The topic of generating leads with blogs was discussed during a lively Twitter chat tonight. Most of the posts reinforced the benefits of using a blog as an effective marketing tool. I captured a few as highlights.

Laura Fitton – @Pistachio
Getting your business found is why you blog. It has SEO value, social sharing value, etc. But traffic does not = customers #blogchat

Anyone can create a blog easily and start generating traffic, but that is only the first step in using a blog as an effective marketing and sales tool. According to Wikipedia there were more than 156 million blogs in February of 2011. Proof of how easy it is to start one. The trick is using a blog effectively to serve your purpose. That purpose for most industrially-focused b-to-b companies is to not only generate interest but also leads for your producs or services.

Leslie Fine – @lesliefineint
A lead to me is someone who has the appropriate needs for my services – not just a reader of my blog #blogchat

Blogs are no different than magazine ads or sales calls though. If you aren’t talking to the right people you are just wasting time and money.

Ray Gordon – @RayJGordon
Quite often the case! RT @markkilens: Businesses that are the best educators will win. blog=education #blogchat

With the target audience in mind, what topics should you discuss in blog posts then. After all it’s a “chicken or egg first conundrum”. You have to talk about what your target audience wants to hear on your blog before your target audience will find your blog! So educate them. Tell them the tricks to using your products and entertain them with news and topics specific to your customers interests. Tell them both about the beneficial features of your products as well as the shortcomings and the things you are working to improve.

audaciouslady – @audaciouslady
RT @ValaAfshar: If content is king, context is queen. Blogs have to demonstrate relevancy to your target audience. #blogchat

Give specific examples of how your customers enjoy or prosper because they use your services. Better yet. Let your customers do guest posts demonstrating how excited they are to work with you.

However, the overlooked secret to blogging success is quite possibly what you ask readers to do after they’ve read your post. Maybe you are making the mistake of not even asking them to do anything. Including a call-to-action after every post is a requirement if lead generation is what you are seeking.

marti konstant – @martikonstant
according to socialtriggers.com, one strong call to action per page is best #blogchat people can’t focus on more #blogchat

Blogs are powerful tools to help your marketing and sales efforts. Good blog posts can provide qualified leads to your sales force or can educate suspect contacts and help your marketers move them to the next stage of the buying cycle.

Contact me if you’d like to discuss how targeted content generation could help you generate  qualified leads for your industrial automation or wholesale distribution business.

charity: water – @charitywater
RT @LinkedIn Need a dose of inspiration? Watch @scottharrison, CEO of @charitywater, share his story of transformation. http://t.co/XYTTjhBF

And of course a favorite of mine since my wife and I both are cancer survivors:

LIVESTRONG – @LIVESTRONG
Myth Busters: Have you taken the #WorldCancerDayQuiz? http://t.co/jzksDtnI What’s your score?

I donate to these organizations but the donations I make are pretty small and typically their efforts aren’t local. And while it’s possible for those with the financial means, Eli Manning for example to make large charitable contributions. Most of us can’t. 

TwitCause – @TwitCause
Eli Manning: Super Bowl Winner and Charity Giver http://t.co/qGX8ODT3

 A new organization in Chattanooga is trying to make a bigger impact with $100 by pooling some resources and simplifying the tyoical grant process that foundations follow. The UnFoundation pools $100 donations from ten trustees monthly and matches that $1,000 with funds from an anonymous source. That $2,000 is granted monthly to a project that is focused on helping the Chattanooga communnity.  

The UnFoundation – @TheUnFoundation
Congratulations to the College Hill Courts Residency Council for winning our first $2000 grant for a community garden! https://t.co/Bk7ehG3M

The first award was given in January to help fund a community garden. Ideally this small garden will help put a dent in growing Food Deserts in areas around Chattanooga. That is a pretty cool way that $100 can help a community.

 The UnFoundation is actively seeking applicants for future grants. Help spread the word!

Dan Roam author of “Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work” and “Back of the Napkin” gives perfect examples of nonsensical explanations in this short video.

How high do you set your customer service bar? Think about the KPIs you use. Do you set goals for those KPIs based on your results from the previous year, against industry averages, or do you actually use benchmarks to ensure you are providing best-in-class customer service. Many companies set the bar too low. They want to satisfy or maybe just satisfice customers and really don’t care enough to put extra effort into gaining their customer’s engagement. Magic happens when you care enough to engage customers. They become fans. Fans are force multipliers for marketers!

Engaged customers don’t tell their coworkers and friends that your product isn’t easy to use. Engaged customers tell you why it isn’t easy to use and specifically how to correct it. Engaged fans are willing to tolerate beta releases because they know deep in their hearts that you will eventually give them access to Version 2.0 that specifically addresses their greatest needs. Engaged customers tell everyone that your products solve their problems.

If you truly want customers that are fans, customers that have a sense of ownership in your company, you have to measure customer sentiments. You need to understand how loyal your customers are, how many customers you retain, and how willing your customers are to advocate for you. How many of your customers are willing to recommend your offerings to people they know?

These results must be used to close the loop in your customer focused activities. The saying you can’t manage what you don’t measure applies to customer engagement as much as anything else. But results measures like any statistic that doesn’t have a comparison is worthless. Comparing “how you did” to “how you did last year” does not result in high levels of performance. You have to benchmark or compare these measures to someone that you know does those things well. Comparisons compel change and build a sense of urgency especially when they show that you aren’t as good as your competitors or as good as you thought you were.

The good news is it is easier than ever to engage customers. Not that the measures are easier to capture, but it is easier to engage with customers. Social media tools, inbound marketing techniques, and the always-connected world we live in gives us ample opportunities to connect and engage with customers but you have to have a plan. What’s your plan for moving customers down the continuum from satisficed to satisfied to engaged and beyond?

Contact me to discuss your specific marketing and sales challenges, how the Baldrige Criteria can help your organization, or look me up at the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit in St. Louis.

“The executives who consistently rank in the top 20% of their companies in both performance and well-being have diverse but select networks…made up of high-quality relationships with people who come from several different spheres and from up and down the corporate hierarchy.”

But the question most people have is how do you meet people from outside your regular social circles? Even people that regularly attend Chamber or other social meet and greet functions (especially if you live in a relatively small community) end up seeing the same people every month. If you strictly use the web and social media for your networking you are really missing out. While social media is a great supplementary tools, Face-to-Face conversation will never be surpassed as the best way to get to know someone.

I’ve found three ways to meet people outside my industry and outside my normal social circle.

GoGrabLunch is a great resource for meeting other professionals. You set up a profile on the website, check a few radio-buttons about your industry and experience level and what kind of people you’d like to meet, and pick a restaurant, and set the time and date for your lunch. Others that are registered on the site can grab that lunch date. It’s strictly professional and it’s free.

There is no better way to meet smart people than through your state or the national Baldrige-based programs. I volunteer for the Tennessee program because as I’ve said before some of the most interesting conversations I have all year happen during training and during my participation on teams. There are a number of ways you can participate either by volunteering or by attending any one of several different conferences and training events.

I was lucky enough to receive an early invite to use Google’s new social tool Google +. It’s been great. I have regular interesting conversations with people I otherwise would not know through this new social tool. If you have not received an invite yet, you can get a Google + invite here. Try it out.

Don’t stop going to Chamber meetings and other social events but find some new ways to network. Make sure your new ways open up opportunities to build relationships with people from outside your normal social circles. And don’t forget to look for me on Google+ or comment here.

Are your marketing and sales efforts focused on the same goals or is there a constant struggle between the two? Is the struggle like a tug-of-war between business functions constantly trying to yank the rope out of each other’s hands? Eliminating this functional silo mentality can yield huge benefits by concentrating efforts.

Marketing frequently sees their purpose as developing the strategy and tactics to develop and refine offerings and to generate market and customer interest. They grab responsibility for all communications that aren’t face-to-face and design offerings based on the information they can gather and what anecdotal information sales reports to them. They think their efforts can overcome the limits of the sales force. Marketing sees its burden as compensating for sale’s inability to see the big picture.

Sales sees their purpose as developing the market and account strategies and to execute tactics that close sales. The marketing message must be stripped and reconstructed to be usable. Sales gets to determine what conversations take place face-to-face and what gets reported back upstream. Sales thinks their biggest challenge is to overcome marketing’s inability to see what’s required to win business in the real world.

So how do you eliminate the disconnect between marketing and sales?

Set Common Goals

Goals should be Customer focused – centered on listening to customers, building customer relationships, and using customer information to improve marketing and sales functions. These goals should be the same for both marketing and sales in a broad strategic sense. These broad, high-level goals can then be cascaded down through the organizational levels with each lower level setting a goal that supports the broad common goal.

Think of a military commander setting his battle plan. His main objective is quite broad but by the time smaller units establish their plans they are much smaller in scale. However, they still support the broad strategic goal. The General sets the strategy to win the war or decrease vehicle accidents – a Platoon Leader plans to take a hill or to ensure speed limits are strictly followed.

Marketing and sales must similarly agree on the big strategic goals. Smaller units will never establish plans that breach the silo mentality if they don’t agree on broader strategic goals.

Use Process Thinking

Marketing frequently thinks they move a customer to a certain stage of the buying cycle then pass the customer off to sales. Customers might enter the cycle at any stage though and regardless of their entry path they expect help. For instance, consider the commonalities between a conversation that occurs via an inquiry from your website and a conversation that occurs during a sales call. Is one a sales conversation and one a marketing conversation? Is one conversation more important than another? Are the personnel involved in one conversation more likely to be knowledgeable about your offerings and more experienced than the other and thus more likely to answer questions and meet customer expectations in a timely fashion?

It seems a bit short-sighted to have your most talented sales people answer face-to-face questions and some of your least experienced marketers answering website inquiries or participating in social media. If these customer interactions aren’t identified as processes first, it is near impossible to ensure customers get the experience you or they desire.
Once the need for a process is identified and the process is defined, then appropriate resources can be assigned to accomplish the task. Process thinking can then be applied to ensure the tasks are not only adequately accomplished but processes can be continuously improved using traditional quality tools.

The only way to really breakdown business function silos is to want to. If politics get in the way or there is a lack of leadership it will never happen. If the desire is in place however, steps in the right direction are to ensure goals are common between the marketing and sales functions and cascade supporting action plans down through the functional units. Then use process thinking to make sure the correct resources are in place to execute action plans and tasks and to continuously improve them. When the marketing and sales functions are integrated in their efforts big challenges can be overcome and great things can happen.

Contact me to discuss your specific marketing and sales challenges, how the Baldrige Criteria can help your organization, or look me up at the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit in St. Louis.