B2B Lead Blog

New technology to connect with customers is emerging every day. But even so, nothing is as efficient and effective as a simple phone call for beginning the conversations that ultimately result in sales, points out Brian Carroll.

During the latest B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar, Brian and his colleague, Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, explained how to make the most of the oldest and best sales conversion tool: the human touch. They explain why:

• The human touch is essential, especially if you count on inbound marketing to drive opportunity and you want to make the best use of sales time and resources.
• Quality data is critical. Good data significantly lowers your cost per lead. In fact, it slashed costs by more than half for a multi-billion dollar Cisco partner.
• Teleprospecting is about connecting with people, and that requires making sure every call counts through thoughtful value-adding conversation.

If you missed the presentation, you can watch the replay below.

How One Company Slashed Their Cost per Lead by More than Half from B2B Lead Roundtable on Vimeo.

View and download slides via SlideShare

Here’s a summary with time stamps to identify key sections:

4:10 – Lead generation is about building relationships. Brian emphasizes that lead generation requires communication and conversation: identifying the right people in the right companies, and engaging them with memorable, relevant conversations.

6:28 – Teleprospecting and email are the two most effective lead generation tools. Brian explains that while emails are a great way to support a conversation, they’re not a good way to start one. “What’s needed to drive conversion into the complex sales is the human touch,” says Brian. He notes that the fastest-growing companies, the companies that are fueling huge amounts of growth, look to teleprospecting and inside sales to maximize effective selling time.

8:11 – Qualify leads accurately and make the most of your sales team’s selling time with teleprospecting. Eighty percent of marketing leads are lost or discarded, according to MarketingSherpa. The biggest reason? They’re not ready to talk to a salesperson. The prospect may have responded to marketing campaigns and provided basic contact information, but sales professionals need much more than that. They need a valid business reason to talk to them and you’re not going to get that on a web form.

10:03 – Quality data is critical. Brandon reveals the outcomes of a breakthrough experiment the MECLABS Leads Group just completed with a $3.6 billion Cisco partner. They tested how higher cost/higher quality lead data affected the cost per lead. The outcome: cheap data is very expensive. The difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was an astounding $581 per lead! Listen to the webinar to find out the details.

22:58 – There are six teleprospecting rules that produce leads. The emphasis is always on building relationships. Teleprospecting is not about talking, it’s about listening.

24:55 – Rule 1: Sustain the calling. Developing relationships is a serious micro-conversion. Therefore, teleprospecting should be long-term and consistent. While most sales people give up after three times, it can take 8 to 19 calls to reach a prospect.

27:21 - Rule 2: Make every call count. There’s no such thing as a wasted dial; every call is an opportunity to learn. Brian advises taking a top-down approach. When you start calling at a higher level, the person you’re speaking with is more apt to confirm contacts and provide referrals. Know the specific role you’re calling for so that if you get voicemail, you can “zero out” to get another referral. Be in the moment. People are open to cold calls if they’re relevant. Five to 10 percent will be ready to speak to you about what you’re selling. With the rest, be prepared to add value to their day regardless of whether they’re ready to buy. After all, 70 percent of brand perception comes from direct contact with a salesperson.

36:28 – Rule 3: Throw away the scripts. Conversation is the goal. Outline the first 30 seconds of the call, briefly explain who you are, your company, the purpose of your call and how you’re going to add value. A call guide is a living document that should be flexible and assume multiple outcomes. It should outline the call’s goal, how you can add value, the important questions that you need answered, and the business issue you need to help solve. Remember: it may take several conversations to qualify someone as a sales-ready lead.

42:44 – Rule 4: Always be relevant. Sales training teaches that we need to follow-up. It doesn’t teach how. “I just want to catch up” or “I just want to touch base” is code for “Are you ready to buy yet?” That’s not being relevant; relevancy is connecting with people by understanding their priorities and their company’s priorities. MarketingSherpa found that 92 percent of B2B buyers are open to cold calls if the salesperson is relevant.

47:34 – Rule 5: Gain opt-in. Do this by sharing valuable information. Provide your teleprospecting team an email template with a valuable piece of content, it’s an easy way to gain email addresses. Brandon and Brian role play so you can hear how it’s done.

49:48 – Rule 6: Always follow up (with nurturing). This segment addresses how to deal with the 85 to 95 percent of prospects who aren’t ready to buy immediately. It outlines how to filter and find relevant content to keep them engaged, and how your teleprospecting team should present it. How do you know you’re nurturing? When what you provide offers value even if the prospect never buys from you.

53:53 – Put the rules into action. Remember, building relationships takes time. But when you add the human touch and bring all the pieces together, this is where conversion takes place. It takes conversation to achieve the discovery that qualifies leads at the level that most sales people need.

