B2B Lead Blog

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

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

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

You could be racing the finest Formula One car, but if you’re always steering in the wrong direction, even a horse and buggy will beat you to the finish line.

So it is with marketing.

Too many marketers think they can lead the pack by leveraging the hottest channels, software and platforms. But these tools, like race cars, are only effective when they’re moving  in the right direction.

Steer Toward Your Customers
Marketing optimization demands that you know where to find your customers – that you know what they value, where they’re looking, and how they want to buy. Fortunately, finding that out is surprisingly easy, says Kristin Zhivago, President, Zhivago Management Partners, a business-growth consultancy.

She says it requires nothing more than speaking with seven to 10 customers. Pick up the phone and ask them:

• How do you feel about our products and services?
• Are our prices fair?
• What was your buying process?
• What is your biggest problem/challenge?
• What trends do you see in our/your market?
• If you were CEO of our company tomorrow, what would you fix?
• What did you type into Google when you first started searching?
• Anything else I should have asked?

You need to use the phone, Zhivago says. You should not ask customers these questions on a social network, on a survey, or during a focus group. You should ask during a one-on-one phone interview.

She says that people do not speak openly, even in surveys, for fear of their words coming back to bite them. People are more relaxed and open when talking on the phone in their normal environments, she says.

“I’ve had marketers ask me after I’ve given a presentation, ‘Is there any way I can do this customer stuff without talking to customers?’” she laughs. “If you are selling to people, give them the respect of finding out what they want and how they want to buy it.”

Find and focus on priorities

Zhivago has successfully used this approach across hundreds of organizations, large and small, she says. The purpose is to clarify:

• What customers value about your products and services
• How they make purchasing decisions
• How they move through the buying process

The goal is to not spend a dime on any marketing or sales activity that doesn’t reach customers where they are looking for, expecting or wanting to purchase your products.

A Simple Reality Check

After realizing that the leadership at many companies was out of touch, Zhivago started routinely interviewing her clients’ customers.

“I started something called a ‘reality check’ where I said to them, ‘Look just give me some time, some names, and let me talk to folks and see what they really think,’” she says.

The idea proved so successful that Zhivago began refusing to work with clients unless she could interview their customers first.

“I knew what they were giving me and what the customer really wanted was going to be very different.”

Be the Champion

If you ask your customers these questions, trends will likely emerge by the fifth or seventh interview. It is rarely worth conducting more than 12 interviews with any given type of customer, Zhivago says. Once you compile the results, the data will put you in the driver’s seat next time you’re meeting with the C-suite.

Zhivago insists that corporate leadership is captivated by customer-centric data. She’s witnessed too many meetings, she says, where marketers get drowned out by a sales leader’s anecdote about a recent call with a customer.

“In those kinds of discussion, the sales leader typically emerges the winner,” she says, “unless Marketing has the research from real conversations with customers in its back pocket. When marketers hear directly from customers about what they want and how they want it, they have the power to stand toe-to-toe with a salesperson and win the support of the CEO. I’ve seen it happen hundreds of times.”

She’s also witnessed how this information has supported sales leaders who have come to the conference room table again and again with a customer issue that the C-level dismisses. Through the customer interviews, marketers are able to support the sales leaders and convince leadership to take action. So this method can be used both to refute single-customer, anecdotal information (which can be misleading), and to reinforce the valid, multiple-customer observations of the sales force.

Have you ever spoken directly with customers to inform your marketing efforts? If so, what questions did you ask and what results did you get? If not, what held you back? Let us know in the comments …

Related Resources:
Video of Zhivago speaking at the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit 2011 in San Francisco

Zhivago’s complete MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Summit presentation

Kristin Zhivago Reveals What Marketers are Doing Right, and What They Are Doing Very, Very Wrong

Guided by Buyers: Four Tactics to Create a Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

Product Marketing: You already know how to chew gum, right?

Human Touch

Imagine this:

Boy meets girl. Boy asks girl out.

On their first date, boy asks, “Will you marry me?” Girl says no.

Boy promptly sends her phone number to the bottom of his list. Six months later, boy calls again.

