HubSpot's CMO, Mike Volpe (@mvpolpe), wrote a piece on the HubSpot blog that I could paraphrase like this: "Don't Assume Your Prospects Know What You Do." He suggested that 'not repeating your value proposition' is the biggest mistake that marketers make.

Every marketer should read it.  He knows marketing and marketers better than I do. But, if that's the biggest mistake marketers can make, I think the biggest mistake that salespeople make is assuming prospects care about your value proposition. As salespeople, we must suppress our urge to spit out what we do and how we do it until the right time, which is usually closing time. Our prospects must believe that we care about them, their challenges and their goals, before they'll be interested in hearing about us. Even then, it's important to focus on how we help them, not how we do what we do. The tricky part is that some prospects will ask you what you do and how you do it. Some will even demand that you tell them before they answer any of your questions. Explaining too much is still usually a mistake in these scenarios too. Why?

Although prospects have more information available to them then ever before, they don't have the right knowledge and experience to make informed decisions and create the ideal plan to help them accomplish their goals. In a perfect world, everyone would follow Mike's advice and marketing would help every prospect fully comprehened the positioning of every company. Then, prospects could make their own decisions about how to solve their own problems. In reality, that rarely happens. Even at HubSpot, where our marketing team effectively generates and nurtures 10s of thousands of contacts every month, only a small fraction of our prospects have connected their goals and challenges to our solution before we start talking to them. Prospects need salespeople to guide them through making the right decisions, given the prospect's unique situation. This starts by uncovering the challenges and goals that a  prospect has. Then, it's the job of a salesperson to connect how their products and services can help them achieve their goals and overcome their challenges. Here's the process that we follow on my team at HubSpot:

1. Exploratory. Understand a prospects goals, how they currently plan to achieve those goals, any challenges that have prevented them from achieving those goals in the past or challenges they (or you) anticipate they might face in achieving them, the timeline for achieving their goals and implementing their plan, the [usually negative] consequences of not achieving their goals and the [usually positive] implications of achieving them.
2. Diagnostic. At this point, a prospect should trust that you are trying to help them. You mostly listened and challenged them and they should be thinking, "Wow. This salesperson knows exactly what I want and based on the questions she's asked, she must have helped other people in my situation before." At this point, it's time to identify what they are and aren't doing well that they will need to do well in order to achieve their goals and overcome their challenges within the timeline they need to achieve it, assuming they will eventually buy your product. This is where a good salesperson can teach a prospect what they don't know they don't know and talk through what they'll need to change in order to be successful. This is often the place where you should disqualify prospects if they are unwilling or unable to make the requisite changes to be successful.
3. Goal Setting & Plan Development. Rarely, do prospects have all of their goals, challenges and timelines figured out. Rarely, are they confident in their plan. Rarely, do they know how they'll overcome challenges. Rarely, do they have realistic timelines. A good salesperson will help them set realistic goals and a plan to achieve them. 
4. Demonstration and Contract. Once all of the above is figured out, it's time to present exactly how a prospect will use your solution to achieve their goals, implement the new plan you co-developed, overcome the challenges they'll face and do it all within the timeline needed. If steps 1, 2 and 3 are done well, a salesperson can usually ask, "How are you going to implement this plan?" and the prospect should say, "I was hoping you guys could help me do that."

How Can Marketers Help?

Assuming that your salespeople follow a guided sales process like this one, how does this change what a marketer should do? Should they, as Mike suggests, focus on including their positioning in every piece of content? It can't hurt. But, I think marketers can do more than that. I'd suggest that marketers should care less about their own positioning and more about guiding prospects to solutions to their challenges, just like a good salesperson. In a complex sale, a prospect could have any number of challenges or may have different goals than other prospects do. Your short product positioning and company branding  will rarely convey all of the right solutions to all of these challenges and goals. Why? If you want your positioning to be relevant and memorable for most of your audience, it must be short and sweet. Buyers are only going to store so much about you in their brains. But, the way your product helps someone is rarely short and sweet. If it were, you wouldn't need salespeople. 

In my next article, I'll feature how two sales experts - Frank Belzer (@fbelzer) (Sales Shift) and Aaron Ross (@motoceo) (Predictable Revenue) - teach marketers and salespeople to customize their positioning based on the needs of a prospect. And I'll talk about how marketers can then connect the right content to a prospect based on their unique goals and challenges.

