Sway

It’s a sure bet that when CIO and IT decision makers gather in groups, tech sales people circle nearby, angling to slip into the crowd. The common wisdom is that every member of these groups is a sales target. Each member is ripe with purchasing potential. That’s certainly a practical way for tech providers to look at IT peer groups. Yet when you view these groups primarily as a source of sales leads you’re leaving their greatest potential untouched.

High-end IT purchase decisions involve many types of influencers, and some of the most credible and trusted are professional peers within the senior IT and CIO community.  We see the signs of this all around us, and we know the truth from our own lives.  Research studies help quantify what our guts are telling us. Case in point, a late 2008 Forrester Research study*:

The members of these groups are gathering to share experiences, learn from each other and talk shop. In other words, they are influencing each other.

So, think twice next time you are compelled to drop an IT peer group into your lead funnel. You may be dropping highly valuable influencer networks into your cold calling program. That’s no way to treat an influencer.

* © 2008, Forrester Research. From “Using Buyer Social Behaviour to Boost B2B Social Media Success” by Laura Ramos, Oliver Young, Patrick Tripp.

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Bernie Reilly, head of Influencer50 in Australia, has built several high-performance sales channels in Asia Pacific. Here, he shares a candid account of his reaction to influencer marketing. This is a reprint of his article in ‘The Influencer’: Q3′09′. Register here for alerts on future issues.

I am new to the world of Influencer Marketing having joined Influencer50 just three months ago. The reasons why I came to Influencer50 may well parallel why I think you should be beginning a conversation with us.

As a former Managing Director of three NASDAQ-listed network security companies for Asia-Pacific, I have spent the last 20 years trying to develop collaborative efforts between my salesforce and my marketing teams, with few solid metrics to gauge my success or failure.

Many believe that the purpose of marketing is to be on the mind of the prospect, when they are ready to buy. So if knowing your target customers is a golden rule of marketing, then we all need to update our understanding of the various categories of Influencers in the B2B and B2C marketplaces.

The most observable forms of influence in the tech & telecoms sector have traditionally come from commercial forces like AR and PR. Yet in the past 10-15 years we have seen the influence of analysts and journalists drop from their highs of 80-90% down to most likely 40-50%.

How has your marketing team coped with uncovering the behind the scenes influencers? Your salesforce may be able to get to the decision-makers, but they can’t get to their influencers. As these individuals are not customers, you most likely do not have them on any prospect or client list. They come from previously undocumented sources, so they’re unlikely to be on a database of yours either.

That is why Influencer50 was established - to leverage the 50-60% of the influencers you are not presently engaging. Sales forces tell us that they love us for what we do - they believe we really aid their sales efforts.

So when I was introduced to Influencer50 by a respected peer late last year, I found myself wondering if this could be a path to leads. High quality leads. You all recognize the real hot leads - they come from a senior executive in a company, or a member of your Board of Directors. When you are handed them, they come with a note saying something like “Please have your BDM call this CFO, he has a need, he has my business card and is expecting your call.” These types of leads have a very high ratio of lead-to-sales conversion. These leads get you in early enough to influence the writing of a tender or a requirements doc. These leads all come from word of mouth. Now think about the quality of leads you would want to generate over time, if you could know and then engage with those influencers who have the ear of the check signer at your prospect. That is what brought me to Influencer50!

Now that I am here in Sydney heading up Influencer50’s Asia-Pacific Office, I would love to hear your thoughts on merging the gap between sales and marketing and what you think works for you on high-quality lead generation.

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Update, Jan. 19: this event has been canceled.

My colleague Duncan Brown will give the opening presentation at the Influencer Marketing Summit next month in London. His presentation, “Capitalise on influencer marketing to accelerate brand performance and drive sales”, will focus on how to:

• Determine the effectiveness of your influencer marketing by knowing what to measure and when to measure it
• Align influencer marketing with business objectives to drive brand performance, increase business growth, validate marketing cost and optimise return

Marketing Week has put together an impressive speaker line-up for this summit. Brand managers hail from the likes of Cheapflights, BT, Nokia, T-Mobile, and LEGO. Plus, several experts will share insights specific to core disciplines of influencer marketing applied to brand management.

Check it out, and if you are attending, give Duncan a shout.

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An influencer program can be a powerful asset in countering sales objections. Here are a few well-proven tips from our collection of case studies:

1. Compile and prioritize specific sales objections. Don’t accept generalities at the outset. You can generalize later. Start with clear, articulate objections. Get a good sense of frequency, too.

2. Identify external influencers who have both the credibility and the message to address each sales objection. Remember, your focus is finding 3rd party influencers with credibility in the eyes of your customer decision-makers. The “right” influencer is one who has the credibility and already has the counter-argument to the sales objection.

That’s an important point and it bears repeating:

Your role is to find the right influencers — not to manufacture them.

3. Design appropriate vehicles for capturing influencer counter-arguments and conveying them to decision-makers as objections arise.

It’s straightforward and sheer common sense.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

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Forrester Research’s Kevin Lucas raises a good question: what core corporate business value can your analyst relations program deliver? His point is that AR programs shouldn’t commit to delivering sales value unless there’s good reason to do so. As logical as that advice may sound, I don’t agree with it.

Analyst relations programs can be designed to deliver on a wide range of business objectives. There’s no reason to shy away from aligning AR with the customer purchase decision process. In fact, that has been the basis of the analyst business — and analyst relations — since the late 80s.

What you can’t do, is bolt sales performance expectations onto an existing AR program. Objectives are fundamental to how you design, staff, fund and measure an AR program.

A legacy AR program — perhaps focused primarily on what’s said during a conference, or improving where your dot is placed on quadrants — is not going to shorten sales cycles tomorrow because somebody issues an edict today.

The magic wand scenario just doesn’t fly.

That doesn’t mean that an AR program can’t deliver sales value. It means that delivering sales value will take time. It will take intention. It will take planning.

Kevin asks a good question. It’s up to each of us to come up with a good answer.

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