“Want to marry me yet?” he asks. Girl rolls her eyes, hangs up and blocks his number.

I fully realize this is a silly scenario, but it’s really not unlike what sales professionals do when they call prospects every few months to “touch base” and ask “whether they’re ready to buy yet.”

That time between the first “not yet” or “maybe” and the next phone call is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate to prospects — through appropriate contact on a regular basis — the value you can bring to their organizations.

This is what lead nurturing is all about. It’s absolutely essential in the complex sale, where the time from first contact to closing is typically many months. However, appropriate contact means providing customers information they want — not trying to sell them something.


Here’s the lead-nurturing litmus test: Can prospects benefit from the information you provide regardless of whether they buy from you? To help pass this test, here are three tips:


Tip #1. Know whom you’re talking to

Analyze your database and identify audiences with common demographics, such as titles and industries, and common behaviors, such as how they first engaged with you and why. This will help you target the right information to the right people; it will help you identify what information is most relevant to them and how they want to consume it.

Tip #2. Find out where it hurts

Talk directly to each of your audiences to identify what they want to know more about. Ask questions like:

• What sorts of issues keep you up at night?
• What resources help you respond to those challenges? (Do they attend events, read whitepapers, forums, instructional videos, etc.?)
• What kind of knowledge/service would make your life easier?
• What sort of information informs your buying decisions?

Tip #3. Help ease the pain

Identify and/or create content that will help them with these issues. (Remember, no selling!) Email this information to them at regular intervals, every three to six weeks.

Over time, prospects are going to think, “You know, this company has really helped me out. They’ve given me information I can use. They really seem to know what they’re talking about.”

The Payoff:  Next time your salesperson calls, they don’t have to make small talk until they conclude with some lame line about the customer’s readiness to buy. They can conduct a meaningful conversation about the latest whitepaper (or article, or blog post, or instructional video) that was sent as part of your lead-nurturing program.


Another Payoff: B2B marketers who nurture leads have a nearly 30% higher return on investment than those who don’t, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Even better, nurturing leads will give you a competitive edge considering a whopping 65% of B2B organizations don’t have any kind of lead-nurturing program.

Want to learn more about lead nurturing? Sign up for this free webcast scheduled for March 6, when Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Revenue Optimization at MECLABS, will present The One-Two Punch of Effective Lead Engagement: Accurate Lists and Powerful Content.


Related Resources:

No Budget and Less Time? Lead Nurturing in Five Simple Steps

BNET Interviews Brian Carroll: Focus on Helping Not Closing

The ingredients of lead nurturing and how they work together

Have a minute? Find out why lead nurturing is more critical than ever

What’s the best lead generation tactic? All of them.

Email Marketing: The importance of lead nurturing in the complex sale

Lead Nurturing: How much content is enough?

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

To Call or Email: That is the Question

Lead Nurturing

Do you remember the fire drills at school? The alarm went off, students got excited, and teachers marched them to the exits. They were a test of the school’s evacuation plan — a calm, orderly process to follow should an emergency strike.

Most lead-generation marketers are not in crisis, but many could use an orderly process to help combat challenges. I chatted with Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager at MECLABS, about her work as lead author of the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (coming out this spring). Doyle surveyed 1,900 organizations to determine how they are using top tactics to overcome an increasingly challenging marketplace where they are expected to:

• Deliver a higher quantity and quality of leads with fewer resources
• Try new channels, track existing processes, and answer to everyone from the sales team to executives
• Battle a harsh market flooded with skeptical buyers

The building isn’t on fire, but the pressure is on. It can be helpful to have a reliable plan for generating leads when challenges loom (just like it can be helpful to have an evacuation plan before the building is on fire). Unfortunately, an astounding 75% of lead-gen marketers do not have a formal lead-generation process, Doyle says. Furthermore, a considerable chunk of organizations (39%) indicated that they are not even able to track the original source of leads generated.

“If marketers aren’t able to show how revenue can be attributed to lead generation activities, how can they grow their budgets and attain the resources they crave for better lead generation?” asks Doyle. “Marketers need to know their own best practices. They need to know what gets their audience to convert and what really drives the highest ROI by generating the greatest volume of highly qualified leads — and then focus on further optimization of those channels.”

Build a strategy from the best tactics

No one can hand you an end-to-end lead-gen process, but it can be helpful to know which tactics are the most effective when you’re planning one.

Click to enlarge

This chart is from the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Benchmark Report (of which Doyle is also the lead author). It compares the percentage of B2B marketers who considered each lead-gen tactic to be “very effective” over the last two years. In 2011, only four tactics were considered “very effective” by 20% or more of the audience:

• Website design, management and optimization
• Search engine optimization
• Email marketing
• Trade shows

When you’re building a formal lead-gen strategy, you should at least consider the tactics the rest of the industry considers “very effective.” They may carry you through times of plenty and times of crisis.

Related resources

Email Summit: What’s the best lead generation tactic? All of them
Website Optimization: 7 ways to reduce the perceived cost of lead generation offers
B2B Lead Generation: Four experts’ advice on generating higher-level leads
Nine Simple Tactics to Drive a Higher Return on Trade Show Investment

Lead Generation

That’s the word from our own Brian Carroll, who made that proclamation in an interview at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit this week.

Paradoxically, this is why it’s critical to be strategic. He explains there’s a lot of ways to acquire leads, but there’s no determining which ones work best without testing. But what compounds the situation is that marketers don’t have the time or resources to test every potential tactic.

This is why Carroll advises looking at marketing like a portfolio manager looks at a mutual fund. They analyze the financial marketplace. They make choices that balance high risk/high reward with the tried and true to achieve the highest return from their investment portfolio.

To get a complete view of what’s performing in the sales marketplace, Carroll turns to data from MarketingSherpa’s Benchmark Reports. He analyzes what’s working – and what’s not – for other marketers and makes informed decision about which tactics would best complete his marketing portfolio. 

Beyond that, it’s all about building relationships with people. “That’s what we really need to do instead of expecting to drive conversion from a single event or email,” he explains and throws in another analogy, “You don’t ask someone to get married on the first date…the relationship you’re looking to start with customers is built over time with trust.”

He expands on how to make that happen: 

“You need to identify the right people in the right companies. Initiate a memorable dialog that answers ‘yes’ to the questions ‘Is this relevant to me and my needs or my coworker’s or colleagues?’ And then  nurture that dialog with a potential customer on an ongoing basis…If you’re doing these three things effectively, you’re doing lead generation well.”

Take five minutes to watch Brian’s interview here:

This video has been produced in cooperation with GetResponse Email Marketing. See more at: http://www.getresponse.com/promo/emailtv

Related resources

Top Takeaways for Small Business from Email Summit 2012

Email Summit: Mobile marketing panel on the complex sale

Email Summit: Testing, timing and format elements in follow-up email

Email Summit 2012: Meeting email marketing challenges

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy

Mobile marketing for B2B is one of the newest marketing channels yet, according to the 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, it ranks second only to whitepaper downloads for growing B2B email lists – even though only 48% of the B2B companies responding have a mobile version of their website.

“As more businesses target marketing to mobile, I expect even better results,” says Meghan Lockwood, MECLABS research analyst.

She will be moderating a panel discussion, Integrating Mobile Campaigns for the Complex Sale, at the MarketingSherpa B2B Email Summit this Wednesday in Las Vegas.  I caught up with her to preview the discussion and reveal what she expects to be some key takeaways.

“There’s an immediacy to mobile that captures an audience as they move through their day, especially busy executives. However, before investing in mobile marketing it’s critical that you thoroughly know your funnel and your key value proposition, and how mobile can advance that,” she warns. “You must be very strategic because marketing to mobile users isn’t inexpensive or easy; you have to code for viewing content on every platform you are targeting – from Droids to iPads – and codes vary by operating system. You have to know what your audience is using and how they’re using it to make sure the investment pays back.

“However, as you can see from the results of the B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, companies are already using mobile to inform and support other marketing channels, and are getting great results,” points out Lockwood. “Considering less than half of B2B marketers are embracing mobile, there is real opportunity for those who know how to strategically use it. After all, the first to engage a customer through a new channel is often the one who makes the greatest impact.”