According to an Ad Age survey presented by Marketing Charts, content marketing comprises an average of 12% of overall marketing budgets. A full 10% of marketers spend more than 30% on content marketing, and 9% spend 19-30%. This means that approximately one in five marketers with a budget of $100,000 would spend up to or more than $30,000 per year on content marketing. Also worth noting is that 55% of those surveyed indicated that they would be increasing their content marketing budget for 2013.

The results of the survey are below:

This many marketers can't be wrong about content marketing. If you're not using this important tactic as part of your marketing strategy, you're potentially missing a major opportunity to reach more new customers.

Why is content marketing so popular?

Consumers find products and services in a variety of ways, but one of the most popular is through Internet searching. The more content you have on your website, blog, and social media pages, the more likely it is that a lead will find you. However, when it comes to content marketing, quality is just as important as quantity. Consumers respond best to content that provides value. Whether it is advice or entertainment, quality content that is regularly updated will attract and retain more leads than simple sales pitches. The best content marketing campaigns build trust, educate the consumer, help you develop a loyal community, and increase sales conversions.

Important factors for creating a content marketing budget

There are many different types of content marketing, including:

• Blog posts
• White papers
• E-books
• Social media campaigns
• Videos
• Infographics
• Buyers' guides

The types of content that you should use will depend largely on your target audience, but it's important to use multiple approaches. For example, if you offer professional accounting services, you might create an informative white paper that describes recent tax updates, and a series of blog posts that answer the most common questions about changes to the tax code. On the other hand, if you sell flower arranging kits, a more effective approach might be to write a graphic-rich e-book and create a series of how-to videos.

Either way, the importance of ongoing content updates cannot be understated. After a lead reads your white paper or e-book, you need to create fresh new content that will keep them coming back for more. Factor this into your content marketing budget so you have enough funds to keep it going all year long. Remember, online content provides ongoing benefits beyond the initial attention it receives. A white paper will draw in new leads long after you have seen a return on the investment, and regular blog posts have a cumulative effect of improving search engine rankings.

How do you create a content marketing budget?

If you are introducing content marketing or placing more emphasis on this important component of an effective marketing strategy, you'll need to create a budget. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Decide what percentage of your overall marketing budget will go to content marketing. If you follow the current trend, this will probably be 20-30%.
2. Decide which types of content marketing you want to do. Remember, it's important to have ongoing content development in addition to the occasional e-book or white paper.
3. Allocate your resources. Factor in the personnel time and costs (either in-house or outsourced) required for writing, editing, video production, graphics, distribution, and content promotion.
4. Estimate monthly expenses. Create an annual editorial calendar so you can predict how much you will need each month. For example, if you plan to launch a new product or service in May, you might bolster your content marketing efforts around that time.
5. Stick to it. A budget is useless if you don't actually use it. Track actual expenses so you can modify the budget as necessary. Don't forget to track successes and failures so you know where to focus your content marketing efforts in the next year.

It's clear that an effective content marketing strategy requires ongoing effort. Unfortunately, not all businesses have the talent or resources to do it on their own. This is why so many small businesses choose to outsource content development to a company that has the expertise and staff to generate quality content. 

How do you use content marketing for your business? What percent of your overall marketing budget is used for content creation and promotion?

About the Author: Ryan Malone is the founder and CEO of SmartBug Media, a strategic inbound marketing agency and Hubspot Gold Partner based on Southern California. Go Lakers.  

Don't let the numbers distract you from the real goal of lead scoring: determining if leads are sales ready. See, by quantifying activity driven by quality information, you will know exactly when to pass that lead onto sales. This information needs to come from two places—your lead and your well-aligned sales and marketing teams. 

Historical website activity data and good old-fashioned sales qualifying questions can provide all the information you need to begin scoring leads—and automating communication based on those scores. But not all information is scored equally. Here are three primary types of criteria that should be established in order to properly qualify leads and how each influences the actual scoring:

Engagement

Scoring based on engagement seems pretty simple on the surface. Criteria that fall under this category usually includes interactions like number of pageviews, website visits, social media mentions and emails opened or clicked.

Engagement, however, can provide more false positives than other type of criteria. You can prevent this by taking the average number of interactions for specific criteria (or the median if the numbers are excessively out of proportion) and making that number your top point score. Then work backward, grouping the number of interactions based on obvious patterns in criteria for various points.

Behavior

Scoring based on behavior goes beyond broad-based engagement and really starts to investigate specific interactions, or combination of interactions, that determine a lead’s level of interest.

For example, if we know a user visits or uses an ROI calculator on your website or downloads a specific pricing sheet as they are moving closer to sales-readiness, then you can give an appropriate score for that specific interaction. Behavior-based scoring involves looking at the historical trends for leads who moved to sales-qualified, opportunity or customer stages in the lifecycle and finding patterns in their paths. The benefit of scoring on these interactions, rather than just engagement, is that it weeds out the tire-kickers and is less likely to allow someone’s score to be disproportionate to his actual interest.

Persona

Scoring based on persona is the most valuable type of scoring you can do. Beyond a lead’s actions, the information a lead provides about him/herself can make a marketing automation system do much of the time-consuming qualifying before a lead even hits a salesperson’s queue.

For example, if you’re selling solar panels to homeowners, you might know one of your most likely candidates has a certain income-level, can utilize a state or local tax credit, or is more likely to be married than single. By scoring based on these specific qualifiers, you can quickly determine if the lead is the right match for you.

But don’t forget about disqualifying people. If you know someone’s electric bill needs to be a certain level in order to benefit from your solar panels, you can negatively score someone who comes in way under the number you’re looking for.

For B2B sales, you might know a decision-maker commonly has a certain title (or simply ask if the lead is the decision-maker). You can score a person with director or president in his or her title higher than someone at the management level or below—or even negatively score an associate level employee.

How These Points Are Used

Once your lead scoring is in place, you can do a number of things using a marketing automation platform, including: 

• Alerting salespeople when a lead in their queue reaches a certain score
• Sending an automatic email to a lead when she reaches a certain score
• Changing a lead’s lifecycle stage to marketing-qualified when he crosses a score threshold
• Providing more specific content to a lead based on a combination of lifecycle stage and lead score
• Update a lead’s rating in CRM software from warm to hot

Of course, there are many other ways you can use lead scoring, but the primary goal is simple: how your sales team determines a lead’s sales-readiness. Whether you go strictly with a lead score or add an at-a-glance layer (like lead grade) on top of the score, your efforts will help sales focus their efforts on leads who are further along in the buying cycle.

Dan Stasiewski is an Enterprise Data Consultant at Kuno. When he's not talking about marketing data and trends, he's probably in a movie theater... or randomly breaking into song. You can connect with Dan viaTwitter, LinkedIn or Google Plus.

 

Hipsters of the world unite!

Wait a minute...they already have.  They teamed up with the programmers, some MBAs and a couple artist types and created an innovative discipline called "content marketing."

The natural base of customers? The types of companies, products, services and business sectors where they feel most comfortable and intuitively understand the business value and buyer persona.

It makes sense - you work within your comfort zone. That's often where you're most effective.

The end result?  

1. Although hardly ubiquitous, inbound marketing is pretty well recognized and established in areas that were first identified. 
2. There are huge gaps between Cambridge and Menlo Park and between islands of software and service companies.

Workers of the world unite!

Wait a minute....we've tried that a couple times and it hasn't worked!

But seriously, there are huge swathes of American industry that are slipping between the content marketing cracks. And in many of these cases they have innovative technologies, quality differentiators and effective solutions to real manufacturing problems.

Somehow we've allowed a business "digital divide" to develop - between the SaaS, mobile app hip crowd that showers before work, and the metal bending, hydraulics-using manufacturing workers that shower after work.

This isn't to anyone's benefit. How do we overcome it?

Digital marketing isn't just for digital business

There's fault on both sides. The carefully cultivated, slightly crusty, down home folksy rejection of new fangled stuff is endearing (and those of us slaves to email may be envious), but self-defeating.

Conversely the hyper-caffeinated, buzz word laden, BYOD techy approach tends to dwell in a parallel reality — brilliant, intellectual and creative, but slightly detached from the core.

But there's real power in digital marketing even (or perhaps especially) for industries that may be constrained by self-limiting beliefs.

So those of us in the content marketing community have both opportunity and obligation. If we can figure out how to distill the benefits of content marketing into a language and presentation that is sensible for traditional industries, there's gold in them hills. (Not to mention over seas and oceans - the international value of inbound marketing is enormous for American industry as well!)  

And if you believe that American manufacturing can regain its role as the soul of a strong middle class (at least until additive manufacturing/3D printing becomes fully established), then you have an obligation as a practitioner of the inbound marketing discipline to help make it accessible.

Let's take responsibility as a group to figure out how to distill the amazing value of content marketing to a heartland audience. Let's have the discussion. We can all benefit regardless of when we shower!

Earlier this month, Gartner released its 2013 U.S. Digital Marketing Spend Survey results, based on responses from 253 marketers at U.S.-based companies.

On average, companies spent 10.4% of their annual 2012 revenue on marketing; 2.5% of this went specifically to digital marketing. In addition, digital marketing spend is expected to increase 9% this year.

With these increases in budgets comes a greater demand for more accountability, service integration and technical know-how among marketing teams. 

More Budget = More Responsibility

While larger budgets bring opportunity, they also bring responsibility. According to the report, “[increased funding] puts more pressure on marketers to deliver and prove a return on investments.” And, yet, only 9% of respondents cited analytics—one of the best ways to prove ROI—as critical to their success.

We agree with Gartner that a lack of focus on analytics is a severe oversight. It is those marketing teams that are able to turn data into intelligence, and intelligence into action that will be the most successful. These teams are better able to tie activities to bottom-line metrics that matter, which lets them report more accurately to executives, gain greater support ongoing and adjust campaigns based on performance.

The End of Marketing Silos

At 20% of companies, digital and traditional marketing techniques have merged so much that budgets are no longer allocated separately. Gartner expects that other companies will follow suit, as they realize that marketing programs can no longer run in silos.

For example, today, it’s common to see traditional TV ads with a social component, billboards driving viewers to a dedicated landing page on the company’s website, and online content spurring PR campaigns. With the lines blurring, it will become harder to earmark budgets specifically to digital or traditional strategies moving forward.

Technical Chops Required

In addition to the rise of digital marketing budgets (stemming from changes in consumer purchasing behaviors), 67% of marketers have budgets to acquire marketing software licenses and infrastructure.

This has created a need for chief marketing technologists, individuals with an understanding of both marketing and technology, in order to oversee and execute strategic programs. Today, 70% of companies have someone serving in a marketing/technology role.

That said: we envision the need for tech-savvy professionals to only grow, as new technologies crop up that continue to change the way consumers purchase products, and consequently how marketers do their jobs. For more on this topic, download PR 20/20’s free ebook, The Evolution of the Prototype Marketer, the Hybrids are Coming.

What’s Your Marketing Budget?

How does your marketing budget compare to Gartner’s averages? Do you plan to shift more funding to digital? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in the comments below. 

For additional insights from the report, visit the Gartner website.

About the Author: Tracy Lewis is an inbound marketing consultant with PR 20/20, a certified Gold HubSpot partner and inbound marketing agency that combines content, public relations, social media and search marketing into integrated campaigns. She is also the community manager for Marketing Agency Insider, the hub for agency news, information and resources.

Image Credit: 401(K) 2013

When was the last time you went to a trade show? If you're like most of my agency’s clients, you've been to a trade show sometime in the last year or two. What was your trade show experience like? Did it involve a lot of standing around the booth hoping someone would make accidental eye contact and feel guilty enough to come over and talk to you? How did you prep for the show? Did you spend a lot of time on having promo material ready, getting your backdrop just so, and filling your toolkit?

In my experience trade shows are a prime example of how otherwise engaged companies drop the inbound marketing ball. So often companies spend all of their time getting their physical materials together for a show. Those same companies then show up and hope attendees with find them in the show directory and come over to the booth. Trade shows become very inwardly focused and passive. I've seen companies with great social media followings go to trade shows and the only thing on their profiles is a single update about the show! If you're going to spend the money to go to a trade show, do the leg work to make it successful.

Before the Show

Long before the first day of a trade show you should be preparing your target audience. Just because a trade show is something that you physically attend doesn't mean it shouldn't follow the rules of any good inbound marketing campaign.

Your first step should be to decide what your message is and develop calls to action. Of course you're also going to need a great landing page for prospects who engage with your call to action. And once you've got your CTA and landing page you are going to need to attract some attention to them. Maybe you email your current customers and tell them about the trade show and include your CTA. You could also buy/rent a list of the shows attendees and contact them with your CTA. Some shows even have social media accounts or hashtags that attendees can follow or "like" to stay up to date with show news. You can post links to your CTA on the shows' social media outlets.

