B2B Lead Blog

As the MECLABS Research Partnership analyst team, my colleagues and I speak with professionals who attend our events (like the next month’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas), purchase our publications, and want more information about how MECLABS can help grow their business. So every day we hear about the challenges they’re facing.

One issue that surfaces all too often is optimizing databases: When you have a database of thousands upon thousands of names, how do you help your team easily and effectively prioritize who to contact? Nearly every company I talk to does some kind of lead scoring, but rarely do those lead scores align with their database in a way that allows their sales teams to determine – at a glance – which prospects are the right fit at the right time.

This hit way too close to home. Here at MECLABS, my team was struggling with the same issue. Through events, publications, and general inquiry, we add hundreds of interested potential partner inquiries to our database every few weeks, sometimes even thousands. We have an ace IT team that has set up platforms so we can quickly identify who fits our Ideal Partner Profile, and we’d contact them as soon after they express interest in our Research Partnership program. We are very well aware of the importance of timeliness for marketers who are struggling to optimize their sales and marketing funnels. And we’d follow up based on the next action that was associated with their file.

But it took Brooke Bower, our data-analysis whiz, to help our team look at our database from a new perspective, one that would help us get the highest return on our time by focusing on the most promising potential partners, as opposed to merely the most urgent.

What we realized was missing was a comprehensive at-a-glance snapshot that basically shows us the key factors that define a successful research-partnership engagement:

• If the individual making the inquiry is a decision maker or an influencer
• How many events the individual, and his team, have attended and publications they’ve purchased compiled in an easily sortable list
• Their organization’s firmographic details – such as revenue, marketing budget, sales cycle and size

We enlisted the IT department to add fields to our existing platform to bring together these details into a single “opportunity grade” that would be applied to each potential partner’s account. (The concept of an “opportunity grade” was recommended to us by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS.) The higher the grade, the better fit for a long-term, strategic research partnership.

Within just a few days, through the teamwork of IT, marketing and sales, we have sorted our database so that it reveals to us that “opportunity grade” for each partner. It wasn’t rocket science, just taking the time to ask the hard questions (thanks Brooke), and look at what we do from a fresh perspective, to give IT the parameters they needed to bring it all together. This is a project that will never be completed, of course. We’re going to continually work with Brooke to analyze what qualities make up our most qualified research partners and make sure our database can easily and accurately help us identify them.

Great results happen when people and departments with different skill sets take time to put their minds together — in this case it was Brooke’s data savvy combined with my hands-on experience talking to potential Research Partners about their challenges.

I’d really like to hear about your experiences in building a database that helps you engage more efficiently and effectively. I welcome you to share them in the comments.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy, Sales

In his most recent post, Dave Green pointed out how marketers invest most of their budget on trade shows even though it ranks fourth in effectiveness. He went on to explain how to get a better return on your trade-show investment through lead scoring.

Now I’m going to share nine tactics that will drive those lead scores – and your ROI – even higher:

Do thorough research. Find out which attendees fit your Universal Lead Definition. If you have access to the registration list, analyze it. Look up registrants on LinkedIn. Develop a list of targets you want to seek out during the event. Research the sponsors, too. They should all be on the event website. There may be ways to join forces with them to reach your audience.

Leverage social media before, during and after the event. Connect with attendees and build your profile before the event through your blog and updates on Twitter and LinkedIn. Tweet relevant content during the event. Invite customer feedback afterward. There’s so much more than can be addressed in this post, so I advise looking online for more great ideas.

Creatively partner with event organizers. If you’re holding an educational or social event, brainstorm with them to see how they can help you attract more and better attendees. This could be everything from sending pre-event emails to including information in registration packages. Negotiate support before signing contracts to minimize costs and maximize opportunity.

Get involved with the event. Don’t just be a statue at a booth. Try to attend a few sessions, switch off with your team members to sit with attendees at lunch and engage on a personal level. It will help you build relationships and you will be able to strike up more relevant conversations if you just sat through the same keynote. Best of all, the conference will be more fun and you’ll learn a lot more.

Provide value, not trinkets. People attend events to gain knowledge and share it with their teams. Time is always tight as they try to take care of work back at the office while absorbing as much information as they can. That’s why you must always think about what’s in it for them to engage with your brand. Provide what they really can use: resources to drive their business to the next level – whether that’s a strategic piece of content, a tool or an opportunity to network with their peers.

