B2B Lead Blog

There have never been more ways to connect with customers, but how can we cut through all of the options, stay within our budgets, and choose what works best for our specific marketplace?

Cindy Humphrey advises going back to marketing basics.

With more than two decades in B2B sales and marketing leadership positions, most recently at a Fortune 500 telecommunications company, Humphrey is an expert at navigating B2B’s ever-changing marketing landscape. She says marketers need to create a process to evaluate and execute new efforts to produce consistently strong results.

“There are platforms and tools that never existed just five years ago,” Humphrey says. “It’s too easy to get lost in the noise.”

Humphrey recommends the following three-step process to keep your marketing on target:

Step #1. Focus on the goal

What’s sexy can overshadow what works and take your marketing — and your budgets — off track.

Humphrey recalls when a budget reduction forced her to end cable television advertising. This disappointed the company’s salespeople because they loved when customers mentioned the ads. So, she asked them a tough question: Were these ads producing what they wanted?

“Having been in sales leadership before becoming a marketing VP, I know the constant mantra marketing hears from salespeople is, ‘These are terrible leads,’” says Humphrey. “So I asked them what kinds of leads they could use.”

Shifting Sales’ POV

This conversation inspired a direct mail campaign that cost only a fraction of television advertising:

• The sales team gave Humphrey the names of the highest-potential — yet seemingly out-of-reach-prospects — CIOs who simply refused to become engaged in a conversation.

• She sent them what they were surely going to consume: a brownie. It included a note from the salesperson saying to look for an architectural tube in the mail.

• Within a couple of days, the architectural tube with a network design — created from public information — arrived. It also contained a letter with a personalized URL to a video of the company’s CTO. He pointed out that if they like the networking map, they’ll love what his team can do for them when they meet.

Hitting the Sweet Spot

This mix of media drove 35% of those non-responsive prospects to pick up their phones and call Sales; 20% of them ended up buying services. Additionally, those purchases opened the door for more sales opportunities.

Suddenly, television advertising lost its glow to marketing that keenly focused on the goal.

Step #2. Research the audience

Once Sales and Marketing agree on the kinds of leads they want (developing a universal lead definition helps), Humphrey advises conducting thorough research. Understand whom you’re talking to, and where and how they want to hear your message.

Key resources that she has turned to in this process include:

• Consumer databases like MRI and Simmons
• Popular press, including Intelliquest Business Surveys, Wired, IDG Enterprise Research and Endgadget

This research was the foundation for a top prospect’s persona. Here’s a sample excerpt from a persona profile:

“Steve is a technical decision maker at a Fortune 500 company. As a kid, you’d likely catch him building spaceships with his Legos. In his teen years, he was likely reprogramming his CPU to do more and do it faster. Today, you’d see someone who loves technology, puzzles and problem solving …”

This persona inspired a social media campaign that those game players and problem solvers found irresistible: a challenging 50-question online puzzle that could launch them onto a leader board of elite problem solvers.

The campaign increased unique website visits from 3,500 to nearly 100,000 and clickthrough rates by 258%.

Step #3. Test to impress

Regardless of research, though, Humphrey never launches a marketing initiative — whether it’s a print ad or a landing page — without testing first.

“By testing on a small scale, you’ll find out what works and what doesn’t, so you can move forward with confidence,” she says.

It also builds engagement with Sales. Remember that direct mail campaign that achieved a 35% response rate from the highest-potential, toughest-to-reach prospects? Humphrey launched it with just a handful of salespeople.

“If you roll a campaign out for thousands of sales professionals, you might have a few who are excited, but the rest may not really care,” she explains. “However, if you roll it out with a few dozen salespeople and it turns out to generate great leads, other branches will be contacting you to move forward.”

That’s precisely what happened with Humphrey’s direct mail campaign.

“Always ask yourself, ‘What is most important to my buyer and my seller, and how am I going to best maximize my budget to reach our objectives?’” she advises. “Combine that with research and testing for the clarity to make the wisest marketing decisions.”

Related Resources:

Targeting for Better Lead Generation Results and ROI

B2B Social Media: Gamification effort increases Web traffic 100%, employee collaboration 57%

How to make B2B marketing messages more memorable

How ECI Telecom Discovered the Surefire Sign that Sales and Marketing Are Aligned

This Just Tested: How much impact does an offline campaign have online?

Marketing Strategy

B2B marketers, stop focusing on generating leads. You’re wasting your time and your sales team’s time.

Now that I have your attention, here’s what you should focus on instead: helping salespeople sell.

How do you do that? By sending them only qualified leads.

Most leads aren’t qualified

Leads are only qualified when they fit your universal lead definition (ULD).  Don’t have a ULD? Before you do any more lead generation, make developing one your highest priority. Start by reading this: Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop.

For nearly 20 years, I have worked with hundreds of leading B2B organizations to optimize their lead-qualification efforts — this includes phoning inbound leads to find out if they are truly qualified. We have found that calling the “qualified leads” at most companies reveals that a mere 5% to 40% are ready for Sales and up to 95% are not really qualified.

However, too many B2B marketers — a whopping 61% according to MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report — think that filling out a Web form, downloading some information, or attending an event is enough qualification to hand a lead to Sales.

That leaves sales professionals two not-so-great options:

• Option #1 – Spend hours upon hours calling marketing leads to weed out the 5% to 40% that are ready to talk.
  

  Ask yourself: Is this the best use of a highly compensated sales professional’s time?

• Option #2 – Disregard the leads they get from Marketing and focus on the deals they know will close. (This is the most common scenario.)
  

  Ask yourself: When Sales ignores leads, how much potential revenue is lost? Understand that leads that aren’t ready to buy immediately represent 80% of your future sales.

The only way to qualify leads is to call them

Every day some kind of software emerges that will help you track customer behavior. This is certainly valuable for lead scoring and prioritizing qualification efforts, but too many marketers rely on that to do their heavy lifting.

When you really need to know all the answers, you must make human contact and speak to them directly. I have yet to find a better way to qualify a lead. In fact, I’ve talked with many of the major marketing automation providers and most have salespeople who follow-up on inbound leads with a phone call.

This human touch takes your organization’s relationship with prospects to the next level. Suddenly, you’re not an email or website anymore. You’re a real company with real people, and people buy from people.

Once you find out directly whether the prospect fits your universal lead definition, you have two excellent options:

• Option #1 - If they fit the ULD, send them to the sales team so it can do what it does best – work on closing the deal.

• Option #2 – If they don’t fit the ULD, nurture them until they do. (Want to learn more about nurturing? Take a look at this article:  Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects – not selling them.)

B2B marketing isn’t about how many names you’re getting; it’s about doing everything you can to optimize your selling time by connecting Sales with the right people in the right companies. Doing this helps your salespeople sell, makes them more productive, and earns your company more revenue.

Related Resources

Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop.

Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects – not selling them

B2B Marketing: The 7 most important stages in the teleprospecting funnel

Traits of the Best Teleprospectors

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

Human Touch

To successfully ride the winds of change, emphasize the positive:

Look at what your customers value most about you, and make that the focus of your marketing communications.

This approach enabled Celarity, a marketing and creative services staffing and recruiting firm, to double the number of candidates it places and increase revenue by more than 35% over the past two years. This is especially impressive considering it was during a period that has been tumultuous for the “hypercyclical” staffing industry.

John Arnold, Celarity’s Marketing and Operations Manager, shares a simple two-prong approach that contributed significantly to this growth by helping increase the number of inbound leads by about 100%.

Step #1: Clarify value

When Arnold came on board two years ago, he noticed that the look and feel of Celarity’s marketing communications was inconsistent.

“Consistency in message – how it looks and what it says – is critical to building recognition, trust and relationships,” he explains.

To create a communication style that would reflect the best of the organization, he conducted:

Competitive analysis

He spent six months examining what differentiated Celarity from the competitors and analyzed competitors’ performance. This included:

• Reviewing  marketing materials
• Monitoring social media
• Gathering feedback from clients and recruits who had worked with them

Sales team interviews

He turned to his sales professionals who were speaking with employers and recruits every day. He wanted the unvarnished truth about marketplace perceptions regarding where Celarity excelled and where the organization fell behind.

He discovered that Celarity’s emphasis on helping candidates grow in their careers, as opposed to merely filling a position, made the organization a favorite among people looking for jobs. This is important because the candidates Celarity places on a temporary basis often end up in permanent positions. When they need temporary help, who do they call? Celarity, of course.

“Social media has made organizations transparent. Your marketing must match your product or you’ll foster distrust and hurt your relationships,” he explains. “Marketing today is about what you’re doing, not what you’re saying.”

Step #2: Communicate that value

Armed with this information, Arnold developed communication to spread Celarity’s value message of advancing opportunity for both the candidates and the clients who employ them. This included the following tactics.

