Everybody’s talking about shifts in media.  Offline to online.  You gotta be on Facebook.  Direct mail is dead.

I’m not so sure.  I still get (and often rely on) snail mail.  Yes, I’m using social media a lot more, but I still live in a very physical world.

This reminds me of a conference I attended a few years ago.  Big-budget marketers were in attendance, many of whom have relied on television advertising to build and maintain market share for their products.  They were concerned that television was “broken.” 

A speaker pointed out that television is, in fact, in fine shape.  More people are watching more TV than ever before.  But with the splintering of their attention across more and more channels, not to mention the expansion of digital video recorders, it’s television as an advertising medium that’s in trouble.  As a media channel that consumers enjoy, it’s just fine.

We’re enamored with Facebook and Twitter and the Web right now, and for good reasons.  But the physical world we live in isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and there are (and always will be) plenty of marketing opportunities there.

Countless studies have also shown that we’re not necessarily shifting our media habits.  We’re increasing them.  We’re spending more time online, in front of the TV, and consuming other media combined than the total time we’ve spent consuming media in years past.

That means more eyeballs in front of more advertising opportunities more often.

We may not have completely cracked the nut in terms of how to best monetize this increasingly fractionalized media world.  But the opportunity is expanding – not just shifting, and definitely not shrinking.

Whether they had a bad year or a great year, most of your customers will start January 1^st back at zero.  It’s a fresh start, which depending on who you’re selling to, can mean your customers are also anxious about the ambitious 2010 goals & objectives they’re responsible for.

Those customers will be looking for anything that can help them get a head-start on those objectives, anything that will make it easier to make significant progress fast.

This is a great time of year to particularly align your product or service to those brand-new objectives.  Demonstrate clearly how you can help, and you’re in. 

And you don’t need to wait until January 2^nd to have that conversion.  Those 2010 objectives are likely locked in already.  Talk to your prospects today to give them more confidence and peace of mind heading into the holidays.

Twitter's importance as a communication and customer/prospect engagement tool is getting hard to ignore.  Still, especially if you're considering Twitter as a corporate communications and marketing initiative, it's important to know why you're doing it - for what purpose, to reach what audience, and to what measurable effect for the organization.

Equally important is to consider why you might NOT want to focus on Twitter at present.  Below are five reasons why you might not want to spend time using Twitter as a component of your marketing mix (at least not yet):

Your customers aren't using it:  Twitter is hot, but it's not Facebook (at least not yet).  It's usage is still somewhat limited, and thus it's important to know your target customers well enough to determine if, in fact, they're using Twitter in enough volume & frequency for you to use it as a channel to engage and mobilize same audience.  There are several effective & free Twitter search tools to help you ballpark this quickly.

You aren't willing (or don't have time to) reciprocate:  Twitter works best when it's a two-way street.  For every link you tweet out, you're retweeting or responding to 2-3 other tweets already in "the stream."  Active engagement with the Twitter community is the best way to be accepted, build credibility, accelerate your influence and followers, and ultimately drive action from your target audience.  If you can't engage, you likely won't get the results you're seeking.

You only want to promote your business:  Yes, you're using Twitter in the first place to grow your business.  Drive new sales.  Engage new customers.  But the best way to do that isn't to always promote your own priorities, goods and services.  Put yourself in the shoes of your customer, and tweet about what they care about.  Most of the time, this will likely mean publishing content that others have written.  Or content you publish that's purely educational, and not at all about selling directly.  Once you establish that you're aggregating and feeding back a steady stream of valuable content that's audience-centric, those occasionally-integrated product and lead generation offers will be better received and generate a higher response.

Your interns are taking care of it:  It may sound like a good idea to let the ambitious, tech-savvy interns launch a Twitter presence for your business.  And while they're with you, if they understand your customer and publish the right content, they might give you a great head start with good early results (measured by followers and clickthroughs).  But a few months later when they head back to school, what do you have?  And who's going to manage it moving forward?  Unless you have a succession plan once the interns are gone, be careful you're not investing in a strategy that's going to be mothballed.  A dormant Twitter business account, which makes you look like you've abandoned your community of customers and prospects, might be worse than one that never got started to begin with.

