B2B Lead Blog

Email marketing is a mature marketing tactic, yet I don’t believe B2B organizations are capitalizing on its potential to generate leads.

I realized this when I read MarketingSherpa’s just-released 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. They surveyed 594 B2B and B2G marketers, of which just about half send out 10,000 to 10 million emails every month. The top priority for the entire group is to deliver highly relevant emails – it ranks above even driving website traffic and revenue.

This makes sense, considering highly relevant email will achieve the other two goals.

But, I wonder how easily they can create highly relevant emails when only 15% reported they have dedicated resources to produce content for each stage of the buying process, as you can see in the below chart, Chart 3.32 – Tactics utilized to improve email relevance and engagement:

Q: Which of the following tactics is your organization using to improve the relevance and engagement of email content delivered to subscribers?

This makes me wonder what is being sent in those 10,000-plus emails each month:

• Do they know what information their prospects want at each stage of the buying cycle?
• Do they know how they want to consume that information?
• Do they have the means to provide that information through their emails?

If they can’t confidently answer “yes” to these questions, how do they expect to achieve their goal of producing emails that are relevant to their marketplace?

I discussed this with my colleague Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, and he agreed with my concern and related a conversation he had with one of our company’s Research Partners. They, too, wanted to send emails that were relevant and didn’t know where to begin. Typically, as a matter of rote, they blasted out an email every week about one of their products. The marketing team knew it wasn’t the optimal approach, but didn’t have the time to think it through – the emails had become merely another part of their weekly list of activities.

Daniel advised them to ask these questions before any email send:

• What is the goal they’re trying to achieve? What is the pain they’re trying to ease? Essentially, know your audience. (I know this is Marketing 101, but when the vast majority of B2B organizations aren’t dedicating the resources to respond to these issues in emails, I thought it needed to be pointed out.)
• Is this a content-focused or promotional email? If it’s content-focused, then what content do you have that’s going to help them ease their pain or achieve their goals? And remember, good content doesn’t sell – it provides information to help prospects regardless of whether they buy from you.  (Promotional emails may teeter way too much on the brink of spam unless they can directly relieve a prospects’ pain point or help them achieve a goal.)
• Why should they open your email? Does the subject line clearly and concisely convey why it’s worth it for them to use their precious time to read it? Are you making a promise you can deliver on?
• Why should they want to engage with you further after reading the email? If you’re directing your audience to a landing page, what in the email should compel them to click through to read it? What’s in it for them if they do? Does that landing page deliver the promised value? Is it crystal clear what their next step should be? Again, what’s in it for them if they take that next step?

Taking Daniel’s advice will put marketers well on their way to achieving their goal of email relevancy, and all of the benefits that come with it.

Related Resources:

Email Marketing: How to maintain low opt-out rates

Email Marketing: Only 21% of marketers integrating mobile with email

Email Deliverability: Only 39% of marketers maintain an opt-in only subscriber list

Email Marketing: 3 overlooked aspects of automated messages

Email Marketing

I had the pleasure of attending MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 2013 a couple of weeks ago, and while I was there, Jim Ducharme, Community Director, GetResponse, an email marketing vendor, asked me how to maintain low email-marketing opt-out rates.

My answer, in a word, was relevance. Watch the video below to find out more.

Relevance is the foundation of lead generation, which is, at its core, a series of conversations. Like real-time conversations, we can’t bore the recipients of our emails by talking about ourselves all the time – we have to discuss what they care about.

• If all we do is focus on winning the sale, they’re going to tune out or opt out.
• If we focus on how we can help them, we’re going to build trust, and when they trust you, they’ll stick around and likely buy whatever it is you’re selling.

The foundation of relevance is knowledge of your marketplace:

• Know what keeps your prospect up at night,
• Know what makes their lives easier or harder and
• Know how your value proposition helps.

This knowledge provides the context for compelling, relevant conversations your prospects will be eager to be a part of. Below are a handful of articles from the B2B Lead Roundtable blog to help you generate these kinds of conversations with your customers.

8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities – Find out the value of asking a handful of customers questions directly – not through surveys, focus groups, digital body language or social media.

Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects – not selling them – Find out how to execute a relevant conversation.

3 Steps that Helped Skyline Exhibits Increase New Product Sales by 18% – Learn how Skyline Exhibits identifies and responds to problems in a way that improves its value to customers.

Sales-Marketing Alignment: How consistent messaging helped ADP engage customers at a faster pace – ADP reveals how Marketing and Sales align themselves to enhance the value proposition by identifying and responding to unmet customer needs.

Content Marketing: Slow, steady pay off for manufacturer – Find out how a manufacturer’s simple email campaign, featuring one piece of relevant content a month, is producing more leads than trade shows at a fraction of the price.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 Wrap-up: Top 5 takeaways for email marketers

Mining Gold through Email Integration: 3 lessons from MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2013 winners

Email Marketing: 142% higher open rate, 15% bigger list from retailer’s strategy

Marketing Automation: 25% more engagement, 0% unsubscribe in 4-email series

Email Marketing

I feel very fortunate to work with some of the world’s most progressive marketers.  Whether they’re MECLABS Research Partners or attendees at one of our Summits, these marketers are driven to prove to their leadership that their efforts drive a return on investment.

They focus on measurable outcomes that translate into revenue, not vague notions like “brand awareness” that were the cornerstone of marketing back in the day. This is why they are attracted to us: We don’t believe there are expert marketers, only expert testers.  At MECLABS, we approach marketing more as a science than an art.

So, when I saw this article in MarketingWeek, 70% of CEOs Have Lost Trust in Marketers, it gave me pause. Interviews with 1,200 CEOs across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia revealed they believe marketers have “continuously failed” to prove marketing strategies deliver on business growth.

Are CEOs disappointed, or are they just waking up?

The article concerned me because these findings are completely incongruous with what I witness among the marketers I come in contact with every day. I believe the results are merely a snapshot: A static picture of what is happening right now.

It misses the point of a massive trend developing. CEOs are waking up. They’re seeing opportunity to align key performance indicators (KPIs) with clear marketing objectives. This is probably why doing a better job of acting on data to improve marketing performance is the goal of 66% of the 1,260 marketers surveyed as part of MarketingSherpa’s 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report. (Check out the report’s free excerpt.)

The Internet has closed down old-school marketing

The old-school approach to marketing, with the fuzziness associated with measuring the brand impact of traditional media like television, is running its course. The Internet has changed the playing field.

However, the Internet is more than a channel – it’s a laboratory to get into the customer’s mind and close the gap between the customer’s reality and ours. We use the Internet to focus on the customer, not the product, and to translate those findings across online and offline marketing so the organization is fully aligned with customers’ desires.

A return to true marketing

When this happens, so does effective marketing. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

How well you’re able to do this is measured in marketing KPIs like conversions and clickthrough rates, but those need to be translated into what matters most to CEOs:

• More leads
• More revenue
• Shorter time to revenue
• Improved marketing-to-sales expense

Fortunately, that’s what the marketers we work with are mastering through leveraging the Internet. They’re testing what’s most resonating with customers, and what isn’t, and then revising campaigns accordingly to drive the best results.

I believe these marketers represent the other end of the CEO spectrum: The 20% featured in the article who believe their marketers provide a return on investment, have “solid influence” within their organizations, and are candidates for senior management.

These marketers represent the future of the profession.

Related Resources:

How to Get the CEO to Support Your Next Marketing Plan

Most important B2B Marketing Metrics For CEOs

Is Revenue Contribution the Best Executive Metric for Demand Generation Investments?

Marketing Data: Using predictive analytics to make sense of big data

Marketing Strategy

It’s year-end. For marketers and sales professionals, the pressure cooker we live in all year is turned up a few notches.

What’s awesome about actual pressure cookers is that you can get great results from them. They cook as much as ten times faster than conventional cooking methods.

But, unless you know how to use the optimal amount of liquid, time and pressure, you’re going create an inedible mess and will have wasted more time than you saved. You can’t simply add pressure and expect optimal results.

So it is with generating leads – yet, when the funnel needs to be fed now, we toss in more leads, turn up the pressure, and voila! We expect robust sales.