Focus only on those who have expressed genuine interest. Trade shows often reward people if they visit as many booths as possible. At too many events, I’ve witnessed sales professionals requiring attendees to sit through a 10-minute presentation to “prove” they’ve visited the booth, when the attendees clearly don’t care about their product.

Are they interested? Take note. At minimum, jot your name and notes about their issues on their business card, and assign one person to collect and enter information into your database for follow up. Include the solution they’re interested in, the issue they’re trying to resolve, other contacts they’ve had with your organization, and any qualitative intel that will help the person following up – such as “launching a new website in Q2” or “unhappy with solution X.”

Promptly and professionally follow up. Before the event even begins, be ready to follow up. Prepare a brief, customizable email template to send out immediately afterward. It can come directly from the sales professional who spoke with the prospect, or it could reference the conversation and any key information you were able to capture. If the prospect doesn’t respond, follow up with a thoughtfully scripted phone call where you position yourself as a resource they can turn to when they are ready to talk. Don’t stalk and don’t be pushy, but do be responsive and close the loop. And be absolutely sure that only one person is doing the follow up. (This is why it’s critical to work from a single database.)

Track and measure the results. After the follow-up emails have been sent and calls have been made, note how many are still in your marketing and sales funnels, and how many deals closed. Monitor this throughout the year to determine whether the trade show is worth investing in the next time.

Do you have additional ideas on how to make the most of your tradeshow investments? I’d love to hear about them. Share them in the comments below.

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, ROI Measurement, Sales Leads, Social Media

I received some news today that leaves me both humbled and honored. OpenView Labs named its top 25 sales influencers for 2012, and I am among them. This is especially meaningful for two reasons.

First, I have tremendous respect for the people who have joined me on this list; I’m in great company. Learn more about them here: Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2012.

Second, OpenView Labs takes a scientific approach to selecting its top influencers. OpenView Labs leverages the Klout True Reach metric to calculate social media influence. They also examined blog activity, and other more traditional content. You can read more about their selection process toward the end of this post here: Marketing Channel Research: How to Design a Prioritization Scheme.

Current Affairs, Inside Sales, Leadership, Sales, Thought Leadership

In the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, 1,745 marketing organizations revealed that trade shows took up the biggest chunk of their marketing budget – over 21%. Yet, they only ranked fourth in marketing effectiveness, under websites, SEOs, and emails.

I suspect that part of the ROI problem may be due to improper prioritization. Smart marketers apply some type of lead scoring to leads generated from website, SEO, and email initiatives. They need to do the same with trade shows. I recommend ranking trade show leads using the point-system outlined below – the higher the ranking, the hotter the lead.

1. Trade-show registration lists. While useful to build your marketing database for lead nurturing, a trade-show registration list is the least-qualified lead source because some aren’t remotely interested in your solution. In fact, they may not have attended the trade show at all. If the trade show closely aligns with one of your solution offerings, then the quality of these kinds of leads will be better. The more broad based the trade-show appeal, the less aligned it will be with your product/service categories and target market, so the conversion rate will be lower.

2. Those who attend a widely publicized trade-show social event sponsored by your organization. Obviously, such events give you time to engage prospects and customers in a more relaxed atmosphere. At times, however, these social events are so large that many of those in attendance never speak to anyone from your team. If that’s the case, the overall conversion rate of attendees is unlikely to be very high. Still, there’s an indication of awareness and interest in your company.

3. Booth visitors. Make sure their reasons for stopping by aren’t for merely collecting a tchotchke or fulfilling a requirement to win a prize.

4. Those who attend a special public event. Often, marketers will create an event within their booth in which someone presents to a small group. There’s typically one-way communication, not a conversation. Depending on the nature of the presentation, this indicates a relatively early stage in the buying cycle. The buyer enjoys a level of anonymity while gathering information to determine whether the solution warrants a conversation. These attendees generally have a deeper level of engagement than someone who stops by your booth to window shop.

5. Those who attend a learning event. These events can be executive roundtables or seminars held during the trade show. You can specifically target the audience and their attendance indicates significant interest.

6. Those who interact with a team member. This group is obviously more qualified than a booth visitor. The challenge is capturing this information. One way is with radio-frequency identification which tracks visitors’ movement. It can tell who stopped by, where they specifically stopped and for how long.

7. Those who attend a one-on-one meeting. Trade shows can be great places to meet individually with key decision makers in target accounts.

This type of trade-show lead scoring can supplement your larger lead-scoring model that includes information like the title, industry and organization size, or the number of responses from the prospect’s company over time.

Most importantly, it can help you determine, as you sort through the massive amounts of leads that trade shows generate, who is most worthy of your attention.

Image: AAPEX Shows

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Sales Leads

I can’t stress this enough: when it comes to marketing, if we’re not constantly learning, we’re going to find ourselves left behind faster than ever.

Some people say I’m an expert in B2B lead generation because I wrote a book on it, but you know what? I am astonished by what I didn’t know then compared to what I know today. This past year has been especially illuminating thanks to the brilliance of smart marketers who are expanding and perfecting the lead-generation concepts I wrote about years ago.

This year’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinars are testament to that.

In February, Paul Teshima, SVP of Product Management at Eloqua, set the tone for the webinar year. He defined the tenets of the new world of marketing in Revenue Performance Management. “We’ve seen a problem now where, even though marketing is doing a great job of generating leads, sales still cannot handle the volume and they slip away,” explains Paul. “Some of the leading companies today are really focusing on this idea of managing and bringing marketing sales together, in a more effective way, now that they’ve solved some of the tactical problems.”

Paul explains how here: The Future of Marketing: The Evolution from Demand Generation to Revenue Performance Management

In March, Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Global Marketing at ECI Telecom, detailed how she executed an ultra-successful content strategy campaign and how that transformed their entire marketing strategy.

“We had to put ourselves in line with our buyers’ journey so we knew how to engage them at the right level,” she points out. “We had to provide value to our prospects, who have never heard of us before, and position ourselves as a company that understands their marketplace and their business issues – a partner as well as an expert.” Learn more here: How ECI Developed an Entire Content Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results

In April, John Johnston, eBusiness Marketing Manager for Volvo North America, outlined how he streamlined, integrated and automated lead generation for a marketing program for 20 different heavy construction segments for dealers in 125 countries.

“We took online marketing activities, leveraged their analytics and optimized – measure, take action and repeat. It’s a continuous loop that makes the database and the lead-generation process better and better.”

Watch the webinar to find out how John’s efforts are providing customers and prospects the precise information they need to make a smart purchasing decision, and dealers a much more detailed, useful picture of who they’re selling to. And much of this is happening in real time. Learn more here: How CRM Revolutionized Marketing and Lead Generation at Volvo North America

In May, Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, and I expounded on the powerful combination of excellent data and the human touch to make the best use of sales time and resources.

According to MarketingSherpa, 80% of marketing leads are lost or discarded because even though someone may have provided basic contact information, they may not be ready to talk to a salesperson. Teleprospecting bridges the gap.

Make sure you’re setting a strong foundation for your campaigns with an accurate list. Brandon revealed the outcomes of a breakthrough experiment that tested how higher cost/high quality lead data affected the cost per lead. The results were astounding – the difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was $581 per lead. Learn more here: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads and How One Company Slashed Their Cost Per Lead by More than Half

In June, Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research Group, shared why inbound marketing – a strategy where the prospects find you as opposed to you finding them – is critical, and how integrating social media and SEO drives it.

“Companies with integrated social media and SEO achieve 60% better conversion rates…Search rankings are driven by relevance, relevance enhances an organization’s credibility, and this credibility helps to drive conversion rates,” says Sergio. “It’s an essential ingredient to a B2B marketing program.”

To prove it, Sergio shared five steps that helped an email marketer pull in 70% more leads and doubled revenue in one year. Learn more here: How to Integrate Social Media and SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

In July, Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, revealed how companies are leaking significant revenue in their sales and marketing funnels – knowledge gained through analyzing two billion communications with 80 million customer profiles. He outlined astonishing facts like 43% of companies don’t even respond to inbound leads! But for those that know how to respond, the opportunities to make the sale grow exponentially – 78% of sales goes to companies that respond first, not to the company with the best or cheapest product.

It’s no wonder that Dave points out that venture capital firms want companies in their portfolios to have inside sales departments. “They’ll recruit, train and transplant inside sales teams into their portfolio companies,” he says. For more data that will show you how to speed leads into your sales pipeline, go here: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Find out how:

• Clarifying value proposition helped one company decrease cost-per-acquisition by 66% and multiplied monthly profit four times over
• Re-engaging clients helped one company attain grow its business by 64%
• To quickly and easily choose the best lists
• To time lead-generation activities to attain the highest possible return on investment of resources
• Closed-loop feedback makes sales professionals worship their marketing department

Find out much more here: Finish 2011 Strong: Six Funnel Focal Points to Maximize Time, Resources and Revenues Part 1 and Part 2

It all came full circle in October, when Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, discussed what more than 1,745 marketing organizations had to say about their lead generation efforts in 2011.