Establish monthly newsletters

Celarity launched separate email programs to reach its three primary audiences:

• Candidates – Those who are looking for temporary positions. The newsletters focus on helping them take their careers to the next level. They include career advice and job-hunting tips, job openings and local marketing events.
• Clients – Employers who have positions to fill. Newsletters include articles on how to interview candidates, check references and general management tips.
• Employees – Those who have already been placed. Their newsletter provides advice on how to succeed at work, and keeps them in the loop on changing processes, procedures and opportunities to engage with other Celarity recruits.

Arnold says each newsletter distribution increases website traffic by at least 30% and provides a meaningful follow-up opportunity for salespeople; the email platform allows them to see who has read an article. Furthermore, Arnold analyzes clickthrough rates and feedback to determine what type of content their marketplace values most, and produces more of the same.

Leverage social media

Celarity has accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and later Google+. Until Arnold came on board, the company wasn’t using them much. So, Arnold started tweeting articles featuring career advice, news about upcoming events and job openings, in addition to blog updates.

In a few months, Celarity’s Twitter following mushroomed from 100 to 2,000. He started a LinkedIn group that now has more than 300 members. Most importantly, Celarity is now a well-recognized brand among Minnesota creatives, he says.

“When I told people about where I worked when I started at Celarity, it was hit or miss on whether they would know the company,” says Arnold. “Today, I rarely come across someone who doesn’t know who we are.”

Send direct mail

Celarity started sending postcards to both potential and present clients. The postcards are sales-focused and emphasize the quality of the company’s candidates.

Celarity cycles through its client and potential-client database, sending organizations a postcard every quarter. The team includes existing clients in this campaign because they may be interested in hiring additional employees.  Arnold says the effort always produces four or five sales-ready leads and one or two sales.

“People think direct mail is a dinosaur.  I’ll let them keep thinking that, because the more they believe that, the more attention our direct mail will get,” laughs Arnold.

In a marketplace inundated with fresh ideas, platforms and strategies, it’s easy to steer marketing off course, especially in a harsh business environment, warns Arnold.

“Always do your due diligence; take the time to examine your value, make sure it aligns with your message, and you’re spreading that message where your customers are most likely to get it,” he says.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa Careers Newsletter

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

Marketing Optimization: 4 steps to discovering your value proposition and boosting conversions

B2B Marketing: Value proposition discussion with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin

Email Summit: What’s the best lead generation tactic? All of them

Steal a Chapter from the Sales Strategy Playbook to Improve Marketing ROI

Marketing Strategy

What’s a marketer to do when leadership dismisses marketing and insists that a superior product will sell itself?

Follow the lead of Jeremy Scully and take a high-stakes gamble: Put your reputation on the line to prove marketing’s value.

Scully, the Business Development Manager for Planisware, a leading provider of project and portfolio management solutions, told his top brass that the best way to use leftover credit with a leading analyst was to feature her in a webinar.

Leadership was reticent. The competition had been hosting webinars for years with hundreds of attendees. If Planisware didn’t attract a large enough audience, then the company’s leaders could look bad and that could hurt their positions as thought leaders.

So Scully struck a deal: He promised to attract 200 registrants from the heart of the company’s target market. They had to be:

• CTOs, VPs or directors in portfolio management or research and development
• In industries like automotive, chemical manufacturing or medical devices
• From a list of 450 organizations with more than $500 million in revenue and $100 million in R&D budgets

The risk? Scully had never promoted or planned a webinar before.

Get prospects on the phone

To capture attendees from this narrow list, Scully used what he knew best: cold calling. Planisware planned an hour-long event, “Best Practices for Portfolio Management,” and Scully’s team spent six weeks phoning potential attendees.

If callers didn’t immediately reach a prospect, they left a voicemail and followed that up with an email. If they did not hear from the prospect after a week, they called again and sent another email.

Once a prospect was reached, Scully’s team members took the following actions:

• Asked about the prospect’s current project portfolio management solution.
• Asked about current project portfolio management challenges and, when appropriate, sent a follow-up email with information that could help solve those issues.
• Clarified contact information. (They not only attained webinar registrants, but they cleaned the company’s lists, too.)
• Went to the webinar platform page and registered prospects immediately if they expressed interest. The platform instantly forwarded an appointment that automatically linked to the prospect’s Outlook calendar.

This effort produced about 87% of the 300-plus registrations for the webinar. More than 60% were directors or VPs of R&D. The rest responded to announcements on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and were partners, existing customers or consultants.

Phone calls and automated emails

The webinar platform automatically sent email reminders to the registrants two weeks and immediately before the event. The team also made personal phone calls the day before the event to the top 50 prospects — those who used programs like Microsoft Office as their project portfolio management software.

As soon as the webinar was over, a standard email thanking attendees was automatically sent, and Scully commenced his lead-generation efforts. He prioritized follow-up on the basis of the prospects’ present solutions and their interest in Planisware.

The gamble pays off

There are several deals from this effort moving through Planisware’s sales cycle – which can be two years or longer – and these deals could be worth millions, Scully says. Closing one of them would bring a 600% to 1,500% return on investment.

These results were more than enough to shift leadership’s perspective on the value of marketing. It’s no wonder they approved three more webinars for this year.

Here are Scully’s top tips for a great webinar:

• Select a speaker who will attract attention. Planisware chooses speakers with high name recognition in their marketplace.“Attendees think, ‘Oh wow, she really knows what she talking about, I won’t want to miss that,’” says Scully. “And it enhances our image as thought leaders.”

• Don’t be afraid to ask for advice. When Scully was torn between outsourcing teleprospecting or hiring someone to do it internally, he turned to the B2B Lead Roundtable group on LinkedIn.“Of course, I got some responses from vendors, but most were from people who were eager to help. It gave me the insight I needed to make the right decision,” he says.

• Act fast, don’t procrastinate. The moment he received permission to move forward, Scully hit the ground running. The messaging, landing page and contact list were developed within two weeks.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” he says. “Something will inevitably pop up that you’re not planning for. By taking care of what you can early on, you earn enough mental capacity and time to address the unexpected.”

• Register attendees immediately while they’re still on the phone. “If you wait and send them an email with a link, it could get lost in their inbox. The urgency will be gone and they’ll forget about it,” says Scully.Another benefit: You immediately collect pertinent information and gain opt-in for future contact.

Related Resources:

New to B2B Webinars? Learn 6 steps for creating an effective webinar strategy

Complimentary Download: Webinar Planning Timeline

MarketingSherpa Toolkit: How to Produce a Webinar

To Call or Email? That is the Question

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

How to improve lead generation with prospecting 2.0

Lead Generation, Webcasts/Webinars

When you’re converting inquiries into qualified leads, it’s widely believed that time is of the essence. Even research published in the Harvard Business Review says you’re almost seven times more likely to qualify a lead if you respond by phone within five minutes than if you respond an hour later.

That’s why, when one of our Research Partners, a B2B telecommunications company, wanted to convert more inbound leads into sales-ready ones, we cut our response time. The results were surprising, as you’ll see in a moment.

We typically phoned people who submitted a Web form on the company’s site within about five hours. We slashed that to five minutes or less with:

• Automated alerts — Our IT team developed a program that notified our lead generation specialists to make a call the moment someone submitted a Web form.

• Adjusted hours — A lead generation specialist was always available during the hours when someone would most likely submit a Web form.

• An easier-to-use database — Lead generation specialists had to go through several steps to access the partner’s database; we revised it so they could reach the lead they needed in one click.

As a result, whenever someone submitted a form, the person received a call back within five minutes more than 85% of the time. At the end of six months, I was eagerly looking forward to the results. Here they are:

Almost nothing changed! Even though we cut response time by more than 98%, the number of qualified leads remained virtually the same and the amount of calls it took to get a qualified lead actually increased slightly.

Our effort did not have much impact. So what did this teach us? To slack off and not respond to inquiries for days? Absolutely not. Instead, we learned three valuable lessons:

Lesson #1: Know your customers and their needs

Will they lose interest or select another vendor in the next hour or two? If so, then instant follow-up may be a good idea. But in the case of our partner, the potential customers’ needs for B2B telecommunications were not going to change dramatically in a few hours, so cutting response times did not have much impact.

Lesson #2: Know what you’re selling

If it’s a transactional sale, five-minute follow-up may very well be worthwhile. Not so much, obviously, for the complex sale. However, again, that doesn’t mean if you have a complex sale you can kick back and wait to respond to inquiries. Our research in complex sales has consistently demonstrated that follow-up within 24 hours is always optimal.

Lesson#3: Test before investing

What works for someone else may not work for you – even if it was featured in the Harvard Business Review. Begin by identifying your key performance indicators: What you want to achieve. For this test we wanted to:

• Increase sales-ready leads — Our partners were satisfied with the amount inquiries their inbound marketing efforts were producing. They wanted more sales-ready leads – leads that fit their Universal Lead Definition.
• Improve lead qualification — Our goal was to reduce the number of dials required to attain sales-ready leads. We were hoping this could ultimately make our team more productive.

Once you set key performance indicators, measure them before and after the test, and compare. It’s really that simple. Start on a small scale, and then implement the program across your entire organization if the results merit it.

Related Resources:

To Call or Email? That is the Question

Webinar Replay: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

New Chart: Chief requirements for B2B lead qualification

B2B Telemarketing

Confession: I wish I could flash this across every marketer’s computer screen the moment it powered up:

A universal lead definition (ULD) clarifies what a lead is to everyone in your organization. It also:

• Fits the profile of your ideal customer
• Has been qualified as sales-ready
• Spells out the responsibilities and accountabilities of Sales and Marketing
• Makes Marketing and Sales more efficient

Still, most of the companies I meet with do not have a ULD. An astounding 61% of B2B marketers admit to sending “leads” directly to Sales without qualification, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

Are these truly leads? Not really. Anyone who expresses interest in what you sell is an inquiry, not a lead. Experience has taught me that only 5% to 15% of inquiries are ready to speak to Sales. However, as many as 80% of inquiries will be ready to speak with Sales in the future. If you send leads too soon, Sales will discard them, so you must nurture them until they fit your ULD.

What does a universal lead definition look like?

A ULD doesn’t need to be complex. Here’s an example from one of our past research partners, an $80 billion IT management organization.

An inquiry becomes a lead when it:

• Fits the target customer profile (industry, revenue, number of employees, etc.)
• Has interest from a decision maker
• Needs what the company sells
• Plans to evaluate the solution in three months or less
• Plans to make a purchase decision in six months or less
• Is ready to speak with a sales rep within two weeks

Setting and using this definition brought a 375% increase in sales-ready leads without an increase in spending. It also helped the sales and marketing teams solve problems such as:

• Leads not being qualified or prioritized
• Leads not being nurtured
• Sales rejecting leads
• No accountability or handoff

The definition could be applied to every lead regardless of where it came from — whether teleprospecting, inbound marketing, webinars or elsewhere. It set the standard for determining which leads should receive the highest priority and brought efficiency to the sales process.

How to create a universal lead definition

So now that you know what a ULD looks like, here’s how you create one:

1. Bring Sales and Marketing together for a meeting with a leader/facilitator whom both groups respect. The premise is that you’re in this together.
2. Asks Sales this key question: “For us to be 100% certain that when we send you a lead, you will act on it and provide feedback 100% of the time, what do you need to know? At what point do you consider a lead qualified?”
3. Listen to what Sales has to say and don’t interrupt. Every salesperson must participate.
4. Clarify and continue. Write a summary of your meeting, including your initial definition, and have another one to clarify what was said. Make sure everyone is satisfied — strong consensus is critical.
5. Publish the ULD everywhere so people who are involved with lead generation are constantly aware of their target.
6. Close the loop with huddles — face-to-face or voice-to-voice meetings. Don’t count on software to close the loop for you. Sales and Marketing should meet biweekly to ensure the lead definition is still accurate. Ask questions like, “Was X a lead? Did they enter the sales process? Why or why not? What else would you like to have known about this lead? What else can we improve? What should we stop doing? What should we start doing?”

It doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to heed my warning, but I promise you, the rewards of doing so — more pipeline, sales, success and better ROI — will make it more than worthwhile.

Related Resources:

Lead Generation Check list – Part 4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition

5 dials to tune in your lead generation process

Why the Term “Marketing-Qualified Lead” Creates Serious Confusion – Part 2

Fostering Sales-Marketing Alignment: A 5-Step Lead Management Process

Webinar Replay: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report Reveals How Marketers Can Transform Mounting Pressure, Challenges into Revenue

Lead Qualification

Marketers use lead scoring to slice all the potential deals in their pipelines and serve the sales team what it’s hungry for — leads that are ready to buy.

Values are assigned to each prospect based on attributes like authority, title, vertical and timing to buy, as well as behavior. For example, did the person:

• Download a video?
• Watch a webinar?
• Review a price sheet?
• Make this action in the last week or month?

Each attribute and action adds to a lead’s total score. When the score hits a pre-determined threshold, the lead is served to Sales.

It’s a process that works very well, according to the soon-to-be-released MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Lead Benchmark Report.  The report reveals that companies that use lead scoring see an average 138% ROI on lead generation, and companies that do not use it see a 79% ROI.

Select ingredients for the healthiest score

Lead scoring is a simple premise. However – like any great recipe – you need the right ingredients in the right amounts. How do you make sure you’re selecting the right attributes and activities to score? And, how do you ensure you’re ranking them correctly?

I posed those questions to Paula Reinman, SVP, Marketing, Bersin & Associates, a human resources research and consulting organization. Over the past several months, she has been in the thick of establishing and executing an automated lead-scoring program. These efforts have already produced a whopping 41% increase in revenue.

If you’re looking for the same kind of results, Reinman advises that you:

Work collaboratively with Sales from the outset

Keep Sales’ strategy, structure and culture top of mind. For instance, if you have a large inside sales team, you might want to set the threshold a little lower because of the number of people who can qualify leads further with a phone call. If you have only a handful of business development representatives, you might want to set the bar higher. But, the threshold also depends on company culture, points out Reinman.

“Some sales teams want only people who are director-level or higher — whoever is the economic buyer — so they know the budget is already there for their products,” she explains. “Yet, I have talked to other companies that say they don’t care if it’s a janitor. If it’s their target organization, they want to talk to them because they believe they can network their way up.”

Analyze content and customers

Examine how customers responded to your content as they progressed through the buying cycle. Look at your website and your content strategy. What did they receive from you via email or social media? You may even want to contact a handful of your best customers to find out what content they engaged at each stage of their buying processes.

“Think about how your best prospects would engage with you when they’re thinking about making a purchase,” advises Reinman. “For instance, someone who watched a three-minute demo, and looked at the product-specification and price list in the past week …would get a higher lead score than someone who downloaded a couple of whitepapers over the past six months.”

Continuously refine your process

Bersin uses a Customer Relationship Management system that allows anyone in the organization to see — in real time — how many leads are being generated, where they’re coming from, and what percentages are new, qualified or recycled. The marketers know precisely where lead generation resources are going and what they’re delivering.

“We watch those numbers all of the time,” notes Reinman. “If the percentage of dead leads are picking up, Sales is accepting fewer and fewer leads, or more leads are being recycled, then we know we’ve got a problem and we need to review what we’re scoring and the weight we’re giving it. The sooner you can catch issues, the better.”

She also suggests meeting with Sales at least quarterly to audit trends and activity, and adjust scores if necessary.

Want to learn more about how Reinman established a lead-scoring system? Go here: The Complex Sale: Lead Scoring Efforts Increase Conversion 79%

Photo by: Another Pint Please…

Related Resources:

Lead Scoring: CMOs realize a 138% lead gen ROI … and so can you

The Lament of the Inside Sales Team: Data, Data Everywhere, but Who’s Ready to Buy?

How to Use Lead Scoring to Drive the Highest Return on Your Trade-Show Investment

Funnel Optimization: Why marketers must embrace change

Lead Scoring

In my most recent research project, the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, we identified key behavioral and motivational differences between marketing specialists. Much of what we learned applies beyond HR and can improve your lead nurturing and sales efforts.

The key to navigating your way to a sales-ready lead is navigating through individual personalities. When you apply the human touch, you must establish credibility and, essentially, establish and manage relationships with many different people at many different levels in an organization.

You must, as Brian Carroll put it, ripen some bananas …

“Fully 95% of your leads are like harvested green bananas, and, off the top, your sales team needs only the other 5%, those that are ripe…

“Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful dialog with viable prospects regardless of their timing to buy.  It’s about building trusted relationships with the right people.  In the end, it’s the act of maintaining mind share and building solid relationships with economic buyers.  It’s not a salesperson calling up every few months to find out if a prospect is ‘ready to buy yet.’”

– Brian Carroll, Executive Director, Revenue Optimization, MECLABS

Lead nurturing based on personality

Below are some characteristics you will want to identify in your prospects as early as possible. They will improve your understanding of the people you’re contacting, and set a path for helping them “sell up” or move to the next stage in the buying process.

The person you are talking to in a lead’s organization might be:

As you communicate with each of these three levels, try to identify which of these characteristics are prominent in the person:

Once you have communicated with your first contact or two, ask them about the decision maker so you can prepare them for the process of helping to achieve your mutual objective – putting Sales in touch with a decision maker ready to make a purchase.

Here’s an example of how to make this system work for you:

Scenario #1 – Wants to be a champion, but not very assertive

Let’s say your champion is not very assertive or a good communicator. He is much more detail- and process-oriented as well as very objective about his approaches. That means he will not be very subjective and will have an average or low individualistic profile.

Even if his corporate attachment is strong, he is going to need your help motivating the influencer. On your call, help him understand that you are there to support his efforts and achieve his goals so he can obtain what you are offering.

Work with him until he is comfortable with all the technical benefits of your product. Then ask if you could get on the phone with him and the influencer. Remember: You are his team member. Use phrases like “we,” “our,” and “us” a lot!

Scenario #2 – Is an assertive influencer but not convinced yet

Now, if your influencer is the exact opposite, then he will be less than excellent with details but an excellent relationship person. When you talk to him, focus on how this will help the individuals within the organization and make the department more efficient and effective.

Provide “global” concepts and images since he is more subjective in his thought processes. This is where your role becomes critical, because to influence a decision maker (who is obviously assertive and controlling), you must provide this “people person” with a compelling sales proposition. You must formulate that concept in his mind so it is the first thing out of his mouth when he meets with the decision maker.

Now, since we know the decision maker is assertive, let’s say he is also somewhat analytical and highly objective, only considering the bottom line. Then you must prepare the proposal or PowerPoint for the influencer with a “bottom-line” focus.

You want to help the influencer see that you want to help make him “look good” by identifying the key points most decision makers look for – “What’s it going to do for me today?” It can be as simple as an opening statement like, “How much effort does it take to add $100,000 to the company’s bottom line? ABC can do that with little to no long-term investment.”

However you set your approach, using this form can help you identify the key traits of the people you’re contacting. Instead of marketing to job titles, you can market to people and their personalities.

Related Resources:

Lead Nurturing: 9 questions answered on lead qualification, nurturing, and Marketing-Sales alignment

Lead Nurturing: 12 questions answered on content, tactics and strategy

Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects – not selling them

Marketing Management: What is your company doing to increase knowledge and effectiveness?

Marketing Career: 4 questions every marketer should answer (and what you need to know to start asking them)

Lead Nurturing

If you’re among the roughly half of B2B companies that have strong alignment between your sales and marketing teams, then congratulations!

Your salespeople are your biggest fans, right? If not, then you’re probably not as aligned as you think.

Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Marketing Programs, ECI Telecom, learned this the hard way.

Looked great on paper

In late 2009, ECI implemented a new marketing automation program.  To use it effectively, Levy and her team convened with sales leaders representing teams from the Philippines to the United Kingdom. They hammered out:

• A glossary to ensure everyone spoke the same sales and marketing language. They agreed on definitions for terms such as “marketing-qualified lead” and “sales-accepted lead.”

• Guidelines on how they would score leads.

• An agreement on a level of service and responsibilities. Everyone signed their names to show they understood their roles, their commitment and how they would interact with leads at each stage.

“At the end of the meetings, we would painstakingly make sure everyone understood what we were talking about. Everyone claimed they did; no one ever had any questions,” recalls Levy.

At the end of this exhaustive process, Levy was confident that Sales and Marketing were fully aligned. But she was mistaken.

Alignment is an attitude, not a signature

Here’s the rub: Several months later, Levy discovered the opposite was true.

Even though her team led industry standards in generating leads and conversions – it had an abundance of marketing-qualified leads. The sales team had accepted none of them.

She thought that Sales simply didn’t understand the software. Her team reached out to the more than 100 members of the sales team to review the system. Then she realized the problem wasn’t the software; it was that no one cared.

“It didn’t matter that we had a written process, it didn’t matter that we had signatures – Sales wasn’t aligned at all,” Levy says.

Back to the drawing board

However, in the course of the one-on-one conversations, one light bulb after another went off across the sales team. The salespeople finally grasped how the new process could make their lives better and their jobs easier.

“Before they thought, ‘Okay here’s more technology we have to deal with,’” says Levy. “They didn’t really pay attention to its value until we worked with them one on one and showed them, ‘Hey, this is your customer and here’s what he’s been doing, with a full screenshot of all of his activity.’”

Once salespeople realized they would receive a full profile of each lead’s activity, including every email clicked and every form submitted, they started showing more interest, Levy says. They started asking for Marketing’s help to support new initiatives.

“In fact, now they don’t do any kind of marketing activity – events or seminars – without coming to us first,” Levy says.

Alignment is a full-time job

Many salespeople in the company admitted they didn’t have a process for responding to leads before this effort.  Now, Marketing gives them a personalized email for every lead.

“The salespeople forwarded that email with a personalized signature, and they were absolutely shocked when they started getting responses,” Levy says.

To address Sales’ increased interest, the marketing team assigned a person to focus solely on alignment. The job of the Centralized Alignment Leader was to maintain the lines of communication that were now completely open between the departments.