I was reminded of this mindset when I recently taught a day-long seminar on B2B Marketing Best Practices at ExactTarget’s Connections 2012 conference. My colleague Dave Green and I were essentially giving marketers the ingredients they needed to thrive in a pressure-cooker lead-gen environment:

• Build the foundation for lead generation programs.  (Ideal Customer Profiles: 5 steps to ensure your lead generation stays on target)

• Master the essentials of lead generation.  (Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop)

• Uncover qualified leads. (Lead Generation: How 64% of marketers starve Sales of opportunity)

• Establish automation processes. (B2B Marketing: 7 tactics for implementing marketing automation from a fellow brand-side marketer)

• Lift results. (How to Build a Quality List and Make Data Drive Leads)

If you want to learn a little more about these subjects, check out the links adjacent to the bullet points.

The challenge marketers have repeatedly complained about, however, at this and pretty much every conference I’ve had the privilege of speaking at, is finding time to apply what they’ve learned. Using time intelligently, and setting aside the to-do list for what’s most important as opposed to what’s most urgent, is key to thriving in a pressure cooker.

Peter Drucker said it best in his book, The Effective Executive. He explains that time is our scarcest resource — it cannot be bought or sold, and therefore, must be used as effectively as possible. Even though this book was written nearly a half-century ago, its precepts are more relevant than ever.

This has inspired me to develop five best practices, based on Drucker’s teachings, to use your time to optimally incorporate what you’ve learn at conferences, and beyond, into your business:

1. Shortly after a conference, block an entire day out of your calendar to synthesize what you’ve learned. Do it as a matter of course every time you register for an event.
2. Use that time to strategically think about what would be the most valuable application of the intelligence you’ve gained.
3. Prepare a lesson plan for your team. Educate them about what you’ve learned and how you would like to apply it to your business. Get their feedback and ideas. Not only are you empowering them, you’re also taking your own learning to a new level and multiplying the return on your conference investment.
4. Together, strategize how you can use this education to achieve your most pressing goals, and then develop a road map to move you forward in that direction.
5. Implement this strategy. Making a strategy isn’t the hard part, implementing it is. To paraphrase Drucker, until a strategy has degenerated into hard work, it is merely an intention. (This is where a to-do list comes in.)

When the pressure cooker is turned up so high it feels like it’s going to blow, remember, we have at our disposal more intelligence than ever before to help us generate better leads faster. We just have to make sure we take the time to absorb and apply it. I believe this is what’s going to separate the lead generation winners from the losers in the 21^st century.

What ideas do you have to efficiently and effectively incorporate the vast amount of information that’s available today into better lead generation? Share them in the comments – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Related Resources:

Email Summit 2013 – February 19-22, Las Vegas

Lead Scoring: How to pick the right ingredients for high ROI

Lead Nurturing: Market to personality and behavior, not job title
B2B Lead-Gen: Top tactics for a crisis-proof strategy

My Key Takeaways as a B2B Summit Clinic Coach: Top lessons from real-world marketers and actionable ideas to drive marketing success

Lead Generation

Joe is newly single. He met his last girlfriend on an online dating site. So, he resurrected his ad, and the new quest began.

Except it was so much harder! He had plenty of dates; he just couldn’t quite connect with anyone. They were nice enough and pretty enough, but there was no chemistry. Like when he raved about his favorite musicians — Jane’s Addiction, Cake and Liz Phair — all of his potential sweethearts stared blankly.

“Uh, who?” they queried.

The problem was that Joe hadn’t been online since 2002, and he didn’t change what he was looking for since then, either.  The women he really would have connected with were older, and maybe even divorced.

Joe’s market is no longer never-married and 21, even though he thought it was.

It’s Q4, do you know who your market is?

So it is with your marketplace. Nothing remains stagnant. That’s why it’s critical to make sure your market is still who you think it is.

How do you do this? Through developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and updating it at least every six months. An ICP is the foundation of your entire lead generation program. It enables you, through database analysis, to identify the people and businesses that will benefit your organization the most. It helps you narrow your lead generation universe and provide a standard against which you can prescreen opportunities.