“It’s increasingly challenging for marketers to achieve success, and challenges are growing in pertinence year after year,” she explains. “Perceived effectiveness of tactics is declining severely. It’s getting more difficult to achieve the same results from the same marketing activities.”

She points out, however, that may be due to the fact that marketers still aren’t optimizing their funnels:

• 68% haven’t identified their sales or marketing funnels.
• 61% send leads directly to sales.
• 79% haven’t established lead scoring.
• 65% haven’t nurtured leads.

Learn how to make 2012 a better year here: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report: How Marketers are Transforming Mounting Pressures, Challenges into Revenues.

We are in the process of planning our 2012 webinar year. What would you like to know more about? What information would help you generate more leads? How can we help you stay on top of lead-generation innovations? Leave a comment below.

B2B Telemarketing, Content Marketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership

I always look forward to the announcement of the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award winners; they’re a great source of inspiration. In fact, just couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the B2B Best in Show Winner’s unexpected email approach grew its subscriber base by millions.

But honestly, I think B2B marketers might be more disillusioned with the power of email, if the feedback from 1,745 marketing organizations in the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report is any indication.  Email marketing remains one of the top three lead-generation tactics, just below websites and SEO.  Yet they claim its effectiveness dropped from 40 to 26 percent from 2010 to 2011.

Maybe this year’s Email Marketing Awards can point to one of the reasons why this is happening. If you look at the list of winners, you will note no one won the top award for innovation.

I asked Adam Sutton about it. He’s a senior reporter for MarketingSherpa. He edits and writes for their email and inbound marketing newsletters, has easily interviewed hundreds of marketers about their email marketing initiatives, and he’s one of the event judges.

“We don’t give out an award unless a company deserves it and an entry really ‘wows’ us,” he confesses.

But he also concedes that impressing the judges is getting tougher every year. “Email is a mature tactic as far as digital marketing goes; the low-hanging fruit is gone and you have to be more creative to reach the fruit that’s higher on the tree,” explains Adam. “But there’s still plenty there – especially when it comes to reaching people through newer technologies like smart phones and tablets. Of course, you want to make sure it’s worth targeting that segment of the marketplace, and you want to make sure you can measure the results. But I think there’s opportunity that companies aren’t taking advantage of.”

But what if your audiences aren’t avid users of iPads or smart phones?  

“I think it’s a running joke here at MarketingSherpa: I’m sold on triggered emails, like confirmation emails and thank you emails,” says Adam. “Triggered emails are marketing for you all of the time. When you’re on vacation, when you’re sleeping, when you’re working on another project, they’re still out there driving business without you having to add any resources.

“I would look for every opportunity to create a triggered-email campaign. Frankly, I’m surprised that I’m not seeing more of these.”

While it may be more challenging to innovate within the larger email industry, Adam thinks the B2B space is wide open if you’re willing to learn from your B2C counterparts.

“Analyze how B2C marketers nurture leads with triggered email, follow-up email, or cross-selling opportunities. Think about how to use those ideas to reach your audience,” he advises. “I’ve learned in my years of writing newsletters that there are very few case studies that aren’t universally applicable. If you think your email efforts are stale, we have hundreds of case studies to give you some fresh ideas.”

Adam points out a number of case study resources:

• Download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report.  
• Subscribe to MarketingSherpa’s free inbound and email-marketing newsletters.
• Have a fresh email campaign that you think is worthy of a case study? Email him at adam.sutton@meclabs.com.

“Tell us what you’re doing, and think about entering the Awards next year,” advises Adam. “Whatever you do, I encourage you to set aside time to contemplate your email program. If it’s not something you’re impressed with, if you consider it more of an expense and a hassle than a performance-driver, strategize a fresh approach and consider getting professional support.”

Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership

At the B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content at MECLABS, asked me and a few other attendees to reveal our most important “aha” moments in 2011. Our responses are compiled in the video below; hearing what my colleagues had to say produced even more “aha” moments for me, and I’m sure they will for you, too.

In fact, this will be well worth investing nine minutes to watch if you want a serious dose of inspiration and insight. You can also review the timestamps for a quick summary.

:31 – Jason Striker, Digital Marketing Director of ICM Document Solutions, insists that even if an organization says they don’t have the money to make a purchase, they’ll still manage to find a way to buy something if they really want it. “It’s not the economy that’s stopping you from getting sales, it’s your message.”

1:01 – Jay Baer, President of Convince and Convert and Author of The Now Revolution, believes that the path to an organization’s social media success can never be paved by a single expert, “It’s about distributing social media responsibilities across the whole enterprise.”

1:23 – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS, says marketers are finally realizing that optimization is not about “seizing opportunity” it’s about recovering the millions of dollars lost through leaking sales and marketing funnels. “Marketers need to think like plumbers and find the leaks and plug them.”

2:40 – Karen Hayward, CMO and EVP of CenterBeam, believes it’s time for marketers to be accountable for results and has been working diligently with her team throughout 2011 to demonstrate that. “2011 was about … owning our accountability.”

3:19 – Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate VP of Marketing Programs, ECI Telecom, says 2011 was a watershed for her. “Everything I thought was true wasn’t.” She went on to explain that written processes are meaningless without real relationships with your sales team. “I learned what alignment really was, and how to align the sales and marketing organization to really create a cohesive group.”

3:57 – Milap Shah, CEO of Nexsales, warns marketers that when it comes to data that drives the lead-generation campaigns, you get what you pay for. “Working with a so-called ’inexpensive’  list could cost firms 2 ½ to 3 times more; it pays to pay more and stay targeted.”

4:37 – I explain how marketing is about building relationships, and how marketing must play a leadership role in transforming companies from the inside so they can transform outside relationships.

5:37 – Kristin Zhivago, President, Zhivago Management Partners and author of Roadmap to Revenue, reveals that over the past few months, buyers are changing the way they purchase. “In the intense scrutiny of the B2B environment, they’re talking to peers first…they don’t want to read websites.” Zhivago explains why: sellers aren’t even close to aligning their websites to how buyers want to buy.

6:37 – Ge Moua, Senior Demand Generation Manager, Unify, says her “aha” moment came when she defined her job as being the liaison between sales and marketing. “For a long time sales and marketing were very siloed … today we’re working together to achieve the same goal.”

7:30 – Tracey DeMay, Marketing Manager, CenterBeam, advises making sure you’re always talking “with” not “at” your customers and meeting them where they’re at. “By the time they reach out to us, they’ve made a decision or they narrowed it down. They’re much farther along in the buying process than before.”

8:12 – Tony Doty, Senior Manager, Research & Strategy, MECLABS, was surprised by how marketing teams in big companies are facing the very same challenges as those in small ones, whether that’s terrible data, poorly tracked metrics, or lack of measurement. “There are huge companies that are just as green as the startups,” he confesses.

What were your biggest “aha” moments this year? I’d love to hear about them, share them in the comments below.

Lead Generation, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Thought Leadership, Uncategorized

How many emails have you sent prospects and customers this week? How many opened them? How many acted on them?

If you’re like most marketers, the answer too often is, “Not enough.”

It’s a hard fact: people are being inundated with so many sales pitches via email that it’s harder than ever to get prospects to not delete your email, no less take action. It’s no wonder that when marketers are obsessively focused on what’s in it for their prospects to open an email, remarkable things happen – like several million new subscribers.

That’s precisely what Citrix attained through a campaign to grow their subscriber base. Typically, when organizations want to grow their email lists, they do things like coming up with a gimmick, giveaway or contest to convince people to sign up. Instead, Citrix decided to leverage their lists to attain new subscribers. They emailed content their existing subscribers valued so much that they eagerly shared it with their colleagues and Citrix made it easy for them to do so. The subscribers’ colleagues appreciated the emails so much that they decided to subscribe too.

The result: an overall email list increase of several million contacts (35%), “which has greatly increased our media spend efficiency. We are generating demand without having to directly pay for the usual media channels like banner ads, Adwords, etc.” explains Baxter Denney, Manager, Database Marketing at CitrixOnline.

It also resulted in receiving the 2012 Email Marketing Awards’ B2B Best in Show. To read the details of how the Citrix email campaign conclusively proved the value of sharing vs. selling download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report. It features more than 100 pages of the industry’s smartest, most-effective innovations, as well as campaign descriptions, sample emails, extensive results metrics and judges’ analyses.