Stronger Alignment = Stronger Results

This experience taught Levy that alignment has nothing to do with signatures or verbal agreements; it has everything to do with results, she says. Today, when she looks at her marketing-automation platform, instead of seeing no accepted leads, she sees 80% or more of leads moving forward.

But perhaps the best outcome is that Sales is now Marketing’s biggest fan in the company and doesn’t mind telling the C-suite, she says. It’s a great sign that the departments are aligned.

“In many of the financial reviews that happen on the executive level, Sales [leaders are] using the same language that we are; they’re talking about marketing-sourced leads and marketing-influenced leads. They’re tooting our horn for us!” Levy says.

Do you have stories about your organization’s lead generation successes and lessons learned? I would love to hear about them! You could be featured on this blog. Please email your ideas to andrea.johnson@meclabs.com.

Related Resources:

Email Marketing: Global telecom combines email and content strategy to segment database

Aha! Marketing Leaders Reveal Their Most Powerful Business Insights from 2011

B2B Marketing: Focused top-of-the-funnel campaign fills day-long workshop in target market

How Content Strategy is Transforming an Entire Marketing and Sales Organization

Sales

A couple of weeks ago, I presented an American Marketing Association webcast, “The One-Two Punch of Effective Lead Engagement: Accurate Lists and Powerful Content” (a replay of the webcast is posted below).

The nearly 500 attendees had so many excellent questions that my webcast could have easily been an hour longer. That’s why I decided to answer nine of the most pertinent questions here today and another 12 in a post on the MarketingSherpa blog tomorrow.

These questions hit on key challenges in lead nurturing today. I hope the answers will help you solve specific challenges in defining qualified leads, nurturing them, and aligning your sales and marketing teams.

How to define a lead

Q: What if salespeople have differing opinions about what a lead is?

A: Bring your best salespeople together and create a Universal Lead Definition (ULD). Here’s a resource that can help: Lead Generation Check list – Part 4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition.

Q: Are there different definitions of ULD for each product?

A: Only if there are different customer segments.

Q: What’s the difference between an inquiry and a qualified lead?

A: A qualified lead fulfills the ULD established by you and your sales team. A qualified lead is ready to talk to Sales; an inquiry is not.

Q: What defines a stale lead?

A: Someone who has not been engaged recently; look at leads in your CRM that have been unopened or unedited in the last three to six months.

Nurturing and automation

Q: Could you review how to convert an inquiry into a lead?

A: Begin with the end in mind. What are the micro-conversions that outline each step in the path? Map out the process. This will determine the path you follow to intensify the inquiry’s intent to purchase and nurture them into qualified leads. It will be different for each organization.

Q: What’s an acceptable opt-out rate for an aggressive email campaign?

A: Know what your present opt-out rate is before nurturing and compare the two. Opt-out rates in the single digits are pretty normal.

Q: What role does marketing automation play in account-based marketing?

A: It’s great for managing and tracking interactions when you have a lot of accounts and have at least 1,000 contacts.

Aligning marketing and sales teams

Q: How do you recommend finding time for the sales team to keep up with new leads?

A: Alignment with your sales team is critical. If your team doesn’t have time to follow up, you may be sending leads that aren’t qualified enough. Maximize the team’s effective selling time. Here are several resources that can help:

• BNET Interviews Brian Carroll: Focus on Helping Not Closing
• Steal a Chapter from the Sales Strategy Playbook to Improve Marketing ROI
• Four reasons why funnels are a marketer’s best friend
• Closed Loop Feedback: The Missing Lead Generation Huddle

In this video, at timestamp 3:19, Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate VP of Marketing Programs at ECI Telecom, explains how critical alignment is to her organization’s success.

Q: How long do organizations usually allow for lead nurturing to take? One year seems right but I get requests for results in three months.

A: Salespeople are always trying to meet their quota and need people who will buy in three to six months. But you have to expect nurturing to take at least as long as your sales cycle.

We must remember that most buying happens when a salesperson isn’t there. You have to be clear that whom you are nurturing will eventually buy; we never stop nurturing until we know the prospect is no longer a fit. If you see someone who hasn’t engaged or opened content in three months, you need to refresh that contact — the person may no longer even be with the company or is simply not interested.

A link to a replay of the webcast is included below. Do you have additional questions? Feel free to ask them in the comments.

Related Resources:

The One-Two Punch of Effective Lead Engagement: Accurate Lists and Powerful Content

The ingredients of lead nurturing and how they work together

How to Get the CEO to Support Your Next Marketing Plan

B2B Marketing Research: 68% of B2B marketers haven’t identified their Marketing-Sales funnel … and it shows

Lead Nurturing