B2B Lead Blog

It’s easy to get ahead of ourselves trying to promote products and services before we’ve given the prospect a reason why they should learn more, and trade events can exacerbate the issue. After all, this is the place where you can see a lot of demos; we expect to collect product information.

However, trade shows can do so much more by creating opportunities for more meaningful engagement for everyone.

We provided this opportunity at the recent MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas two weeks ago (and our B2B Summit before that). We gave sponsors the opportunity to engage prospects during an hour-long set of roundtable sessions on the exhibit floor the second day of the four-day event.

Here’s how it worked:

• Sponsors brought in thought leaders to guide 15-minute small-group discussions (no more than 10 people) on topics such as:
  • Utilizing Automated Messages to Improve Your Email Program
  • Maximizing Mobile Email ROI
  • Optimize Data for Your Prospect Outreach
• Event attendees could select the three topics they thought most relevant to their issues and visit three different round tables.

The marketers and sponsors loved these sessions.

Marketers could:

• Network with a small group of people with similar challenges and speak with them later in the event
• Get a glimpse into a vendor within the safe confines of a group

Sponsors could:

• Demonstrate thought leadership
• Build rapport and relationships with individual marketers
• Use these roundtables as a stepping stone for the next step in the journey, like meeting one-on-one in a coaching clinic or stopping by the booth for a related offer. (I did note that the most effective roundtable leaders were those who led a discussion and not those who asked one or two qualifying question followed by a 14-minute PowerPoint presentation.)

It’s no wonder the roundtable events were jam-packed and most of the discussion was constant and lively.

“It was better than speed dating,” one marketer admitted to me!

Other ways to creatively engage prospects include:

• Cocktail parties
• Coaching clinics
• Games to encourage networking
• Event-specific business cards with QR codes everyone can scan

Great conferences are rich with case studies, trends and advanced practices.  This environment motivates participants to collaborate with the sponsors who are making innovation possible and each other.  Where else throughout the year can this fruitful exchange happen so readily?

Seen in this light, trade shows have the potential to be a super-intensive engagement opportunity for everyone involved. Facilitating audience participation and collaboration should be a high priority for hosts and sponsors. It certainly is for us, and we would love to hear your ideas for increasing connection, collaboration and interaction at these events.

Related Resources:

Optimization Summit 2013 – May 20-23 in Boston

Event Recap: Notes from the Optimization Summit 2012 roundtable sessions

How Technology on the Trade Show Floor Can Help Your Sales Team Work Smarter and Sell More

Trade Show Follow-Up: 5 tips to optimize response

Nine Simple Tactics to Drive a Higher Return on Trade Show Investment

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

GetResponse Roundtable at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013

Marketing Strategy, Uncategorized

Trade shows and conferences are still the biggest areas of investment for marketers, according to the most recent MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. And, as we marketers have embraced digital, the value of face-to-face interactions has increased.

There really isn’t a digital replacement for shaking someone’s hand or reading their body language and all the other benefits of human interaction. It’s all about building relationships.

Yet, many companies still measure marketers on cost-per-lead metrics when such metrics are inadequate for measuring face-to-face interactions at trade shows.

The real value of trade show interactions

Consider this: The cost of having one qualified face-to-face meeting with a prospect is often hundreds of dollars; it’s often $30 to $100 to have a phone conversation. CEOs need to look at the economics of competitive market dialogue holistically, with Marketing and Sales working together to walk customers and prospects through the buying cycle as economically as possible.

From this perspective, the cost of face-to-face conversations takes on a very different perspective. Trade shows and conferences are a great way to have many face-to-face meetings in a short time.

Plus, you can learn a lot at a trade shows from customers, prospects and even competitors.

Optimizing face-to-face conversations at trade shows

The challenge is that for those staffing booths, the hours are long and the conversations unending. To capitalize on these face-to-face interactions, the trade show team needs a much better way to distill conversations for future follow-up, especially since so many people who will be doing the following up won’t be the ones who spoke to the customer or prospect at the event.

Why not direct some trade show investment to a better means of capturing the conversation? For example:

1. Most trade show name badges include quick response (QR) codes that detail prospects’ names, titles and contact information. Why not scan these codes with a smartphone or an iPad? When scanned and populated into your CRM, you eliminate the data entry errors that inevitably happen when business cards are entered manually.
2. Associate this information with a simple form that the sales professional can access from a smartphone or an iPad and use to distill the conversation. You could include:
   • A few key pain points/motivations that relate to your solutions
   • One or two qualifying questions, such as the size of the account
   • A drop down for the contact’s position, e.g., CxO, VP, director, practitioner
   • A short free-form text field the rep can use to write a note

Invest in working smarter

A (relatively) small technology investment will help sales and event professionals work smarter. They’ll instantly capture why customers might want to buy your product and be able to follow up with the most relevant conversation. Sales professionals can then subsequently focus on the issues that are most important to the prospects whether it’s a week or a month after the trade show.