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Email Marketing, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay

I have a confession: you know the cliché about the cobbler’s kids? I’ve been there and done that. And you can see proof of it back in April, 2009, when I blogged about how to best leverage LinkedIn as a lead generation tool.  Step five was “create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.”

The problem was that my company at the time, InTouch, which became a part of MECLABS this year, didn’t have its own LinkedIn Group.  My message to my blog readers should have been, “Do as I say not as I do.”

I knew, having advised my readers to start a LinkedIn group, that I should at least consider doing the same. But I wanted to make absolutely sure that whatever I created would contribute value that couldn’t be found anywhere else. Why add to the noise?

So I began perusing groups in earnest. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any one, at the time, that was completely dedicated to lead generation. Okay, let me qualify that – one that was completely dedicated to lead generation without self-promotion drowning out discussions that addressed real issues. That was the gap that needed to be filled, so three weeks later I launched the B2B Lead Roundtable.

Today, we’re celebrating its second birthday, and I am proud to say we are on the verge of 8,500 members. In fact, I expect that we will reach and exceed that milestone this week.

I am also glad that the B2B Lead Roundtable became what I had hoped: a forum where professionals can share their questions and insights without being inundated with people trying to sell them something. Instead, they’re given legitimate, compelling feedback from professionals who genuinely know what they’re talking about.  That’s probably because the vast majority are seasoned executives.

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Content Marketing, Current Affairs, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech

This week I was in San Francisco doing a live, streamed presentation, Uncovering Trends and Best Practices in Lead Generation, for Cisco. It’s part of their on-going Partner Velocity Program which provides in-person events, in-depth resources, and online marketing tutorials to their value-added resellers worldwide.

I believe Cisco sets the standard for how to engage channel partners, and am honored that they asked me to share my ideas around where they need to focus their marketing attention and resources. In essence, smart marketers approach their work like a portfolio manager; they’re constantly thinking about and testing the optimal investment strategy.

In the playback below I examine how to make the best investments of marketing time, money and energy, and point out the areas where too many marketers are squandering opportunity and resources. I cover:

• The latest trends in lead generation.
• How to create buyer personas.
• Social media as a lead generation tactic.
• Steps to optimizing the B2B mix.
• Guiding principles to effective B2B telemarketing.

Of course, I only had an hour to speak and each of these topics could be a webinar on their own. In fact, that’s precisely the case next week, considering the topic for the next B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads – How One Company Slashed Their Cost per Lead by More than Half.

What other points would you like me to expand on? Let me know; watch the broadcast replay and review Cisco’s excellent blog post about my presentation. I’d love to hear from you.

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay, Weblogs

This is the second part of a series which asks, “Is Teleprospecting Too Complex for Testing?” The first post outlined what could seem to be insurmountable teleprospecting testing challenges. This post looks at how teleprospecting can be successfully tested.

You see, complexity really does tax our ability to think clearly about testing. Still, what are free markets but a giant global laboratory that tests various business models? Every day, someone somewhere invests his life savings in an entrepreneurial dream. That dream is an experiment – a test – to see if the market will want enough of what that person is selling so he can make a profit and grow his business.

These experiments are multivariate and never ending. Think about it: businesses must adjust to competitive threats and market opportunities, and reinvent themselves on the fly with ever more experimentation. You can see which experiments work: those are the companies that make money. Breakthrough experimentation is obvious, too. Those are the companies like Microsoft back in the ‘80s, Google more recently, and now Facebook that exploded from nothing into a giant corporate mushroom.

Granted, some of this experimentation is not all that scientific. In fact, too often it’s random and ill-conceived. But it’s all just a bunch of experiments. So complexity is not a barrier, really.

I believe there are three key considerations:

1. It’s very important to look at experience – and the wisdom gained from that – in the marketplace and use that knowledge as a baseline. The most important part of that baseline is the model:

• What kind of people do you hire?
• What kind of training do they need?
• What does the compensation look like?
• What kind of metrics do you use?
• What is the charter of the team, and what are the mutual obligations of sales and marketing?

There are really many models to choose from. Choosing the right one for your business will simply give you a better jumping-off point and eliminate needless experimentation. And if you review all the models and come up with some new innovation, at least your innovation is coming from an informed point of view. So that’s why case studies are so very critical.

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Sales, Sales Leads

This is the first of a two posts that will examine whether teleprospecting is too complex for testing. I was compelled to develop this series after observing interaction on our LinkedIn B2B Lead Roundtable (which has rapidly grown past 8,000 members).

