and the one below, near Ypres in Belgium.


The picture in Normandy is of Juno beach where the Canadians landed on D-Day. This beach was the most heavily fortified of all D-Day beaches. Similar to the Americans at Omaha Beach, the casualty rate approximated 50%.

The second picture looks out to the fields of Passchendaele, where one of the most horrific battles of World War I took place with over 500,000 dead including 16,000 Canadians.

The horrors of these two wars are difficult to fathom from North America, let alone from standing in these battlefields reclaimed by Mother Earth.

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to those who suffered and those who gave their lives to preserve our freedom.

Lest we forget their sacrifices.

(For more photos, see my Flickr posts).