The key principle to follow is before the show, attract as much attention as you can to the fact that you're going to be there. If you can get people excited about your attendance, maybe with a giveaway or demo you've been talking about online, then you should see more foot traffic to your booth.

At the Show

I've been to a lot of trade shows, and I've noticed a few things about show attendees over the years. The first thing I've noticed is that people tend to lack concrete answers to a very simple question. I like to ask the people manning the booth what makes them different/better than their competition. A lot of the time they say, "Our quality," but what does that mean? No one goes into a trade show and says that they have a substandard product or service; everyone is going to say they have a quality product. How much better is your quality? How does that quality transfer into better performance or results for your customers? If you want to stand out, figure out precise and evidence-based answers to those questions before you step onto the trade show floor. Find the answers, work to define, quantify and support them. This work needs to be done, and marketing needs to do it.

My second piece of advice for day-of-success deals with the people you have manning your booths. Basic rules of business attire are essential; dress neatly and conservatively in clothing that fits well, is clean, and is ironed (if need be). Once you've replaced the too small/too large, rumpled, and casual clothing, you need to work on the enthusiasm levels. If you need to, you can rotate out teams throughout the show to keep your people fresh, awake, and enthusiastic. Whatever you do, you need to keep in mind that the people in your booth are the face of your company. For best results you want the face of your company to be professional, knowledgeable, and engaging.

After the Show

Once you get home after a trade show it can be tempting to sit back and wait for your phone to start ringing, and that's what a lot of companies do. If you want to maximize your trade show efforts, you should treat the post-show just like you did the pre-show; work the inbound marketing. Did you collect emails/business cards at the show? Create a lead nurturing campaign designed specifically for the trade show contacts you collected. Did you hand out flyers or proportional material? Stick a QR code on anything you hand out that directs people to a landing page with a great offer. Did you make new industry connections? Make sure you get on your social media accounts and connect with any new contacts you made at the show.

Don't be afraid to work the trade show angle as much as you can. For example, trade show interviews on your YouTube channel, photo diary of the show on your blog, or blow by blow show updates on your Twitter stream. The key to a successful trade show experience is making every aspect of the show work together. Keep your message clear, arm your people with the quantitative data they need to back up your message, and stay enthusiastic!

Lead nurturing has probably become a major part of the services you offer your clients. Lead nurturing allows marketers to maintain communication with leads who are not yet ready to buy, and your clients understand that. What they may not understand, though, is executing a successful lead nurturing strategy often requires the involvement of several departments within an organization, not just marketing. 

Before embarking on your lead nurturing journey with your clients, here are a few people you may want to consider including on the lead nurturing team.

Sales Managers

Don’t wait until you have a list of leads to engage sales managers in the process — aligning sales and marketing early on is essential. Never assume marketing and sales define qualified leads in the same way—in fact, their definitions are often very different. It is also important to agree at what point a lead will be handed off to sales and the process for getting the leads into the hands of the right sales representatives. Many marketing automation systems, such as HubSpot and Marketo, have built-in lead scoring functionality. Points are assigned to a lead based on a variety of factors, like pages visited, content consumed, job title, company size, etc. Once a lead’s score reaches a defined threshold, it is sent sales.

Sales Representatives

Lead nurturing will most likely be a new concept for your sales team. In my experience, most sales reps are accustomed to cold calling leads from a purchased list or following up on leads that have completed a sample request or sweepstakes form. Prior to launching a lead nurturing program, educate the reps on the process and how better qualified leads will benefit them: according to DemandGen Report, on average, nurtured leads produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus nonnurtured leads. It is also important to talk with the reps about the information they need to qualify a lead. Marketing can use this information to build better lead capturing forms.

Legal/Regulatory Team

In working with clients, I have found those that have included the legal/regulatory department early on in the process often face fewer barriers when submitting content for approval. You may find that not all copy may need to go through the same rigorous review process. For example, copy extracted from previously approved documents for use in emails or blogs may be able to bypass some stages of the approval process. But you will only know this if you ask the right people up front!

IT

As marketers, if we could simply measure our success by the number of leads sent to sales, our job would be easy, right? Wishful thinking, I know. Our success is often measured on the revenue generated from the leads. However, without having a complete picture of what happens to the leads once they are handed over to sales, it is difficult to report ROI. In an ideal situation there is a constant flow of data between your CRM and marketing software through the use of an API—this is where your IT team can help. Be sure to include them early in the process rather than frustrating everyone half way through.

Customer/Technical Support

Who knows the common questions and challenges customers face better than your front-line support teams? Your customer service and technical support departments can provide you with valuable insight. For example, in talking with technical support you may learn the three most common questions received. Why not interview a technical service rep to get answers to these questions and use this information to create a download or blog post? 

Final Thought: Remember a successful lead nurturing program often requires the assistance of multiple departments within your company. Before jumping in head first, take the time to meet with and educate key players.

Have you recently embarked on the lead nurturing journey? Share your tips for success or tell us about the challenges you encountered in the comment section below.

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Shannon Fuldauer has a B2B and B2C eCommerce Marketing background including roles as Vice President of Marketing & Sales Support, and subsequently Vice President of Public Relations & SEO Services, for CareerBoard.com. She has expertise in digital marketing and advanced email communications.

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Creatures of Habit...or convenience

Every business knows who their customers are, right?  After all, that's about as basic as it gets. But how often is that knowledge of customers predicted on open minded, robust analysis? Not often. Rather it's typically an extrapolation based on gut feeling impressions of how it's always been.

Is that horrible? Not really - after all that's what most companies do. But compared to what "could be", it's analogous to the proverbial drunk looking for his car keys under the streetlight - not because he lost them there, but because that's where the light is.

Grab a flashlight!

So if we're going to peer into corners beyond the arc of our neighborhood streetlight looking for prospects, where should we start?

1. Prospects you should know about...but don't
2. Prospects you couldn't possibly know about
3. Prospects that everyone else in the world knows about but you pretend don't exist

First, grab the sales team, CSRs, and anyone else who is customer facing during the sales process. Map out all the interactions from leads through delivery and subsequent support to identify what topics, roles, pains, decision points and themes emerge. Be careful about discounting outliers as aberrations - this may well be the data you seek!

With the perspective you generate you now have the data to map personas, value and buying process against actual experience rather than just lore. Additionally you'll identify key gaps. For instance, if financial benefits are a key part of your value (e.g. not just lower cost but a legitimate reduction in WiP inventory due to a process improvement - and resulting reduction in working capital and manufacturing floor space requirements), but nowhere in your personas, influencers or buying process are you helping the buyer extrapolate the corporate financial implications, you have a gap to fill and an opportunity.

Remember that most folks have a lens through which they see this topic:

• The type of buyer personality with which they are comfortable
• The type of industry where they have succeeded
• The value that they find most compelling based on their personal biases, etc.  

And of course the inverse of each as well. Don't allow individual biases to limit the range (really hard in small companies where the owner is the primary sales driver, where the company is formed around his/her biases, and where the assumption is that every company has the same priorities and buys the same way as them).

Second, get your R&D and marketing folks together. (Note - don't try this at home.  Seriously. Get some sort of experienced corporate facilitator to help plan and execute this!)  If done clumsily this could be a colossal waste of time. However, managed artfully, this will let you continuously troll for opportunities by creating conceptual content that highlights core technology capabilities. This will allow buyers searching for component solutions to stumble across your company. This is precisely how GE intends to identify many of their new market opportunities.  

Put simply, you can't possibly anticipate the various serendipitous applications for your technology, and therefore can't market to the folks who might need it. Naturally you can't create content for every possible situation. But in parallel to your focused, persona based content you can create some that is more focused on the technology (NOT the old product crap of GB of RAM, RPMs, HP, mm, torque, ANSI, etc.) in general ways that will allow R&D folks in other businesses to identify core capability that they need to support their developments.

Third, accept that customers are defined by their needs and budget NOT BY THEIR PASSPORT (or time zone, primary currency, language or continent)!  From a simple perspective, your distance from Toronto, Mexico City or London is likely less than between many pairs of American cities between which trade is reflexive. But more importantly many buyers in many corners of the globe fit your ideal prospect criteria. With shrinking incomes, low to negative GDP and policy uncertainty that constrains investment here in the US, why not take the easy route? If you can shift your mindset you'll find you have a global market with areas that you can enter relatively easily where "Made in America" is craved.

If you're already inbound marketing, you already have a base of leads and data for initial market opportunity analysis. Eventually as you select focus markets you'll create parallel market specific personas, content and even locally hosted microsites with the relevant TLD - but those are refinements for later and not necessary for initial success.

And as a bonus?  What about paying 50% lower tax on the profits from those sales?

But what do personas really represent?

Indulge me while I make an awkward segué into a related topic.  

I've become increasingly convinced that personas are the simplest way to evaluate potential clients and prospective inbound marketing practitioners for suitability.  What do I mean?

It's pretty simple. Real effectiveness at inbound marketing requires: 

• Lateralized cognition - artistic and logical cognitive predilections must be balanced
• Broad business understanding - empathy (and ideally experience) with different functions and priorities across business
• System perspective - intuitively understanding how all the pieces must be interwoven because omitting even one damages the program

More than any other step of the program, the exploration and development of personas provides a handy crucible to assess these required attributes. Someone who approaches the persona step with a flat, check the box, simple mentality will never fully embrace the system of inbound marketing.

You can gauge quickly whether a potential client grasps the concept and engages with you in the persona process, or simply parrots back the routine and reflexive. If it's the latter, I would contend that you will always be justifying your program rather than collaborating.  

Similarly while you may focus on hiring "position players" such as an SEO expert, you can't afford to be the integrator between their silo efforts and the comprehensive program. An SEO expert that doesn't embrace the persona process, and push aggressively to be involved and demonstrate awareness and interest in the related aspects, will likely not be able to grow with the organization. Further, their work won't manifest the nuanced, systemic perspective that ultimately distinguishes average from exceptional. It's far more critical that role players and technical specialists understand how their piece fits into the larger context than for you to understand the detail of their specialty - beyond adequate knowledge to manage effectively.

Maybe the question is...can someone who has never owned and run a business, is uncomfortable with systems and strategy, nor achieved noteworthy sales mastery, really create personas much less drive an effective inbound marketing program? Answers? Debate? Skepticism? Incredulity? Vitriol?  (On second thought, hold the vitriol, but let's have some discussion.)

About the Author: Ed Marsh is co-founder of Consilium Global Business Advisors, an international marketing consulting agency focused on developing strategic global business development and channel programs.

Today, HubSpot officially launches in Europe.  Here's a few presentations they'll be making:

I blogged long before I had any real sales skills or experience. I thought I knew how to sell, but didn't really learn the right way to do it until I hired Rick Roberge. When I started learning how to prospect, I realized that a blog is a perfect selling tool. Blogging helps with generating awareness, establishing credibility, and nurturing prospects. Shortly after I started getting sales coaching from Rick, I started coaching Rick Roberge on how to use a blog. Unlike me, he was a salesperson long before he ever wrote a blog post. That was almost 10 years ago now. Rick is still blogging.

At HubSpot, my sales team is constantly telling our partners to blog more frequently. They're also coaching agencies on how to offer blogging as a service to their clients. But, very few people on my team actually write their own blogs. Not anymore...

1. Sales People Can Blog - A group blog by Danielle Herzberg's sales team. So far, contrbutions are from Dan MacAdam and Brian Signorelli, both Channel Account Managers at HubSpot. It's fun and it's funny, not just for salespeople, not just for agencies.... So far, their stuff appeals to a general marketing and sales audience.
2. Inbound Agency Selling with David Weinhaus, a Channel Account Manager. David was the first salesperson on my team to blog consistently. Great advice for agencies.
3. Nick Sal Inbound - Nick Sal is a consultant on our agency team. Anyone who knows Nick, knows that he brings excitement to everything he does. That shows through in his writing too.
4. Innovation Al Marketing  - Al is the wise man on the agency consulting team at HubSpot. He's an excellent writer and communicator. I speak from experience when I say: don't ever ask him for critical feedback about your blogging efforts, if you don't really want it.

There's a real SHIFT going on - where marketers aren't the only ones blogging. There's a shift in sales going on - where salespeople are seeing the value of blogging. Inbound marketing changes sales. Frank Belzer just published his book today: Sales Shift: How inbound marketing has changed selling, making it more difficult and more lucrative at the same time. He's leading a bit of a movement, I believe.

Are you in sales? Do you blog? Why? Why not?