Great discussion last nigh at the SVAMA event about how B2B marketers can leverage social media to generate leads.  Check out the summary by Kirsty Scott of SD Design

A few points I thought were esp. interesting, insightful, or controversial.

1. Create LOTS of interesting, relevant content.  But how, given limited resources?  The panelists suggested:

• One person can generate a lot of content and a lot of buzz – it doesn’t take an army
• You don’t have to be a professional writer. Just get your ideas across.
• Give your community a forum for creating content. WD40 fan club is a great example of community-generated content.

2. “The internet is a great medium for experimentation,” Mike Linton.

• Its easy to try out different tactics, different language, and different social media hubs.  You quickly can learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t.
• Its easy to overcome resistance inside your company by suggesting, “Let’s just run it as a test.”

3. The community is there. Deal with it.

• If your company thinks its not “doing social media,” its wrong. Users, customers, and probably employees are talking about you, whether you’re there or not.  Best to join the conversation than to be ignorant. (Sounds like parenting advice!)
• Communities take on a life of their own. Don’t expect to control or even guide the conversation.  Instead find an employee most like your audience and ask them to participate in the dialogue.
• Develop a thick skin.  Even within communities you create, someone will find something negative to say, and chance are, it will get disseminated.  Don’t be taken by surprise, and don’t panic.

4. Lead Gen is a process, not an event.

• Include calls to action – SUBTLE ones – in your content.
• Give people the opportunity to “self identify” as interested though their actions and responses to many different forms of interactions (Blogs, tweets, webinars, emails, facebook fan clubs, LinkedIn group participation, etc.)
• Track participation and score interest level based on those interactions.  It takes time and experimentation to find the most promising patterns.

5. Traditional PR is in trouble, and reporting is dead (or at least, in the re-animation ward).

• If everyone if writing about the latest events, for free, what’s a reporter left to do?
• PR’s traditional emphasis on providing access to reporters and providing reporters with story no longer provides the value it once did.

Were you there?  Tell us about other great insights from the evening.

Do you agree or are these suggestions off the mark?  Share your B2B Lead Gen experiences via Social Media.

Later this week I’ll be moderating Silicon Valley American Marketing Association’s event on Social Media for B2B Lead Generation. The keynote speaker and panel are as well-informed a group on this topic as you’re likely to find: David Meerman Scott,  author of New Rules of Marketing and PR, Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot and author of Inbound Marketing, Mike Linton, former CMO at eBay and before that at Best Buy, and Zack Urlocker from MySQL (now Sun Microsystems).

What would you ask this group about using Social Media to drive a sales pipeline?  Here are some of the questions I’ll have for them:

1. How do you move from conversation to lead generation within social networking environments, and without angering the people you’ve engaged?
2. How does a company select the social media hubs that are most important to their business and their audiences?
3. What constitutes a “qualified lead” in the social media context?
4. How do you estimate the resources required to create a presence in social mediums?
5. What can B2B companies learn from BtoC practices?
6. What’s your advice for the change agents who are advocating greater investment in social media by their companies?
7. How should resource-strapped start-ups allocate the time and resources for social media?
8. What are the top three do’s and dont’s for using social media to feed a sales pipeline?

Your turn!  What would you ask?  I’ll post some of the answers to your questions here after the event.

A great set of tips about on-the-fly sketching from XPlane are directly related to a recent post here about “2.0ing your sales meetings”

Happy to see that collaborative selling approaches are becoming popular, and now insightful companies like XPlane and WhiteBoard Selling are helping sales reps get more interactive and collaborative.   That can only translate into greater customer relevance, and more productive and valuable sales meetings.

After 2 days at the Sales 2.0 conference, I fear we may be on the same path CRM took in its early days.  Though some of the new tools are great, and MUCH easier to adopt, there is too much talk of technology, not enough  about behavior and cultural changes.   All things 2.0 are really about interaction and collaboration with customers. And that requires a change in mindset.

Basic example of 2.0 principles in action, that actually requires less technology.  (A version of this focused on customer references was used very successfully by Beverly Chase and the  BEA marketing team)

Instead of arming your reps with the new and improved power point presentation, design a white board talk.  Script it with questions and discussion points instead of spiel.   The result is a conversation where customers contribute ideas, and the content evolves based on the here-and-now in the room, and not what marketing thought up a month ago back at corporate.

Spent the day at the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco.  Lots of insightful speakers including JudyFick of Unisys, Jeremy Cooper of Salesforce.com, my friend Gail Ennis of Ominture, and David Satterwhite of newScale.

A few noteworthy quotes:

• To find the buyer, “find out who will get fired if the problem isn’t solved.”
• “If you’re following up on the leads that already have a budget and a time line, you’re too late”
• “Never confuse activity with results” – Judy Fick
• On the importance of metrics in a recession: “When the tide goes out you know who’s been swimming naked.” – Warren Buffet quoted

The big themes:

• Instant information about customer behavior, and instant response
• Sales and marketing alignment and collaboration
• Value creation as part of the sales and marketing processes  (see solutions marketing post that touched on this same topic)
• Technology helps create unprecedented visibility and responsiveness – and you need a collection of vendors to cover the entire customer life-cycle. Average # of sales / marketing 2.0 software products shown on presenters’ slides was 8.

A few dozen exhibitors showing all manner of cool software and services for deeper, more detailed, more responsive insight into customers and their behavior.   Spoke to some very happy customers of Genius.com, LucidEra, and ConnectAndSell.

More info and some conclusions tomorrow after Day 2.