Front Lines is a guest viewpoint section offering perspectives on current issues and events from people working on the front lines of Canada's technology industry. Mark Organ is CEO of Eloqua.
Any business-to-business (B2B) marketer will tell you the No. 1 issue they face when trying to drive demand and revenue growth is generating a constant stream of high-quality sales leads. In the quest to deliver a shorter, fatter pipeline of revenue opportunities, many of the most successful B2B marketers have turned to consumer technology.
Like chat and streaming media, today's corporate obsession with blogs and podcasts are examples of communication channels used by or for consumer audiences that have made their way into enterprise marketing departments.
Next on the list is social networking. Sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster are establishing new paradigms in how people get information about products and services. Communities of interest, referrals and social networks are giving a new generation of people access to information. Marketing and sales professionals in business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are now embracing this — and, to remain competitive, so must B2B companies.
In many ways, social networking is tailor-made for the B2B sale, with its longer sales cycles, considered purchase and multiple stakeholders. The old cliché, "It's not what you know, but who you know" is truer than ever. Time-starved business leaders are subject to a constant bombardment of marketing messages, making the personal referral the gold standard in lead generation.
The problem is using personal referrals to gain access to senior decision makers and accelerate the sales cycle is a process that just does not scale well. Only the most gifted of networking pros have a large enough contact network to use consistently and the time available to nurture and activate the network upon demand.
Business Social Networks 101
As a result of this fast-growing phenomenon, business social network (BSN) applications have emerged. Spoke, LinkedIn and Visible Path are just a few of the BSN companies that give organizations the tools to leverage social networking to integrate the referral and sales processes in a highly-scalable way.
For example, let's say a sales person wants to gain access to a CEO of a major technology company. Using a BSN application, the rep can enter the person's name or company into the search form and see that one of his supplier's sales reps knows somebody (who may know somebody) that knows the CEO. It is unknown how many links there are in the chain, or who the next person in the chain knows (a feature used to protect the privacy of the people in the chain), but the rep is able to gauge the strength of the path to the CEO. The rep can then send the first person in the chain an email through the BSN system asking for a referral to the CEO directly if available, or to the next person in the chain. Anyone in the chain can decline to send it along, and the rep will never find out who broke the chain (another privacy feature).
With some clever networking, e-mail pitching and a pinch of luck, the connection will be made and the rep will get his 15 minutes with the CEO to pitch his wares.
For sales prospecting, the process can be very useful and yield high-results when attempting to connect with SVP, EVP and C-level professionals in mid to large-sized companies.
I recently used a BSN tool to for an upcoming trip to Asia — a region where I had few personal or business relationships. To maximize my productivity, I quickly found out which friends — and friends of friends — had contacts there. I was able to book 14 meetings with business contacts in Singapore within days.
BSN and Demand Generation