Which brings me to my final point: Unless there is a specific, time-sensitive request by the prospect, hold off on follow-up until at least a week after the event. Having been out of the office for a few days, the prospect’s hair will be on fire, and very likely, for the next few days thereafter, his or her inbox and email will be filled with messages.

Of course, many vendor messages will be generic and therefore ineffective.  Yours, on the other hand, will connect with the prospects’ motivations and more likely convert them into pipeline.

Related Resources:

Trade Show Follow-Up: 5 tips to optimize response

Nine Simple Tactics to Drive a Higher Return on Trade Show Investment

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

Lead Generation: 39% say offline lead gen has somewhat decreased

Lead Generation: Trends in 2012 marketing budgets

Event Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: AAPEX Shows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem with the SiriusDecisions model is one of language. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few weeks ago, I wrote about ways to combine sales and marketing knowledge to improve lead generation.  Let me be more specific about one strategy that the best sales organizations do that marketers should replicate in their demand-generation and lead-nurturing campaigns:

Stratify resources as part of a coverage model.

The idea is simple:

1. The best sales people call on the most lucrative accounts and handle the largest deals.  
2. The least-expensive sales people call on the smallest accounts and handle the smallest deals. 

This kind of stratification even occurs within large accounts, where an inside sales rep may handle smaller transactions and a field sales person handles the bigger deals.

In other words, sales leaders align resources with the revenue potential. 

Revenue is only one of the dimensions of this stratified use of sales resources.  Probability of purchase is another.  Thus, as products become increasingly commoditized, decisions move down the chain of command. Lower-cost inside sales people can manage such products and services, freeing field sales people to focus on newer high-growth products where the decision processes are longer.  In fact, when sales organizations use a division of labor to set up a teleprospecting function to support other sales people, the idea is that prospecting is a lower-probability activity that less-expensive phone resources can handle on behalf of a more-expensive field sales resource. This frees them up to focus on the high-probability sales-ready leads.

Finally, this same concept gets played out at the micro-level, too. That is, each sales person must decide whether a sales opportunity offers enough revenue potential or a high enough probability of success to warrant further investment of time.

Here’s a few ways marketing can apply this same idea:

Lead follow-up.  Not all leads have the same likelihood of purchase or the same revenue potential.  Divide leads into two or three tiers, ideally driven by automated lead-scoring rules.  For the top tier, make more follow-up calls.  Call all the buyer personas for the solution.  Tele-nurture personas with quarterly calls. Invest in experimentation with the cadence of calls, the integration of email, and even the use of mail. For the lowest tier, make one call within an hour of response and then use email to nurture.  

Demand generation. Not all prospects have the same value. Your investment should reflect that reality. Use the same stratification and invest more resources in the top tiers of the market to generate demand. 

1. Targeting. Hand-build a key account database to improve targeting and personalization. New data-as-a-service providers can build a best record from multiple lists sources. So identify and validate all the buyer personas. This kind of enhanced database can improve the possibilities for personalization and content segmentation.
2. Content.  For many marketers, a large account represents millions of dollars of revenue, often on an ongoing basis. These economics make it possible for a different way of looking at content investment. Vertical content, executive-level content, and even company-specific messaging become much more viable in this context. My favorite example of this idea was a client years ago who took out one full page ad in the local Cincinnati newspaper to solicit Proctor and Gamble. This company had a new technology for cutting diaper material. But P&G had big investments in its own diaper-cutting technology and so the client’s sales organization had spent years trying to open a door. The $100k ad, which used the headline, “Proctor and Gamble, we want to pamper your bottom-line,” resulted in just eight leads, but one of them turned into a $5 million deal within six months.  It is a fabulous example of this idea of stratifying resources to align with revenue potential.
3. Contact Strategy.  Marketing has three options here:
   1. Using higher-cost forms of contact, like a teleprospecting call or a more elaborate mailing package
   2. Using more frequent contact, and / or
   3. Placing more focus on the most influential buyers (e.g., the executive buyer)

 With this approach, marketing can create:

• Account-specific webinars or even on-site events
• Highly personalized communications and landing pages that reference other decision influencers in the account
• Teaser campaigns with very tailored messaging
• Teleprospecting campaigns that results in relationship building with key stakeholders

The possibilities are infinite.  Often, marketing can repurpose some of the content and design work for the next tier down.