And if you want to learn even more about the most innovative and effective ways marketers are using email to drive more opportunity and revenue, consider attending the next Email Marketing Summit, Feb. 7 – 10, at Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. To review an agenda go here: 2012 Email Marketing Summit. Receive an extra $500 off registration by entering promotion code 192-ST-1004.

Email Marketing, Social Media

In my post earlier this week, I outlined the challenge presented by SiriusDecisions’ Demand Waterfall taxonomy, specifically with the phrase “Marketing-Qualified Leads” (MQLs). Another problematic phrase is “sales-accepted leads.”

Often, funnels leak the most during the handoff between sales and marketing. Invariably, marketing blames sales and sales blames marketing. A lack of clarity around the term “sales-accepted lead” is the real culprit.

Marketing doesn’t need sales to “accept” the leads. Marketing needs sales to confirm whether the lead met the Universal Lead Definition that was agreed to between sales and marketing. This is a yes/no answer. Sales people should be able to tell on the first sales call, whether by phone or in person, if the lead met the criteria they set with marketing. If the lead didn’t meet the criteria, then marketing needs to know why. There are usually just a handful of reasons.

Such feedback need not wait until the lead is converted to an opportunity weeks or maybe months later. Instead, marketing can take immediate actions to improve lead-qualification practices. And sales leadership can identify sales people who do not understand the agreed-upon criteria, which can lead to an improvement in the Universal Lead Definition.

That’s why I like the phrase “sales-validated leads.” That’s what sales should be doing: validating whether the lead is really a lead, per the definition agreed to by sales and marketing. For most marketing organizations, this small change in funnel focus can make a huge difference in plugging funnel leaks.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your comments. At MECLABS, we don’t want to “own” the funnel taxonomy. We want to create a new, universal language that is useful for everyone and share our knowledge freely. That objective is best accomplished through a community effort via social media. So please, share this post with other funnel mavens and share your opinion. Together, we can create a new, more useful set of funnel definitions.

Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads, Thought Leadership

SiriusDecisions made a brilliant contribution to B2B marketing several years ago when they created their Demand Waterfall. That “waterfall” is a metaphor for key funnel stages. It seems like everyone I talk to who works in the technology industry, which is an early adopter of marketing innovations, uses the Demand Waterfall framework. The concept is useful for any B2B industry with complex sales.

Part of the beauty of the demand waterfall vernacular is that it added descriptive language to the word “lead.” All too often, sales and marketing have very different definitions of what a “lead” is. With its Demand Waterfall, SiriusDecisions created a common language between sales and marketing by labeling key funnel stages. By benchmarking industry funnel conversion rates, SiriusDecisions provided B2B marketers with a powerful framework for evaluating their own conversion rates from one funnel stage to the next, identifying funnel leakage and best practices, and forecasting results.

The problem with the SiriusDecisions model is one of language. 

 What Does “Marketing-Qualified Lead” Mean to You?

To apply benchmarks to funnel stages, you need an apples-to-apples comparison. The problem is that “marketing-qualified leads” has two distinct meanings. For some marketers, “marketing-qualified” includes telequalification. For others, it doesn’t. In fact, the same marketer might very well route some leads to a telequalification function and other smaller, transactional leads directly to sales. This problem is further compounded because, as revealed in the 2012 B2B Benchmark Report, sometimes sales owns the teleprospecting function and sometimes marketing does.

Obviously, filtering leads through a telequalification process greatly reduces the number of marketing-qualified leads and improves the downstream conversion rates. So what are you really benchmarking? 

That’s why I break “marketing-qualified leads” into two funnel stages: “phone-ready leads” and “sales-ready leads.” 

• Phone-Ready Lead:  Marketing has done whatever it can to suppress duplicates and enhance, score and nurture the lead until the lead is ready for a phone call – that call may come from an inside sales rep or a telequalification professional. 
• Sales-Ready Lead:  The lead has been qualified via a phone conversation. In such cases, the teleprospecting rep has typically confirmed that the person participates in the decision process, has a relevant pain, and wants to talk to a sales person.  In short, the lead is ready for sales engagement.

Lack of clarity around funnel stages will lead to misunderstanding, muddled benchmarks, funnel leakage, and the adoption of sub-optimal practices. Do you think the terms “phone-ready” and “sales-ready lead” are an improvement?  Do you have a suggestion for more precise language? I welcome your feedback and will share additional thoughts in future posts on a new funnel paradigm for the complex sale.

Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Thought Leadership