Members ask very interesting questions about teleprospecting that evoke thought-provoking responses. In fact, some questions will spark furious debate that might go on for weeks or even months:

• Should teleprospecting reps leave voice mails?
• How many dials should someone make per day?
• What is the right level of compensation for a rep?
• How much of that compensation should be variable?
• What are the pros and cons of pay for performance from outsourced teleprospecting vendors?
• Is it better to outsource teleprospecting or bring it in-house?
• Should teleprospecting be a sales or marketing function?

As you can see, the questions can range from tactical to highly strategic. If the question is a topic I don’t know anything about, I can find myself changing my mind as I read one good argument versus another, back and forth, like a tennis match.

Some questions are not at all new. Like the voicemail question, the outsourcing question, the pay-for-performance question, or the dials-per-day question. People have been having these debates long before LinkedIn existed.

Many times, the more sage members will answer with caveats. “It depends” is a phrase that gets used a lot. For example, the optimal amount of dials per day per rep will depend on the solution’s complexity, the size of the potential opportunity, the rep’s familiarity the accounts he is calling, and so on.

What is the best answer to a particular teleprospecting question?

Still, doesn’t it seem like there is probably an optimal answer for each situation for your business? Couldn’t we set up experiments to find out what works best, instead of just debating the question endlessly?

Also, since there are so many questions, what’s best to test first? For complex questions, how do you structure tests that yield valid answers? After all, for B2B lead generation, the quantities are often very small and the buying cycle is very long.

The complexity of teleprospecting compared with other marketing functions

With email you can create two different subject lines, randomly split your list, and figure out which subject line worked best. Email, landing pages and direct mail really lend themselves to this kind of experimentation. The universe is often large enough to yield statistically valid outcomes. Important questions can be isolated and measured.

Teleprospecting could undergo this kind of experimentation, right? But experiments that use the scientific process require isolating variables that you intend to test. Everything must be identical between the treatment and control except the question you’re trying to answer.

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, ROI Measurement

Over the last several years, according to MarketingSherpa, marketing departments are increasingly taking responsibility for tele-prospecting. Why do you suppose that is happening?

Let me be clear: teleprospecting is not selling something over the phone, a function that remains squarely in the sales organization. B2B companies use telesprospecting to follow up on and qualify marketing-generated responders, and identify and generate demand through outbound  calling.

While I explained in a recent MarketingSherpa blog post that teleprospecting should serve as a bridge between sales and marketing, one department has to own the function, and marketing seems to have momentum. For good reasons.

Before I break down why marketing should own this function, let me say that people I respect believe with all their hearts that teleprospecting belongs in sales.  This is their general rationale:

1. It’s a sales activity.
2. The best teleprospecting representatives should have career paths into sales and should have a sales aptitude. (Ex-road warriors are a hot commodity in the recruiting profile of many organizations.)
3. You need a sales culture in a teleprospecting operation – yes, all the braggadicio and rah-rah stuff that the black-turtleneck crowd arches an eyebrow at.
4. The teleprospecting representatives must have a sales-like compensation structure, based upon results.
5. The teleprospecting representatives should be aligned with sales.

While there is always a situation that would be an exception, I generally agree with all of their points.

But so what?

Are any of these reasons valid enough for sales to own teleprospecting?  Sure, there’s the “if it walks like a duck” argument. But lots of us have duck walks and we’re not, in fact, ducks.

Here are more compelling arguments – on behalf of marketing ownership – listed in increasing importance:

1. With the right teleprospecting approach, more inquiries will convert to sales-accepted leads. The teleprospecting team can set up a structured approach to nurturing accounts. They can provide follow-up and network to identify the appropriate buying influence, cross-polinate one interest to another, and execute numerous other tactics that result in a bigger revenue contribution from upstream marketing campaigns.  Obviously, marketing must find the right balance between wringing the last nickel of campaign revenue and obtaining a good return on investment. But with responsibility for the entire function, better yields are entirely possible. Can sales do the same thing? Yes. But marketing has the greatest vested interest in capitalizing on upstream investments.

2. Teleprospecting can improve upstream demand generation yields. Not only does teleprospecting convert leads, it can elicit precise feedback on each one so marketing can better tune media, messaging, and tactics to improve the upstream investment yields. Can sales do this? Yes. But again, marketing has a much greater vested interest in making sure upstream campaigns work well.

3. Teleprospecting overlaps with demand generation. Clearly, when teleprospecting representatives cold call, share a value proposition, and discuss how solutions solve problems, those representatives are generating demand. They are just doing so by phone instead of emails, landing pages, blogs, and other forms of contact. Marketing owns demand generation. Teleprospecting is one really important tool in the demand generation toolkit. You wouldn’t take paid search or email marketing from the toolkit, would you? Giving marketing demand generation more clearly divides sales and marketing responsibilities at each stage of the buying cycle. The bigger the company, the more important it is to delineate responsibility. This divisions by stage of the buying cycle will reduce duplication of effort.