You expect miracles:  It's not going to happen overnight.  There are tools that can help you accelerate Twitter followers quickly, but follower volume does not mean immediate credibility, influence and follow-on activity for your business.  If you're getting into Twitter for a quick hit, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.  Know that you're making an investment in a tool that will not only take some time to grow, but that will become a growing and increasingly important asset that feeds your business for a long time to come. 

Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.

World-class CRM tools such as Salesforce.com allow for an incredible level of customization, analytics, segmentation and long sales-cycle deal management.  It’s a highly complex program that can do amazing things.  Unfortunately, many users over-use it.  They add too much customization, use too many features, and make it difficult, cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive to use and get value from.

Similar story with Jigsaw, one of the industry’s best lead nurturing and marketing automation software packages.  It can allow an incredible amount of segmentation and customization for following up with countless different types of pre-sales leads.  But you can over-think lead nurturing too.  Do too much, and it’ll take way too much work to maintain and execute, especially if your organization isn’t big enough or you’re not staffed to support that work.

For CRM systems, marketing automation programs and many other SaaS products, I have two recommendations:

Start Simple:  Do the basics.  Forget segmentation at first.  Start with the simplest implementation and grow from there.  If you boil the ocean from day one, you’ll create confusion and frustrate your users. 

Don’t Overdo It:  As you expand usage and complexity, know where the point of diminishing returns is – for your investment, for how your teams are able to use it, and for the revenue & sales return you get out of the time/money investment.  If you go too far, don’t be afraid to pull back to what’s more comfortable and delivering the best return.

We all have big, intimidating projects on our plates that, frankly, are a little scary.  They either feel like a lot of work, or you’re not exactly sure how to tackle them.  So, we hem and haw and avoid them.

I’ve found that a fairly simple trick can help me get more of those projects done.  It takes just five minutes.

When I’m facing a big project or task, I tell myself I’m going to spend five minutes getting it started, and that’s it.  I’m either going to just do five minutes worth of that task, or just spend five minutes planning how to tackle it.

The secret of the Five Minute Rule is that I almost always keep going, blow past the five minutes, and get the task done in far less time than if I would have kept procrastinating.

It’s those five minutes that demonstrate how relatively quickly & easily the task can actually get done.  If you get five minutes of momentum, sometimes that’s all you need to keep going to the finish.  If you use the five minutes to brainstorm, it makes the task far less intimidating and easier to get done right away.

Find something on your list right now and give it five minutes.  Let me know what happens next.

Most sales professionals hate cold calling.  Following up with existing leads sometimes isn’t much better or easier.  Even the best salespeople often have a strong case of call reluctance that’s difficult to shake.

But once successful salespeople get rolling, they often find it easy to keep that momentum and generate results – live contacts, interested prospects, new sources of closeable pipeline.

Here are five ways to get past that case of call reluctance and get more of your leads moving towards a sale.

Script the first 30 seconds:  Oftentimes call reluctance comes from a concern that the beginning of a conversation may be awkward.  Get past that fear by writing down, visualizing and even practicing the first 20-30 seconds of the call.  Have a specific script you will use printed out and next to your phone.  It’ll give you confidence that each call will be easier to warm up, and get right to the conversation you want to be having.

Have a great voicemail script ready:  Let’s face it, most of the calls you make will result in a voicemail.  Many sales pros leave a long, rambling voicemail with no direction, no urgency and no call to action.  Have a great voicemail script ready beforehand, and use it every time.  Leave something that’s no longer than 40-45 seconds, had a good pace, a sense of urgency, and a strong offer or call to action to get your prospect to call back quickly.  When you have a voicemail script like this, that you know works, it’s easier and faster to get through more of your calls (because you know those prospects will be calling back)

Turn off all other distractions:  You’ve done it too – you make the first couple calls, get a kernel of momentum, then check your email or Facebook page and it’s all gone.  When you’re ready to make those calls, turn off everything – email, your Web browser, RSS feeds, notifications, everything.  Get yourself into a zone where you’re making those calls and nothing else.  You’ll be surprised how quickly you get through the list, and drive results for yourself.