Finally, in addition to the economic benefits, keep in mind that the best sales people call on these kinds of accounts.  Helping these producers make more money can result in a very powerful group of marketing evangelists within the rank and file sales teams and executive team.

Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership

Longer selling cycles and stalled deals are impeding sales funnels everywhere. Use these three practices to convert more leads into revenue:

Use Funnel-Specific Market Research
If you really want to understand what’s happening with customers at a particular point in your funnel, then you have to ask them while the last interaction with you is relatively fresh in their minds. As such, an interview or survey should happen close enough to the event that the prospect will recall the context of the decision. Be sure to include questions on customer decision dynamics. In many industries, for example, executives are scrutinizing much smaller transactions, so lead generation, lead nurturing and sales enablement tactics must address this shift in buying behavior. Typically, such research reveals a few issues that can be addressed relatively quickly.

Integrate this research into your demand-generation and lead-nurturing framework by making such surveys or interviews automated trigger events. For example, let’s say you’d like to gain a customer perspective of your teleprospecting operation. Here’s how you can go about it:

1. Create an automated rule - on the first teleprospecting conversation send an email to the prospect moments after the call.
2. Reference the conversation and the name of the representative, then ask for confidential feedback.
3. Provide a link within the email to a simple survey that asks about the knowledge and professionalism of the representative. The web form might also allow for free-text feedback.

Use this type of feedback to improve training for the individual or team. Similar context-sensitive surveys could occur when customers download a white paper or a case study, attend a webinar or visit a tradeshow booth. Use this kind of information to improve white papers, case studies, webinars, or other specific marketing outputs.

Use Teleprospecting to Re-Engage Your Stalled Prospects
Professional teleprospecting representatives should consistently approach “dead” leads as an informal market-research project. The message can be straight and true. The representative is trying to find out what went wrong to better serve customers in the future. The rep should ask the customer to be as candid as possible, then listen and thank the customer for his candor. Open-ended questions should be used at the outset, with probing and clarifying questions thereafter. In many states, B2B calls can be digitally recorded so key stakeholders can actually hear what customers are saying.

Obviously, for this approach to work, the teleprospecting team must be listened to as a voice of the customer. The company can then use this intelligence to develop incentives that address the problems of delay. For example, if prospects lack capital budgets, perhaps a “buy-now-pay-later” program will get the sale back on track. Commonly, nothing has happened because the project was never a priority. In such cases, lead nurturing and campaigns targeting more senior executives can be of value.

Make this type of effort a two-part campaign. In the first phase, the team does the research. In the second, after huddling with product marketing and sharing the answers, the team reaches back out selectively to offer solutions that respond to the prospect’s reason for stalling. Of course, the solutions can then be applied moving forward to all stalled prospects.

Update Your Ideal Customer Profile
Sometimes, less is more. If your research reveals that your product or services is not a particularly good fit, you might want to revisit the ideal customer profile for each product or service, and adjust your targeting and qualification tactics accordingly. Better targeting won’t salvage stalled leads, but it will allow you to allocate more sales and marketing resources where you can win more frequently. That strategy, in turn, may buy your company more time to change the product or service to make it more competitive.

While no one can change the economy, you can increase the yield from demand-generation investments by using these three practices. They’ll help you attain a better understanding of the buying behavior and obstacles that prevent customers from moving forward. This approach will help you identify the best tools to move them down the sales funnel or reallocate resources that will yield a better return on investment.

B2B Telemarketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Sales, Sales Leads

In this recent interview with BNet Australia, Brian Carroll reminds us that 90 to 95 percent of customers aren’t ready to buy. (Find his comments at timestamp 18:14.)

So what do you do with them until they are?

You nurture them.

Learn more opportunities to leverage lead-nurturing in the video below.

This is the fifth in a series I developed for a leading IT organization to teach their channel partners about lead nurturing. My purpose was to make the concept easier to understand and accessible.

Here are links to the first four clips:

What are the advantages of lead nurturing?

What problems can lead nurturing solve?

What is the difference between lead nurturing and lead generation?

What are the ingredients of lead nurturing?

If you have any recommendations on how I can build on this series, I welcome them.

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy

For most of us, the phrase “demand generation” conjures up things like campaigns, trade shows, and the corporate website.

But what about sales prospecting? Despite all the newfangled marketing automation tools, most CEOs increase the funding for demand generation by authorizing the expansion of the sales organization.

