Digital Body Language

Whether you are a salesperson or company, your prospects are changing. Finding and connecting with prospects is more difficult today than ever before. And once you do connect with a prospect, the chances are they know far more about the issues they want or need to address and the potential solutions to those issues than the prospects you've dealt with in the past. It used to be salespeople were the dispensers of knowledge and solutions. Not too long ago most psopects needed salespeople to help them analyze their needs and to then propose viable solutions to those needs. No longer. Everyday more and more of our prospects are turning to the ever growing number of resources on the internet to research their problems and issues, their wants and needs. With the explosion of websites, artilce sites, blogs, forums, webinars, and other resources immediatley avaiable to anyone willing to take a few minutes to do a keyword search, salespeople are no longer the lynchpin of knowledge and solution. Salespeople are increasingly engaging prospects at a later and later stage of the purchasing process--often so late in the process that their only task is to give a price since the prospect has already diagnosed the issue, researched the various solutions, determined the most appropriate solution for their situation, and now only need a potential product or service provider to quote a price. This movement away from using salespeople early in their purchasing process creates a huge problem for companies and salespeople--how to recognize and capture a prospect early in their solution search. Steven Woods in Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World (2009: New Year Publishing) argues that just as it used to be critical for a salesperson to be able to read a prospect's body language in order to be able to successfully move them to make a positive decision to purchase, it is now equally critical--and possible--to read a prospect's "digital" body language via their use and movements through the company's internet resources. Digital Body Language is aimed at the marketing function of companies with relatively sophisticated marketing departments engaged in business-to-business complex sales. For Woods, the activities that allow one to read the body language of a company's electronic visitor is very much a pre-sales handoff activity. This, however, doesn't mean that smaller companies, salespeople, and individual professionals can't pick up some good ideas of how to understand where in the buying cycle the visitors to their website, blog, podcast, or other resource are. Woods argues that by understanding and analyzing where the visitors to the company's website or blog come from, how long they stay, what they engage while they are there, and what they go afterwords can help the marketing department formulate a campaign to eventually move the prospect from investigator who is researching issues and options to being handed off to t

Steve put together the science behind the art of demand gen, marketing and database management as it pertains to marketing and sales. There are topics covered in this book that have not been touched by others. It's timely, accurate, provoking and a must-have handbook for any marketer out there that relies on technology to do their job.

Steven Woods book explains how marketing is playing a role deeper into the buying funnel than ever before what marketers need to think about in order to effectively interpret the digital body language of largely anonymous consumers. This skill is critical to evaluate their information needs and provide them with the appropriate content and offers to help them progress through the buying cycle. This is especially important during these trying economic times, where as Tony Jarros from SiriusDecisions indicates, people haven't stoppped shopping; they're just not buying. Nurturing these leads is vital to increase velocity through the pipe and ensure that when they are ready to purchase that your product is top-of-mind. I have also become a fan of Steven's blog of the same name http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com where he offers tips and tricks on how to further apply topics in the book, using Eloqua's product.

I'm not sure if I like the term Digital Body Language, but Steve Woods' book I like very much. It clearly shows how the role of marketing in the complex sale has changed, and gives lots of detailed suggestions on how marketing teams can cope with this change, by using smart demand generation strategies. This book is required reading for marketers who currently use a marketing automation system such as Eloqua (for a full list of vendors see my blog LeadSloth.com). Or for marketers who plan to use such a system. It provides useful guidelines to improve profiling, lead scoring, and lead nurturing. Also, it shows how to measure marketing ROI more objectively. Steve Woods is CTO an co-founder of Eloqua, so the book is based on 9 years of practical demand generation experience. However, the book does not mention Eloqua, so you are spared any advertising and you get access to knowledge that is relevant regardless of the marketing software you use. Digital Body Language is not an easy read, because it's chock-full of information that has never been put in a book before. Steve has added about two dozen case studies, which are brief but provide practical examples that make the book come more alive. All in all, I think this book will soon become a classic in the demand generation space.

Steve's Book was insightful and quite timely. Buyers have changed the way they buy (using the Web) but marketing departments have not changed at all. Steve addresses this disparity with a logical and well thought out model to measure and market in a Web world. I highly recommend this book for all marketers who have to face a new Web world and all MBA students who have just learned the old model with little application. With Steve's new paradigm you will be able to hit the ground running.