Get momentum, and keep going:  On a related note, have a strong list to call and keep going until you’re through it.  Do it at a set time, perhaps the same time of the day every day, and make sure those around you know you’re staying focused.  This can take discipline, even if you don’t have distractions.  You leave a couple good voicemails, maybe have a good conversation that moves a prospect along, and you want to get some more coffee.  Tell your manager.  Avoid these things, and make the next call.

Do it early, or do it late:  When you first get into the office in the morning, make those calls.  There won’t be firedrills, you won’t know what’s awaiting you in your email, and you’re more likely to get call-backs later that day from the voicemails you’ve left in the morning.  Next best strategy is to schedule those calls late in the day.  After 4:00, you’re more likely to catch your prospect in their office, doing their own catch-up before leaving for the day.  You’ll either reach more people live, or leave voicemails that will be returned first-thing the next day (getting your next sales day off to a great start)

Too often, sales & marketing blame each other for a lack of results.  The leads aren’t good.  Sales doesn’t follow up.  The excuses go on and on.

If this sounds familiar for your organization, there are things you can start doing right away to mend fences and start on a path towards not only better relations, but far better revenue results.

Call a sales & marketing summit, and don’t let anyone leave the room until the following five things are agreed upon:

Common Lead Definitions:  What, exactly, is a qualified lead?  What are its characteristics?  Get as detailed as you need to be, but make sure both sales & marketing agree on that definition.  That way, when leads are delivered to sales, they at minimum meet the basic criteria you’ve both agreed on to make them worth the sales team’s time for follow-up.

Initial Response Time:  If the leads are good (and meet the minimum qualified definition), you need a “service agreement” for how quickly those leads will get their first response.  If the lead is waiting for something (a white paper, for instance) response time should likely be no longer than 24 business hours.  In other cases, 48 hours may be acceptable.  Decide what’s right for your organization and customer, get sales management’s buy-in, communicate it clearly to the sales team, and put in place reporting tools to make it super-easy to track this on a daily basis (and send both you and the sales rep alerts when leads fall outside of the service agreement).

Lead Follow-up Steps & Channels:  How many times should a lead be attempted before the sales rep gives up and moves on?  Should all of those attempts be via phone, or should there be a mix of other channels – email, social media channels, in-person, etc.?  If you don’t reach agreement on this critical process, every sales rep will have his or her own idea of what’s right.   Some will call once, leave a message, and consider the lead dead.  Others will call the poor prospect 20 times.  Create a standard with sales not only to ensure leads are thoroughly vetted, but also to ensure sales is moving on to fresher opportunities if there’s nobody at home.

Clear Lead Stages:  A lead comes in.  The rep starts to attempt a call back.  They reach the lead and determine it’s a good prospect, or long-term prospect, or just not qualified.  How do they report this information to you?  What lead stages have you set up in your lead management or CRM system to not only make it easy and clear how you want sales to categorize their working leads, but also to report to management progress & quality of leads (not to mention improve your lead generation ROI performance moving forward)?  Don’t go overboard – 15 lead stages gets way too complicated – but 4-6 stages is reasonable and actionable for most sales environments.

Handing Leads Back to Marketing:  According to MarketingSherpa and others, the vast majority of leads generated by B2B organizations in particularly will buy – just not right now.  Those leads (once they’re identified as such) need to be passed back to marketing for active nurturing.  Make sure there’s a clear process for sales to do just that – ideally with the click of a button. 

Getting your idea to spread like wildfire is simple.  Well, the math is simple.

You simply need a viral coefficient greater than one.  In layman’s terms, for every individual who sees your message, you need it redistributed to more than one additional person (on average).

Let’s say five people see your message.  Three read it and do nothing.  One sends it to two people.  Another sends it to four people.  That’s five readers who redistributed your idea to six people.  That’s six over five, greater than one.

As long as the coefficient is greater than one, your idea spreads.  And spreads.  And spreads.

Knowing this math alone isn’t going to help you create a more viral message.  But as you put new messages into the marketplace, you should be able to measure the economics of their distribution.  How many recipients, how many readers, how many retweets, and so on.

Know your customer, regularly create and publish messages & ideas customized to them, watch the results, do the math.  Watch what’s working, and do a heck of a lot more of it.