4. Integrating teleprospecting into other forms of outbound marketing can improve its efficiency. Integrated marketing works for a reason. So does integrated lead nurturing. You need one group to design and orchestrate messaging, timing, frequency, and method of contact, and then set up experiments to optimize the contact, messaging and information-exchange strategy. This lead-optimization experimentation must become de rigueur for marketing. That will be challenging if you take the most important tool – teleprospecting – out of the marketing toolkit.

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads

Have you had some great marketing successes this year? Then you’ll want to let my colleagues at MarketingSherpa know. They’re compiling their ninth annual MarketingSherpa 2011 Wisdom Report. It shares the best thoughts, ideas, anecdotes and takeaways from marketers in 2010. 

In fact, even if you’ve had disappointments, and are willing to share, they’d like to hear from you as well. After all, failure is often the best teacher.

Tell us, what are some of the best lessons you learned this year?   

Great marketers are always working so diligently to put everything and everyone else in the spotlight. That effort deserves attention. That’s why I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to attain some very positive publicity. 

Share your wisdom here, but you’ve got to do it soon because the deadline’s December 21.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Cold Calling, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Referral Marketing, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Trigger Events, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth

Improving marketing performance is not just about implementing the right technology (i.e. marketing automation, lead scoring, nurturing etc.); it’s also about creating a strategic process to involve people in the process of lead nurturing and qualification.

You may have the best content in the world, but there are just some things that must be discovered through a human, two-way conversation. To put some perspective on how the human touch impacts marketing performance, I was interviewed by Christopher Doran VP, Marketing for Manticore Technology to focus on the importance of leveraging personalized outreach along with marketing automation to improve your success.

In the interview I answer the following questions from Chris:

• How can strategic phone outreach impact lead scoring?
• What do you think it’s critical for marketing to learn on the phone that they cannot learn through online behavior?
• What are the top 3 relationship-building impacts teleprospecting can help marketing achieve?
• Can you share an example of something learned in a call that enabled a company to improve their online marketing programs?
• What do you think is the biggest benefit for marketing from Marketing Automation systems?

I’d love your input… Where else do you see the human touch making a big impact marketing performance?

Read the interview: “How the Human Touch Impacts Marketing Performance”

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads

The single biggest issue for B2B marketers is effective lead generation. I wrote an eight part series on building an effective lead generation program a while back. To help readers who missed the series, I pulled all the posts together in order.

In this series, you’ll read the following posts:

1: The Right Mindset: Conversations, not campaigns
2: Sales and Marketing – One Team
3: Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile 
4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition
5: Treat your marketing database as a valued asset
6: A Multi-modal lead generation portfolio approach
7: Effective lead management
8: Lead nurturing for lead development

You may also find this ebook that connects with the series relevant.

Can you think of other critical success factors I’m missing?

B2B Telemarketing, Books, CRM, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech

It’s important to think of lead generation as a process, rather than an isolated event, or a series of campaigns. A process can be continually improved through ongoing testing and refinement and will generate higher quality results more cost effectively (i.e. reduce expense-to-revenue ratio) and improve overall ROI.

Think about your lead generation process as being controlled on a mixing board. Let’s start with 5 of the biggest dials on the board so that we can start to tune in and turn up our lead generation ROI:

Dial 1 – “Turn up” lead quantity. Increase your program response rates across multiple lead generation channels to drive more inquires. Get more of the right people in the right companies to respond across multiple tactics through testing.

Dial 2 – “Turn up” lead quality. Improve your lead qualification process to increase “sales ready” lead conversion rates. Delivering leads that your sales team really wants based on your universal lead definition.

Dial 3 – “Turn up” sales team pursuit and feedback. Create joint service level agreement between sales and marketing to reduce time-to-sales follow-up. Ensure that “sales ready” leads are being fully engaged by sales.

Dial 4 – “Turn up” the number of certified opportunities in pipeline. Focus on improving your lead management and lead nurturing process. Build your marketing pipeline to increase your sales pipeline.

Dial 5 – “Turn up” closed sales. Focus on developing pipeline acceleration programs to shorten your time-to-revenue. This requires marketing to go beyond demand generation to help sales reduce friction in order to close more sales.

The mixing board analogy seems even more appropriate as you think about continuous process improvement. As the process develops you will need to consistently make adjustments to the dials as you respond to feedback and spikes in the flow. This is not a “set it and forget it” endeavor.

I hope this gets you thinking about making beautiful music.

Related Posts:
Lead generation optimization: Finding the right amount of friction

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads