The marketing channel - and the leads it creates - is the lifeblood of every business. The foundation is an authoritative voice in the market, delivered through engaging content. To deliver this without bringing the business to a standstill requires a flexible, systematic approach for creating a sustainable pipeline.

From The B2B Lead Generation Machine, Carrie Bedingfield shares a methodology which any business can set up and run within 6 weeks.

The first, most crucial and most-challenging-but-crumbs-when-you-get-it-right-everything-falls-into-place job is to define your most profitable space. Specifically how you position and describe yourself.

Over 2-3 strategic workshops as a leadership team, aim to:

• Crystallise and profile the markets you are targeting
• Establish the burning platforms
• Create hooks and levers for you to gain traction rapidly
• Package this into a clear proposition for your audiences
• Establish the themes you will lead on in 2013.

Next up - properly define the market segments you've chosen to play in and design a shop window and marketing communication approach that will access decision makers and generate new opportunities.

Done all this? You're ready to build your marketing machine. It's delivered on a quarterly cycle - one theme per quarter. This makes it repeatable and creates huge focus. It also means you're measuring and reviewing very emphatically every 3 months and ploughing the learnings back into the next quarter.

Build your quarterly process using the following four stages. In brief: create great content, spread it far and wide, rake in the leads, nurture to pipeline.

1. Content: Inspire hope and confidence

Claim ownership of your target market place and the themes you have established you will lead on with great content. You'll need to inspire two things through your content:

1. Hope - show there is a better, simpler, faster, more profitable world just around the corner. Paint a picture of vibrant success
2. Confidence - show there's a high likelihood of getting to this better world by working with/buying from you.

Three reasons to create inspiring content:

• Earn the right to charge a premium price
• Magnetise people to your brand/website/people
• Be the obvious choice in pitches - on and off paper

How?

One way is to create powerful 'thought leadership' in your marketplace - stamping your authority and earning the right to a conversation. The emphasis is on moving way beyond 'we're here, we do this;. Using your in-house capability, tapping into your knowledgeable client base and possibly working in conjunction with one of your partners there is the opportunity to create an opinion piece that generates awareness, access and leads.

The key is to create content framed in such a way that those who click are self-selecting as prospected. For example "The future of data centres" attracts the intellectually curious; "running out of space in your data centre: three choices' attracts those with a problem they'll pay money to solve.

Examples of content that can inspire:

• White papers
• ebooks
• Very sharp knowledge pieces
• Webcasts/podcasts
• Videos
• Research/diagnostics

Idea: 'What if...' series - focused on the issues of your different customers - clients/candidates, challenging the status quo. The content would be highly visual (perhaps a webcast or animation) and would work through a company's recruitment challenge or candidate's decision process; building the balanced and opposing views, acknowledging complexity and pointing out the critical insight made visible at each stage.

Idea: 'The Invisible - Made Visible' series - very sharp set of 2-page articles that give a strong, personality-filled point of view to the market. Highly visual and scannable in print or on the web. The series brings the issues to life and forces readers to question their current approach and ways of working.

Idea: Research paper - a detailed research campaign which allows you to target hard to reach decision makers and build a peer-to-peer relationship with them, whilst leveraging their reputation and knowledge in your content.

2. Create buzz: take your content to the four corners of your market place

If your content (and name) is known across the market place, it provides a soft landing for campaigns, makes your business the 'only choice' - and most importantly drives 'raised hands' over the web (via sign-ups) that you can convert to leads and new clients. 'Sweating' your content is key to getting on the radar of the people you want to reach. Using the high value content to create a noise in your target market segment will put you on the map of a much wider audience albeit invisible at this stage.

How?

Share your opinions with the press, share content via social media, optimise your site for keywords your market is searching on and create a viral effect where trusted partners share your content with their audience.

In practice this includes:

• Setting up and managing relevant LinkedIn groups to magnetise your content
• Contributing to other online groups
• 'Sweating' your high value content in your own communications with clients
• Cultivating social media, e.g. social bookmarking
• Creating and sending online press releases
• Blogging and sending your articles to other bloggers
• Pitching journalists and online publications

3. Generate leads: make invisible eyeballs, tangible relationships

Creating a powerful buzz around your business is a great start - but you'll need to turn the invisible visitors on your website and social media pages into visible names and email addresses that you can proactively build a relationship with, otherwise you'll struggle to get enough new clients over the line.

The objectives at this stage are to generate new name contacts, open up conversations with existing content and cross-sell to existing clients.

And there are two core ways to do this:

Create 'hand raising' opportunities on your destination site. This means engineering a pathway, whereby people who are reading your content are motivated to exchange their details for something of value. This could be: an extra powerful piece of content, a diagnostic tool, a webinar, or event... or something particularly engaging in your market. Your aim should be to generate the highest quality, highest volume of hand raisers possible - set a target and manage your way to it.

Secondly, reach out directly to prospects. Make this outcome focused - i.e. specifying the need/problem and the destination you can take the prospect to and bringing this to life in the prospect's mind, rather than describing 'what you do'.

Consider:

• A personal email campaign that opens up very broad strategic conversations and leverages right place/right time. Be honest and compelling. Approach prospects with a peer-to-peer approach of 'can we create value together?'
• Offering your content through a powerful email series that highlights exactly who the content is for and the issues it can solve/provide clarity on
• Sending a hard copy letter as a 'market update' with the tone of keeping each prospect informed with key issues/new solutions, rather than overtly selling your solution

4. Nurture leads: turn clicks into pipeline

Most prospects won't be ready to buy right now, even if they have engaged with your content. Automate the process of following up and continually engaging them - they are your goldmine and next year's revenue.

Providing regular, relevant, sustainable communication with your pipeline re-awakens dormant prospects, shortens the sales cycle and sweats the most out of your pipeline.

How?

• Newsletter - regular, fresh, valuable content which keeps you front of mind, cross-sells, encourages referrals and builds your brand. You will need to take a different approach from most other newsletters - it's a well used format, but great information curators are still welcome in inboxes
• "Saw this and thought of you" emails. Design to drip feed high impact small news items (like award nominations) to your database, these emails should feel like a personal update. They are the equivalent of watering your seedlings gently.
• Event - run an event specifically aimed at your target audience to turn email addresses and clicks into real relationships.

And an example in practice: Vybrant Organisation

Vybrant wanted to bring their marketing efforts together with a clear strategy that would truly generate leads end-to-end. They created a machine with efficiency and creativity at its heart.

An example of a quarter with a theme of High Performing Sales Teams

Content

• Created a white paper specifically for sales directors called "White Space for Pioneers: develop the new high performance sales team'. Interviewed 20 sales directors - all new contacts/relationships for Vybrant
• Created a powerful case study about Vybrant's work in a major public sector body

Buzz

Sweated via eshots, a webinar, social media and 'saw this and thought of you'. In addition, a generic social media and web campaign was delivered including a series of press releases which achieved coverage on over 1000 websites, including many industry leading sites and publications.

Lead generation

Released the white paper to a cold audience, plus ran the 'generic' Vybrant lead gen campaign. The results?

• 8 meetings
• 3 proposals
• 1 piece of closed business; 2 more pending

Nurturing

• Quarterly newsletter created, generating more clicks and incoming enquiries
• Each interviewee was nurtured over a 3-month period to open up new opportunities

The outcome

ROI was 12:1 (from project closes so far).

For the complete B2B lead generation how-to guide, read The B2B Lead Generation Machine.

Exporting represents a prime channel extension opportunity for many UK businesses. Jaguar Land Rover now export 80% of their output; Cambridge-based ARM Holdings are selling their semi-conductor technology into 95% of the world's mobile phones. We hear these headline grabbing stories - in the SME sector there are also very notable successes.

From within our own community, a company who started exporting in 2010 now comments that "exports are critical; very, very important to our business. We have developed and had great success with our product in the UK, but the true volume potential will come from exports, and we're definitely starting to see that".

Themis Analytics won the Queen's Award for Enterprise in International Trade in 2010, with 80% of their revenue coming from a nimble approach to global relationships.

The rewards can be considerable - channel extension can transform your business.

For businesses that have an exportable product (and many may not realise they do) and the vision to become "export-fit", the opportunity exists to participate in a market with a population one hundred times larger than the UK, and generally achieving stronger year-on-year growth. It takes a great deal of effort to develop and launch a product successfully in local markets, so with all that hard work done, it surely makes sense to consider extending the reach of your business to the very greatest extent through growing your channels internationally.

In part, exporting is about growing sales and ensuring the necessary infrastructure is in place to support that growth. As we are highlighting through this series on building the asset wealth in your business, happily such channel extension opportunities not only boost the profit side of the equation, they also drive the multiple. Demonstrating demand for your product globally is hugely attractive to the right investor, thereby commanding a higher valuation for your business.

The pursuit of channel extension through exporting, represents a transformational growth opportunity that can greatly enhance the value of your business?

What next?

Download the next article: Do you have an exportable product? Could your product make you millions in new markets?

High profile businesses, such as Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls Royce and Cambridge-based ARM Holdings are selling over 75% of their product into overseas markets. A number of SMEs have also built up considerable export businesses.  The following quotes are from SMEs based in the North-West of England:

• "We could no longer exist without exports. If we had not made moves a few years back, given the increasing globalisation of our industry, I don't believe we would be around today." IT sector.
• "Exports have been fundamental to our growth. We are now exporting 60-65% of our output and expect this to climb to 80% within the next five years as we continue to grow." Light Engineering sector.

At the same time we hear that "the value of UK exports to Ireland is greater than the combined value of our exports to China, India, Brazil and Russia" (The Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 2011).

Taken together, the above clearly suggests there is a huge untapped opportunity for UK businesses seeking to internationalise... but many have yet to seize the opportunity. For businesses that have an exportable product (and many may not realise they do), the opportunity exists to participate in a market with a population one hundred times larger than the UK, and generally showing stronger year-on-year growth. It takes a great deal of effort to develop and launch a product successfully in local markets, so with all that hard work done, it surely makes sense to consider extending the reach of your business to the very greatest extent through growing your channels into export markets.

Shirlaws helps businesses seeking to export. At its most obvious level, exporting is about growing sales in new markets and ensuring the necessary supportive infrastructure is in place; Shirlaws has been helping businesses from the outset with these challenges, boosting clients' profitability as a consequence. Companies that now consider exporting a way of life are also likely to have significantly boosted the valuation of their businesses as a consequence of demonstrating there is international demand for their products. Shirlaws can assist businesses to further build their valuation by also working with them to positively impact their multiple.

If exporting may be of interest to your business, what's the next step? Let's first of all recognise what exporting isn't; it's not an opportunist venture or something that can be successfully pursued half-heartedly or driven by short-term objectives. Success is realised when an exportable product is complemented by a supportive unified long-term vision for the business, enthusiastically endorsed at all levels of the organisation. A refreshing of the current positioning of the business and the acquisition of new skills may also form part of what's required to make a business truly "export-fit". Many of you will recognise how these themes dovetail with Shirlaws' frameworks and areas of expertise - both culturally and commercially.

Which products typically perform well in overseas markets? Some products very obviously lend themselves to exporting - it's inconceivable that Samsung or Apple would offer their products to one country only - their market is wherever there is humankind; national borders are a mere detail. For a manufacturer of fresh foods with a 3 day shelf-life, options may be more limited; although if there is demand for the product, solutions may still exist to internationalise. Every product deserves to be considered on its own merits. In that context, the following attributes, often present in a successful exported product, should be seen as merely representing a guide:-

• a truly differentiated product / niche offering
• a system offering or the prospect of repeating sales - one-off projects need to be high value to warrant the upfront marketing cost
• secure technology / intellectual property
• high product value relative to shipping cost
• minimal need for overseas infrastructure (at least initially) - e.g. local office, engineering support, etc.

Many smaller businesses are wary of export, dissauded by the apparent complexity, uncertainty and risk. Much of this is around mind-set - a natural aversion to the unfamiliar. If such psychological barriers can be overcome then there is a potentially transformational growth opportunity that can greatly enhance the value of the business.

“When you focus on the weird, passionate, interesting segment of the audience, you can do extraordinary work for a few (and watch it spread) instead of starting from a place of average.

Go ahead and make something for the elites. Not the elites of class or wealth, but the elites of curiosity, passion and taste. Every great thing ever created was created by and for this group.

There's a surprisingly large amount of room at the this end of the market--among those that care enough about what they do to say no, and better yet, to teach the market why they're right.

They earn their niche at the top of the market by leading.” – Seth Godin in his blog on 23^rd April 2013.

Dear coaches, here’s a clarion call for excellence for your work, especially when you are coaching your client’s positioning strategy, to ensure they focus on an elite group of potential clients.

And when you are coaching them, are you arousing elite in them?

Are you holding them in a higher space of brilliance than they currently hold themselves?

My current belief is that I ought to hold them as magnificent so I have a direction in which to coach.

Otherwise, what am I doing there?

Breaking Bad, the US crime drama series, is the best thing on TV since The Wire, in my opinion.  And as well as being a great drama, there is also a great business lesson in there too.

If you've not seen it, here's the summary.  A brilliant chemistry teacher, Walter White,  known as Walt, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. For a man in his early 50's, this is a major blow.  He has a wife and teenage son and another child on the way, yet he has no legacy.  Despite being a brilliant chemist, his career didn't bring him wealth.  He's ended up teaching in the local state school.  He doesn't earn much.  He has few savings.  No life insurance. No nest egg to help his family survive after he's gone.

As a loving father and husband he decides that he is going to spend the year or so he has left to live accumulating a legacy for his family. Here's the twist.  To do this he joins forces with a former student of his, a drop out who is now a small time drug dealer. Walt applies his brilliant chemistry skills to making and selling the purest, highly illegal, amphetamine drug Crystal Meth.

Once you get over the immorality of it all, the business lesson emerges. Walt produces the purest Crystal Meth ever seen in New Mexico.  His sidekick though, sells it in small quantities on the street at the usual market price for meth.   Pretty soon he sells out.  And the market is desperate for more.  Trouble is their *distribution* is not geared up to supply the amount of demand they've created at the chosen price point.

What emerges is a realisation that as well as building the product, they are trying to be a distributor as well. It's the lack of focus on one or other that is their undoing, at first.
The business only starts to work when they do a deal with a brilliant distributor.  Someone who can buy in bulk and take the product to market because the distributor already has the relationship with the market. He actually runs a chain of fried chicken restaurants which provide a great cover for his illegal activities.

This is the interesting business lesson.  Know what you are good at. Are you good at creating a product that is unique or at least of a unique quality in the market?    Or are you great at distributing product - building a relationship with the market? Perhaps specialising in a particular segment of the market that you know and understand and who knows you and who you can sell other people's product to? 

I was discussing this issue last week with Daniel Priestley. Daniel is the entrepreneur author of the runaway best seller; Become a Key Person of Influence and now his excellent new book, Entrepreneur Revolution. Daniel has built a hugely successful business by creating a brand called KPI which produces a range of events, courses and published material for entrepreneurs.  What Daniel understood from an early point in time in his business' development was that his was primarily a product business.  Operationally he creates product and distributes it to the market, but what he and his colleagues fundamentally understand about KPI is that they're really good at creating product that the market wants.

Most successful businesses are primarily good at one or the other; product or distribution.  Few are really good at both.  Companies that are really good at one buy other companies that are really good at the other.

Apple is another great example of a product company.  They began as a product company.  Their products are of a unique quality. Beautiful design. Excellent functional capability. Then they created a great product called iTunes is a brilliant distribution channel. They sell music, films, books, music and media content via that channel.  Because Apple was first to market, or at least first to be known in the market, for distributing music digitally, they captured the market. iTunes is the top of mind for people wanting to purchase music.

So now iTunes is a distribution business. 

In Breaking Bad, when Walt works out that he's really good at making a unique product and focusses his energies on that, he goes out and finds the best distributor in the market and does a deal with him.  His luck changes and he starts making the big money.  That's a great business lesson, focus, focus, focus, on what you are good at.  If you do that you'll always be able to find someone who's better than you at the things you're not so good at.  Another way of saying it is, leverage your asset.  Make more out of the thing that is of value in your business.  It might be a physical thing, or a skill or whatever. Know what it is and focus on it.

And for more detail on this inspirational business lesson, check out season 1-4 of Breaking Bad and look out for season 5. The final episodes ever are due out In August. Enjoy!

Today the world wants to move faster and has less attention span.

My current belief is shaped by two great thinkers – Stephen Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Darren Shirlaw, founder of the largest business coaching firm in the world.

Covey was, and Shirlaw is, a great spotter of patterns.

Both are able to escalate thinking up layers of context to a point of higher value.

Both taught me that direction matters more than speed.

If you doubt the validity of that, try doubling your speed when you’re lost and see how that works for you.

Darren encourages going beyond goals that have time attached to focusing more on moving in the direction of your vision.

And acting on the vision today, this removing the artificial limitation of time.

Make your vision come to life in any way you can tomorrow so you move in the right direction.

Many companies have tried to increase equity, but failed because they attempted what we call "a logical extension" path.  Instead, we advocate "asset extension", an approach that accounts for Shirlaws' successes with clients wanting to grow.

Our start point uses the concept of "valuation = profit x multiple".  We explain this equation to clients by having "profit" equate to income and "multiple" equate to growth.

Stimulate plans for faster growth

When working with clients we help them consider two alternatives.  Would they increase equity quickly through a logical 'next step' extension?  Or is it faster to understand their fundamental assets and extend in this direction instead?

In the first example we worked with a medical supplies company with £12.8m of revenue and £2m of profit.  The management team wanted to reach £24m of revenue to double its profit, so we aske them to consider two alternatives: 

1. Instead of a medical supplies company, think about yourselves as a supplies company with one business in the medical space.  What other business lines could you develop, which relate to being really good at supplies?
2. Now imagine you are running a medical company.  All your assets - knowledge and contacts - relate to the medical industry, rather than being good at supplies.  If you are now a medical company, with one business in medical supplies, what else could you do?

We showed them how focusing on the business assets stimulates new ideas for extension.  Once the management team recognised themselves as a medical business, rather than a supplies business, they began to create innovative possibilities - medical recruitment, for example.

When we asked whether it would be faster to build a supplies business from £12m to £24m or a medical business, their answer was immediate.  Asset extension of a medical business would be faster than developing along logical supplies business lines.

Understand the businesses' fundamental assets

Most property sales and brokering businesses run letting agencies alongside the main business.  While addressing some 350 people from this sector recently, an audience member asked, "Why does nobody in our industry ever make money from lettings?"

I explained that most property companies go for logical extension, rather than asset extension.  Because their clients often buy to let, property companies logically create a lettings division.

If we look closely at property brokering businesses, they are actually sales businesses.  Lettings businesses, on the other hand, are administration businesses.  The staff in property businesses are sales and marketing people, whose chief skill set is not administration.  This means that property businesses unwittingly set sales people, with very poor administration skills, to run an administration business.  They make less money than they expect because sales and administration skills are diametrically opposed.

It might be logical, but it doesn't generate growth

Although the business extension is logical, these property companies failed to realise their asset is sales and not administration.  If we were advising a property business about extending, we would help them understand this hidden asset.  We would ask, "What else can you sell?" rather than, "What else could you do in terms of property?".

Sometimes assets are not obvious or found by repositioning the business line.  Rather, the question becomes, "Who do you know?" or "What do you know?".

What do you know?

In a further example, we asked a foreign exchange business about its assets.  At first they were unclear, so we asked the owner "What are you really good at?"  He replied, "I know a lot about tax and international business structures.  It's what I use to win foreign exchange business".

Instead of foreign exchange, we suggested he thought about the business as an international company where one arm offered foreign exchange.  What else could it now offer by way of services?

He realised the extended business could offer tax and international structuring.  "The next thing would be trade advice," he said.  "We have so many cross-border clients it would be easy to refer people and set up trade."  Within an hour he had considered six viable business lines.  While they were not all possible short term, these ideas helped him create a new three-year business plan.

Re-energise the senior team

Taking an asset approach to increasing equity comes with an added bonus.  Owners and management teams become immediately energised by new possibilities.  For example, the medical supplies business told us, "We never saw our business in this way before.  We feel completely re-energised about this new asset approach".

“ I can’t tell the future, I just live there”  - Doctor Who.

“I can tell the future because I have coached my client to create it”  - Shirlaws Coach.

Yes, I do know there is only the present.

My current beliefs also include the skill for me to travel forward in time, see the possible future and come back to explain what needs to happen today in order to manifest it.

Remember Darren Shirlaw”s unerring forecasts of the phases of the depression that has just ended? All based on his understanding of trends and human behavior.

Do you need more encouragement to become an avid trend follower, so you can begin to predict your clients’ futures by co-creating them?