Here are the steps to developing an ICP:

1. Identify your five best customers
   • Those who provide the most revenue and profit
   • Those who are delightful to do business with
2. Identify your five worst customers
   • Those who give you the least revenue and profit
   • Those who are challenging to do business with
3. Create profiles for each and populate them with:
   • Their SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) and/or NAICS (North American Industrial Classification) codes
   • Annual revenue
   • Number of employees
   • The positions and roles of your key contacts
   • The scope of the organization – local, regional, national, global
   • Their business situation – are they a startup, mature, in growth or decline?
   • Internal/and external factors affecting the company
   • Psychographics, such as corporate values, culture and philosophy
4. Trigger events that attracted them into your database in the first place.

   Common trigger events include changes in:

   • Strategies
   • Financing
   • Ownership
   • Legislation
   • Buying processes, influencing roles and decision-making roles
5. Analyze what they have in common:
   • Your worst customers should look completely different than your best
   • You should see a distinct picture of where your target market lies

Data analysis = Truth

Everyone has an opinion, which may or may not be accurate. An ICP created through thorough customer data analysis reveals the unvarnished truth. It is based on objective evidence of marketplace behavior, not on observations that can shift with every individual’s perspective.

The dangers of not having an accurate ICP: If your ICP isn’t spot on, your lead generation will be off and there will be no getting it on track.  You could have the perfect channels and execution, but it won’t attract whom you want. Or, it will turn people off.

One MECLABS Research Partner related how it tripled its Google AdWords spend and doubled its digital marketing investment, but hadn’t reviewed its ICP in two years. The result: Its lead conversion decreased by 50%. The Research Partner’s marketplace had changed dramatically over the last two years, and it was targeting the wrong people. The company didn’t bother to look at the qualities of who has been attracted to them recently.

The benefits of having an accurate ICP: An accurate ICP can increase revenues without increasing budget.

Consider another Research Partner. The company wanted to increase its average sale, which had been about $60,000. We advised the team to develop a database of prospects that fit its ICP. We then conducted a lead generation campaign. In the first year of the new program, the average sale rose to $80,000, while revenue increased by 20%. The sales team focused on fewer opportunities, but these opportunities were of much higher quality. The team achieved more revenue without spending more money or more time. Learn more about that in my book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.

The upshot: An ICP ensures you take full advantage of the very best lead generation opportunities and never waste time, resources or energy settling for so-so ones.

Related Resources:

Lead Generation Check list – Part 3: Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile

My Key Takeaways as a B2B Summit Clinic Coach: Top lessons from real-world marketers and actionable ideas to drive marketing success

Lead Generation: 4 critical success factors to designing a pilot

Marketing Research Chart: Top-rated tactics for developing value propositions that resonate and convert

Lead Generation

Editor’s Note: Buy, build or both? This is the eternal quandary for many marketers and salespeople looking for a reliable list to contact. In this final blog post in the series (check out the previous posts here: “List Buying: 3 reasons why this tactic can be deadly for marketers” and “Buy, Build or Both Part 2: The basics of list building,”  Brian Carroll provides tips for effective list buying if you choose to go that route.

Remember when you were in college, studying hours every single night so that you never had to cram when final exams came.

Me neither.

Let me clarify: I did more than my share of steady studying, but I also ended up cramming for an exam once in a while. Life sometimes got in the way of doing things perfectly, just like it does today.

So it is with list building. While we would all like our ideal customers to opt in to our lists through continuous, consistent inbound marketing, sometimes we’re going to miss a few. Sometimes there isn’t the executive buy-in, and the budget that comes with it, to carry out the kind of inbound marketing campaigns that attract every prospect to opt in. And, sometimes there simply isn’t enough time.

So, when you must purchase a list, I recommend that you do the following:

1.  Know whom you’re targeting. Here’s a brief rundown on how you identify that ideal customer:

1. Rank your customers by most profitable, best revenue and easiest with which to do business. Then rank by least profitable, worst revenue and hardest with which to do business.
2. Evaluate the characteristics of the top five companies on each list. What characteristics link the best and the worst?

This information is what you need to paint the picture of your ideal customer. Take it to the next step by noting the following:

• Annual revenue and geographic reach

• Industry vertical, including common keywords that identify the companies and Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) and North American Industrial Classification (NAICS)

• Number of employees

• Decision-maker roles

• Psychographics such as values, culture, and internal and external issues that influence their buying decisions

Without this basic information, don’t invest in a list.
Learn more about building your ideal customer profile in this article: “Lead Generation Check list – Part 3: Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile.”

2.  Consider using Dun & Bradstreet or InfoUSA as a starting point for general business lists. They have all the basic demographic data you’ll typically need, but you’ll have to do more research to fit your ideal customer profile. Furthermore, if you want to reach anything other than top executives, you’ll have to add those contacts yourself. But it’s a good place to start.

3.  Find a list provider who is consultative. List sellers can be very pushy; look for one who is rewarded by how well he serves, not how much he sells. When looking at list providers:

• Be clear that you are buying a list, not renting. Many companies only rent lists, so you can only use them for a specific period or number of times. This doesn’t work well for ongoing lead generation.

• Make sure it includes the right demographic data to reach your ideal customer.

• Find out if they can create lists by both keyword and SIC code, and if they can identify contacts who have purchased products or services that are similar to yours.

4.  Invest in the best, not the cheapest. My team discovered through testing that the cheapest list is actually 60% more costly than the most expensive one. Here’s the story in a nutshell: We were doing lead generation for a billion-dollar telecommunications company. We compared the cheapest list (names collected from business cards) with the most expensive one, where data was compared against multiple sources, and names, titles and roles were each verified with a phone call.

We made 312 phone calls with the same staff, used an identical script and called at the same time of day. We compared number of calls to:

• Attain a lead – It took just 77 calls to attain a sales-ready lead with the most expensive list; it took 240 with the least.

• Disqualify a contact – With the most expensive list, it took 90 calls, with the least expensive, it took merely 11. With the cheap list, 67% of the people on the list were no longer with the company!

In a month of calling, our experiment revealed the cost per lead with the most expensive list was $373; the cost per lead with the cheapest list was $954.

Go to the 12-minute mark in this video of a session from B2B Summit 2011 to find out the details: “Optimizing the Lead: Learn a data-driven optimization process that reduced cost-per-lead by more than 60% in one month.”

5.  Test your lists – even if they’re internal. Call about 300 contacts to find out if:

• There’s duplicate data

• The information is current and complete

• The contacts are actually in your target market.

If more than one in 20 fails, the list definitely needs a good cleaning before it’s used.

In the Direct Marketing News article, “Brands Enhance Lead Generation Strategies,” Michael Feldstein, Director of Marketing at Boardroom, Inc., a direct response publishing company, says he is “never sure” if a list he has purchased is accurate and current.

“That’s why we always test,” he explains. “If we have 50,000 names, we’ll test 5,000.”  He goes on to say he does his best to buy names from companies he can trust and won’t preload the test with good names.

6.  Make one person the list guru. You can have the best campaign, but if your list is garbage, it won’t get the results it deserves. I have found that at least half of the success of an outbound campaign hinges on list quality. That’s why you need at least one person dedicated to monitoring, updating and maintaining your lists.

Again, in a perfect world, everyone who could benefit from your product and service would find you and opt in to be on our lists. But the world is imperfect; all we can do is the best we can with what we have. I hope my tips help, and I invite you to add any others in the comments below.

Related Resources:

Do You Expect Your Inside Sales Team to Practice Alchemy?

How to Build a Quality List and Make Data Drive Leads

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

Teleprospecting: When cutting response time is a priority (and when it’s not)

Lead Generation

The precursor of change is always pain.

For most of us over the past four years, our marketplace has inflicted varying levels of it as we have slogged through the most challenging economic climate since the Great Depression.

This is apparently not enough to make marketers and sales professionals embrace change and develop a formal lead generation strategy, considering that 75% of marketers still don’t have a formal lead generation process or guidelines according to MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report.

This tells me they either

1. have an impressively high pain tolerance, or
2. have been blessed with an unusually beneficent marketplace.

I hope most of them are in the “B” category.

Why?

Because when we ignore the pain that should motivate us to change, it becomes increasingly worse until change happens. But, by that time, the result is often change we don’t want or expect.

If you’ve been feeling the pain of producing lead quality and quantity but don’t know what to do about it, keep reading. I’m going to give you what you need to start easing that pain now by developing a formal lead generation strategy with a universal lead definition (ULD). I’ll be teaching about ULDs at this week’s B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando.

What is a ULD?

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

It should be applied to every lead regardless of its source – and sets the standard to determine which leads should be the highest priority.

How do I create one?

1. Bring Sales and Marketing together under the leadership of someone both teams trust and look up to the most.
2. Ask the sales team this critical question: “For us to be 100% certain that you will both act on a lead when we send it and provide feedback 100% of the time, what do you need to know? At what point do you consider a lead qualified?”Supplement this question with these:
   • How can we raise the bar and give you better leads?
   • What need makes a lead a good fit?
   • What information is necessary to determine if a lead is worth the follow-through?
   • What are the titles/job functions of economic buyers and influencers?
   • What does this company value? What is its culture?
   • What are the common business issues?
   • What information do you need to qualify the lead as being sales-ready?
   • What are the characteristics of the ideal sales opportunity?
   • What are the questions you need answered before getting a lead?
   • What information is must-have versus nice-to-have?
   • What questions should we ask leads before passing them along?

3. Listen to what Sales has to say, and don’t interrupt. Every salesperson must participate.
4. Summarize the notes from this meeting, and then have another to clarify the definition and to attain everyone’s buy-in. Consensus is critical.
5. Publish the ULD everywhere so people who are involved in any aspect of new customer acquisition are constantly reminded of their goal.
6. Close the loop with huddles – biweekly face-to-face or voice-to-voice meetings. Don’t count on software to do it for you. Ask questions such as:
   • 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 start doing?
   • What should we stop doing?

The upshot: There is no lead generation strategy without a ULD. If you don’t have one, follow the steps I’ve outlined and establish one now before the lead generation pain becomes so intense that you can no longer control outcomes.

Related Resources:

Lead Generation: How 64% of marketers starve Sales of opportunity

Marketing Research in Action: 65% of B2B marketers are not nurturing

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

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

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

Lead Generation

A couple of weeks ago, I presented the webinar, “Optimizing the Lead: A data-driven optimization process that goes beyond lead capture.” Lead optimization is the core of revenue optimization – making as much money as possible from your time, energy and resources. We work with our Research Partners to achieve just that.

It’s key to business success, and it’s no wonder this topic produced excellent questions from our webinar audience. I didn’t have time to answer all of them on the webinar, so I’m taking the opportunity here. I find that when one person has the courage to ask a question, many people have the same one but don’t want to ask it because they don’t want to appear uninformed.

Here’s your opportunity to read and learn, without having to put yourself out there.

What does it mean to “enrich data” and “merge/de-dupe”?

When you enrich data, you’re filling in the details about a contact that may be missing.

A customer relationship management system (CRM), or simply an Excel spreadsheet if you can’t afford a CRM, provides a single, central location to store customer information so you can update it easily and ensure accuracy.

It also makes it easy to identify duplicates and merge information – that is literally what is meant by the term “merge/de-dupe.”

Learn more about the importance of data: “B2B Marketing: Building a quality list.”

If someone signs up for a free trial of your product, does that automatically make them a lead?

To answer this question, I need to understand your universal lead definition (ULD) and if this person fits it. If he doesn’t, he’s just an inquiry. You have to qualify where his interest is and measure that against your ULD.

The question I have is: How many people who download your trial actually install it and use it? For example, we worked with a software company to set up a nurturing process to communicate the value proposition on why prospects should install the trial, how to use it and action items to move forward with their evaluation of the software solution.

Find out more about the critical importance of ULDs and how to build one: “Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop.”

What is a persona?

Picture whom you’re talking to and that is, in essence, your persona. It’s the profile of people who are involved in the buying process — their roles and the questions and issues they’re facing. Defining personas helps you determine what’s relevant to your target markets so you can develop effective nurturing campaigns.

How do I know if I’m nurturing?

Ask yourself, “Is what I’m sharing with my customer valuable to them even if they never buy?”

