General Consultant Discussion

I listened to this over the weekend. It's from Dan Lyons (Fake Steve Jobs, former Newsweek reporter) who tried to start a new career at age 51 by joining pre-IPO HubSpot. It's an eye opener mostly because Dan is a fairly experienced reporter and has a lot of insights about his experience (if HubSpot is so good at inbound marketing why do they use to much outbound marketing??) as well as the startup industry. He doesn't go easy on Marc Benioff either.

I was just speaking with a group of partners this morning about how awesome social, inbound marketing techniques are ... usually for marketing firms. ;)

I can say from the standpoint of an ERP VAR that inbound marketing attracts: - People who don't want to pay a consultant - Companies not on maintenance - IT departments who are trying fix one of their screwups - Employees who are not in accounting (production, sales) calling to see if they can get free info - Quick questions - Third bids - Requests for verification that an existing partner gave good advice - Just-in-time requests for urgent services such as disaster recovery, moving servers Fortunately it seems that most of this has further degraded in quality to the point if you don't pick the phone up and talk to them on the first call then they will ignore your return call/email. A good source of ""kryptonite"" is any mention of the word fee. In 98% of cases you will never hear back unless they keep your quote and call back on Christmas Eve to accept it and wonder if you can be done after the weekend because that's when their office will be back from holiday vacation.

The ironic thing is that you are one of the best partners at creating content that attracts inbound calls and you have the worst experiences and essentially advocate not doing it.

I wouldn't say that I advocate not doing it. What I advocate is being realistic about the outcomes. Not being afraid to walk away if the inquiry isn't accompanied by a payment (at the appropriate time). The quality of inbound leads becomes significantly lower each year. You must know ahead of time what type of relationship you want with inbound leads. Are you ok doing one-off work for fractions of an hour at $100/hr (or less)? Then inbound is probably going to give you a lot of opportunities. If you are looking to develop recurring revenue streams, you are going to kiss around 25 frogs until you find one prince.

We have worked with 3 different telemarketing companies over the past 12 months. The majority of the leads we got were nurture leads and often smaller than reported on the lists we purchased. Although we have already closed a rather sizable deal from the activity we have learned that telemarketing needs to be paired with a complete campaign strategy which will be akin to inbound marketing. Good prospects do not want to be called and will also not respond to an e-mail blast about an upcoming webinar. The efforts required to land the new customers we all want will be long and arduous or referral based. Building trust requires a lot of work and a consistent stream of valuable information that is relevant to the prospect, or implied trust through referral. Building a referral network also takes a lot of shaking hands and kissing babies.

ERP and CRM marketing used to be straightforward. But the market has matured, and so the marketing can no longer be the same. Gary's assessment seems correct: it's now harder and takes longer. I think success is now more sensitive to matching the nature of messaging to the profile of the audience to attract -- Wayne's frog culling is even more relevant. Hubspot's response to the book is interesting, especially the justification for the marketing methods. In our business, I don't really see that there's any other strategy -- am I missing something? http://bit.ly/1XvAkaN