She will expand on these thoughts with panelists Nick Fuller, Director of Strategy & Analytics, eDialog; Josh Herman, Vice President of Product Strategy, Acxiom Corporation; Kate Williams, Consultant to T-Mobile, and R.J. Talyor, Director of Product Marketing, ExactTarget. The conversation will include:

Integrating mobile with other channels. “Complex sales have a longer gestation period and some are very content-based; which requires nurturing and repetitive touches with content like newsletters and whitepapers,” says Lockwood. Reading them on a small screen can be next to impossible, so she advises giving prospects the option to forward the content to their tablet or laptop for review later.

Analyzing existing customers’ usage. “For a few companies, creating an app that can make their customers’ jobs easier, such as ordering inventory immediately from a job site, could create powerful brand engagement. These organizations will literally be at their customers’ fingertips all of the time. Of course, I can’t emphasize enough that you must make sure your audience will use an app before taking the time and money to develop it.” Lockwood points out. “However, mobile is a great tactical tool for learning more about your customer – technology can track location, phone type, links clicked, time spent on content, and more.”

Knowing what your audience is seeing. “You must have first-hand understanding of the full user experience,” insists Lockwood. “Test your mobile marketing campaigns on yourself. Know how long they take to load. Know what your email looks like on mobile. After all, according to Return Path, that’s how almost a quarter of your audience is seeing it – they say that 23% of all email is viewed using a mobile device.”

Testing. “Mobile marketing is still in its infancy, so it’s smart to begin with a clear objective and measure its effectiveness in achieving it,” she notes. “For instance, at the Summit, Silverpop is having a contest leveraging its new PlacePunch platform. Attendees who check in via mobile from certain locations and activities can win an American Express gift card. They’ll get an introduction to PlacePunch and Silverpop will build their list.

“Best practices will emerge over time. In the meantime, be strategic about your mobile marketing activities, and test them so you know precisely what works and what doesn’t,” she advises.

Do you think your marketplace is ready for mobile marketing? Why or why not?

Are you using it already? If so, tell us how – what has worked and what hasn’t? We’d love to hear from you.

If you can’t attend the conference and are hungry for more mobile marketing advice, whet your appetite with  MarketingSherpa’s 30-Minute Marketer: How to Use Mobile for Marketing: – 11 Quick Tactics for Taking Your Marketing Strategy Mobile.

Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Warning: If you watch only the first few minutes of this webinar, you might get discouraged about the state of marketing today. However, if you watch the webinar through the end, you’re going to be excited about marketing’s potential for driving more revenue than ever before.

At the beginning of the webinar, Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, revealed that 1,745 marketing organizations are reporting remarkable declines in marketing effectiveness in 2011. But their other responses point to what’s causing this.

While almost all respondents said they’re expert at lead generation:

• 68 percent have not identified their sales and marketing funnels, no less optimized them.
• 61 percent send leads directly to sales.
• 79 percent don’t score leads.
• 65 percent don’t nurture leads.

What does this mean? In essence, they’re not making the most of the leads they’ve become expert in generating. Watch this webinar to learn the strategy that will transform leads into revenue as efficiently and effectively as possible.

View Slides on Slideshare

Use these timestamps to jump to key points fast.

8:20 – Jen compares B2B Benchmark Report responses between 2009, 2010 and 2011. Key findings: It’s increasingly challenging to achieve success. Challenges are growing in pertinence year after year. Marketers are torn between prioritizing more leads vs. better leads.

9:30 – Perceived effectiveness of tactics are declining severely. It’s getting more difficult to get results from the same marketing activities.

10:21 – The 2012 B2B Benchmark Report reveals that regardless of challenges, marketers are still not optimizing their funnels. Jen reviews the percentages: 68 percent haven’t identified sales and marketing funnel. 61 percent send leads directly to sales. 79 percent haven’t established lead scoring. 65 percent don’t nurture leads.
Read more…

Marketing Strategy, Uncategorized, Webinar Replay