Learn more about lead nurturing: “Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects – not selling them.”

Is it possible to nurture too much?

Absolutely, if what you’re providing is not relevant to the person to whom you’re sending it. They emotionally unsubscribe, even though they may not bother to do so actively. Pay close attention to whether they’re opening your emails or clicking through to links – those indicate if they really care about what you’re sending them.

Learn more: “5 Lead Nurturing Tips to Create Relevant and Engaging Emails.”

What are the biggest struggles to establishing a lead nurturing program?

Understanding your customer well enough to know what matters most to them, and then identifying the content that addresses it.
Learn how one billion-dollar company went about this process: “How Content Strategy is Transforming an Entire Marketing and Sales Organization.”

How do you make a cold call that’s memorable in the first 30 seconds?

Relevancy is everything. MarketingSherpa has found that 92% of B2B buyers are open to cold calls if the salesperson is relevant. Prospects want to know the following:

• What’s in it for me or someone in my company?
• Does this person/solution/organization align with my priorities?
• Do they get it? Do they understand how I work?
• Have they looked at my company? Do they understand our priorities and challenges?

So conduct your pre-call due diligence:

• Learn as much as you can about the prospect and his company.
• Find out how your organization’s value proposition aligns to their needs. (Learn more about effective value propositions in this article: “Value Proposition: 3 worksheets to help you craft, express and create derivative value props.”)
• Tie your research and your value proposition together succinctly to create a valid business reason to call.
• Test messaging to identify the approach that works best.

Can lead nurturing work without sales management buying in?

No, because the ultimate purpose is to help the sales team sell; this requires complete alignment between sales and marketing goals. Find out real-world reasons why sales management buy-in is so critical in this article: “How ECI Telecom Discovered the Surefire Sign that Sales and Marketing Are Aligned.”

Do we have to make a follow-up call after every email send?

You position the follow-up call, or human touch, based on how people are interacting with your content. Did they click on the link? Did they consequently download or review additional information? Did they do this in sequence or throughout the course of several months?
All of this information determines their readiness for a phone call, and you can measure readiness through lead scoring.

However, if you see someone is not engaging with what you’re sending them, you may want to figure out why. We made a phone call to an inquiry who was not opening any of the content we were sending him. It turns out he said he was a network administrator on a Web form. In reality, he was the chief technology officer, and was being sent the wrong content! When we started sending him executive-level content, as opposed to technical, he ended up buying a few months later.

How do you develop a lead scoring process?

1. Start with your ULD to know exactly when an inquiry becomes a lead and is ready to be turned over to Sales.
2. Understand the must-haves Sales requires before engaging a lead. They could include:
   • The size of the company – for instance, it must have at least 100 employees and $20 million in revenue.
   • The title or role of the inquiry – he must be a manager or higher who influences the buying decision for example.
   • A trigger event – for instance, they’re expanding into a new region.
3. Analyze current customers:
   • Track their path to making a purchase.
   • Examine what content they consumed along the way. Do you see any patterns? Did every one of them download certain documents or regularly attend webinars?
4. Weigh all of these qualities and actions with a number, and analyze them to determine which sequence adds up to a sum that will likely point to a sale.

Learn more about lead scoring: “Lead Scoring: How to pick the right ingredients for high ROI.”

If you want to learn more, watch the webinar replay: “Optimizing the Lead: A data-driven optimization process.” And, if you have any additional questions, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Lead Management

Last Tuesday, I had the opportunity to share the most exciting aspect of working at MECLABS – Research Partnerships that allow us to test and optimize lead generation processes. Spouting theory is easy, but it’s meaningless unless you know how it works in the real world with real companies.

It’s thrilling for me to observe lead generation strategy transform into revenue for our Research Partners. Watch the webinar replay for a behind-the-scenes look at this research. You’ll learn how we:

• Improved the quality of sales-ready leads by attaining better information about prospects and where they are in the buying process

• Determined how and when we speak to prospects to quickly advance them through the sales funnel

• Achieved a 375% increase in sales-ready leads and $4.9 million in additional pipeline in eight months

For more information about these lead optimization tactics, view the webinar replay below:

View the slides on SlideShare

Related Resources:

On Lead Qualification: Steps to Convert Inquiries into Viable Sales Leads

Lead Capture Optimized: 201% increase in captured leads with clearer value proposition

B2B Lead Testing: “Cheap” data is actually expensive (via MarketingExperiments Blog)

Lead Generation, Webinar Replay

Let’s say you’re dining out, and you order chicken pad thai. The waiter immediately trots out with a raw chicken breast, a bunch of whole carrots, a pile of bean sprouts, a handful of peanuts and some rice noodles, dumps them in front of you, and then walks away.

You wouldn’t think much of the chef, yes?

Frankly, you could rightfully draw the same conclusion if you extended that analogy to marketers. Unbelievably, most are still sending only raw leads to Sales, and they aren’t making an effort to bring those leads to a place where they’re ready for Sales to bite into. Consider data from a new report released by our sister company MarketingSherpa, the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link). The report compiled survey responses from nearly 2,000 organizations, of which 73% sell primarily to other businesses.

• 64% of marketers still send all leads that respond to marketing campaigns directly to Sales

This is a costly mistake. In contacting even qualified leads for hundreds of leading B2B organizations over the years, I have found that only 5 to 40% are ready to buy right now. And, leads that are ready to buy right now are the only kinds of leads Sales really wants – they have quotas to meet, after all.  It’s no wonder 80% of Marketing-generated leads end up lost, ignored or discarded.

I am certain there are marketers who will read this and say, “Well, I would love to give Sales only qualified leads, but they are starving – they want every lead we get!”

If that’s the case, don’t let them discard the leads that aren’t ready to buy immediately. Make absolutely sure they give them back to you to nurture.

• 59% still don’t have lead nurturing programs

You see, most of those leads will eventually buy from either you or a competitor, just not at this moment. However, since 59% of marketers don’t conduct lead nurturing, a lot of companies are conceivably giving those sales to competitors that do nurture their leads.

Lead nurturing is not unlike using a slow cooker. You can start with ingredients that don’t seem promising, but time will produce the delicious outcome for which you’re looking.

In a nutshell, lead nurturing keeps prospects engaged through a consistent, easy-to-follow “conversation” in which they are eager to be involved. It’s a gradual process that guides them from where they’re at right now to where you want them to be in the buying cycle. This conversation is supported by content such as articles, videos and whitepapers – information they really care about and that can help them make the best purchasing decision.

Please note: This content must benefit them whether they buy from you or not.  Never pitch products or services.

Find out more about lead nurturing here:  “Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects – not selling them”

Establishing a lead nurturing program is a powerful way to increase both quantity and quality of leads. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, it may take a few months before you start seeing results. However, it’s worth the effort: A strong lead nurturing program will remove the need to give raw leads to Sales and, instead, give them a steady stream of piping-hot leads that are ready and eager to move forward.

• Companies that nurture leads receive a 45% higher return on lead generation investment

Making the effort to nurture leads will pay off handsomely, according to MarketingSherpa research. Lead nurturing companies report a 125% return on lead generation investment, compared to a mere 86% for companies that don’t bother with it.

This does not surprise me at all because organizations that nurture leads do a better job of keeping every one of them in the sales funnel.

In the video, “15 Years of Marketing Research Summed Up in 11 Minutes,” Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS, illustrates this point.

As Dr. McGlaughlin says, people are highly unlikely to fall through your sales and marketing funnel with grace and ease; they’re much more likely to fall out of it. You’re constantly fighting against competitive noise and internal distractions.

If prospects make it to the other end and close the deal, chances are they’ve gradually moved on a deliberate path, overcoming intense resistance. Lead nurturing helps remove that resistance to progress them more easily.

In summary, the days of generating leads and sending them off to Sales are long over. Sales doesn’t have the time or resources to bring the 60 to 95% that aren’t ready to speak with them to a place where they are. Because of that, you’re losing potential deals. Nurturing leads can ensure the best return on your lead generation investment by helping you give Sales what they want most: Only the most well-prepared, juiciest opportunities.

Related Resources:

Marketing Research in Action: 65% of B2B marketers are not nurturing

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

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

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

Lead Generation