Surprised?

You shouldn’t be. Books like SNAP Selling, Sales 2.0, SPIN Selling and Solution Selling for years have been teaching sales people to generate demand, one conversation at a time. Most companies don’t call what sales people do “demand creation” or “demand generation.” No, we’ve given it more pedestrian names, like “pipeline development,” “sales prospecting” or “cold calling.” But, really, what’s the difference between what sales people are trying to do and what demand-generation does?

The Percent of the Sales Budget Spent on Demand Generation

Efficient sales people don’t spend much of their time prospecting. They network. They get referrals. They leverage LinkedIn and Twitter, and monitor news feeds about key accounts. When done properly, these activities are very effective and do not take a great deal of time. The rest of their pipeline will come from sales-ready leads.

But many sales teams spend 20 percent or more of their time prospecting. A recent technology software client of mine, for example, had their six-figure field sales people spending more than 40 percent of their time prospecting.

Multiply those percentages of time spent prospecting by the total sales budget for the team in question and, in most companies, money indirectly (and maybe inadvertently) allocated by sales for demand generation is at least as large as the entire marketing budget. In fact, it could be a multiple of the marketing budget.

Think about that.

It’s not like sales people like to cold call, cold calling is time consuming and often demoralizing. Sales professionals would prefer to talk to people who have a problem they could solve. So why do sales people do it?

There’s one simple reason: they have no choice. Marketing rarely generates a sufficient volume of truly qualified leads. It’s not because marketing can’t or won’t. It’s because marketing doesn’t get the funding necessary. So sales people have to pick up the slack.

The Case for a Larger Sales Force

Against this backdrop, how hard is it for sales leadership to make the case that the way to increase revenue is to hire more sales people? New sales people generate demand. Sales management has years of evidence of the correlation between more sales people and more revenue. It’s not always true. Obviously, the product and services have to warrant demand generation efforts, but if they do, adding more sales people will generally grow revenue.

The Case for a Larger Marketing Budget

There’s a flip side to this argument, one that has been getting more and more compelling. What about increasing the investment in lead generation to drive more revenue through the current sales organization? If a sales force is using 20 percent or more of its available time to find sales opportunities, there are two key questions:

1. Can marketing be a little bit more efficient generating lead pipeline than field sales people are with cold calling?
2. To what degree?

With each advancement in marketing automation and database marketing, the answer has to be a resounding “yes!” There is a revolution going on in content marketing because of these advancements and our expanding knowledge of buying behavior. Social networks have further accelerated the possibilities.

The old budget allocation benchmarks should be challenged. Marketing leaders should be showing the CEO and the CFO and the other key stakeholders in the C-suite that marketing needs more funding in order to really move the revenue needle.

A Four-Step Plan for Making a Bigger Different with Lead Generation

If that sounds like your situation, let me share these ideas for driving change:

1. Measure how much money your sales organization really spends on demand generation.
2. Determine the revenue capacity that would be available if your sales team spent more time working opportunities instead of looking for them.
3. Share these findings with the executive leadership team and propose an experiment in collaboration with sales, finance and your CEO to improve sales’ financial performance: supply a sales team with a sufficient volume of sales-ready leads so that their time spent prospecting is cut in half.
4. Compare the revenue performance of the pilot team with that of their peers.

Set up the experiment to give key stakeholders the proof points that will convince them that it would be a no-brainer to reallocate budgets to scale the effort. Make sure the pilot sales team is reasonably representative to eliminate key variables like the solution being sold, the talent selling the solution, and the market you’re selling to. That way, you can attribute any increases in pipeline and revenue to the lead-generation investment.

Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads

Sales cycles are getting longer, according to the 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, and nearly half of marketers say that’s the biggest challenge they’re facing right now. However, lead nurturing can transform this challenge into an opportunity to drive more sales.

All you need to do is give your prospects the information they need when they need it to confirm that they’re making the smartest purchasing decision. After all, as Brian Carroll noted in this interview (timestamp 16:48), most selling happens when your sales professionals aren’t there. Lead nurturing can give the champions in your prospect organizations the knowledge to do the selling for you.

Learn more in this two-minute video, the fourth in a series I developed for a leading IT organization to teach their channel partners about lead nurturing. My purpose was to make the concept easier to understand and accessible.

Here are links to the first three clips:

What problems can lead nurturing solve?

What is the difference between lead nurturing and lead generation?

What are the ingredients of lead nurturing?

What additional advantages of lead nurturing can you think of? I welcome your ideas and insights.

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing