B2B Lead Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Marketing Strategy

I always look forward to the announcement of the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award winners; they’re a great source of inspiration. In fact, just couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the B2B Best in Show Winner’s unexpected email approach grew its subscriber base by millions.

But honestly, I think B2B marketers might be more disillusioned with the power of email, if the feedback from 1,745 marketing organizations in the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report is any indication.  Email marketing remains one of the top three lead-generation tactics, just below websites and SEO.  Yet they claim its effectiveness dropped from 40 to 26 percent from 2010 to 2011.

Maybe this year’s Email Marketing Awards can point to one of the reasons why this is happening. If you look at the list of winners, you will note no one won the top award for innovation.

I asked Adam Sutton about it. He’s a senior reporter for MarketingSherpa. He edits and writes for their email and inbound marketing newsletters, has easily interviewed hundreds of marketers about their email marketing initiatives, and he’s one of the event judges.

“We don’t give out an award unless a company deserves it and an entry really ‘wows’ us,” he confesses.

But he also concedes that impressing the judges is getting tougher every year. “Email is a mature tactic as far as digital marketing goes; the low-hanging fruit is gone and you have to be more creative to reach the fruit that’s higher on the tree,” explains Adam. “But there’s still plenty there – especially when it comes to reaching people through newer technologies like smart phones and tablets. Of course, you want to make sure it’s worth targeting that segment of the marketplace, and you want to make sure you can measure the results. But I think there’s opportunity that companies aren’t taking advantage of.”

But what if your audiences aren’t avid users of iPads or smart phones?  

“I think it’s a running joke here at MarketingSherpa: I’m sold on triggered emails, like confirmation emails and thank you emails,” says Adam. “Triggered emails are marketing for you all of the time. When you’re on vacation, when you’re sleeping, when you’re working on another project, they’re still out there driving business without you having to add any resources.

“I would look for every opportunity to create a triggered-email campaign. Frankly, I’m surprised that I’m not seeing more of these.”

While it may be more challenging to innovate within the larger email industry, Adam thinks the B2B space is wide open if you’re willing to learn from your B2C counterparts.

“Analyze how B2C marketers nurture leads with triggered email, follow-up email, or cross-selling opportunities. Think about how to use those ideas to reach your audience,” he advises. “I’ve learned in my years of writing newsletters that there are very few case studies that aren’t universally applicable. If you think your email efforts are stale, we have hundreds of case studies to give you some fresh ideas.”

Adam points out a number of case study resources:

• Download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report.  
• Subscribe to MarketingSherpa’s free inbound and email-marketing newsletters.
• Have a fresh email campaign that you think is worthy of a case study? Email him at adam.sutton@meclabs.com.

“Tell us what you’re doing, and think about entering the Awards next year,” advises Adam. “Whatever you do, I encourage you to set aside time to contemplate your email program. If it’s not something you’re impressed with, if you consider it more of an expense and a hassle than a performance-driver, strategize a fresh approach and consider getting professional support.”

Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership

How many emails have you sent prospects and customers this week? How many opened them? How many acted on them?

If you’re like most marketers, the answer too often is, “Not enough.”

It’s a hard fact: people are being inundated with so many sales pitches via email that it’s harder than ever to get prospects to not delete your email, no less take action. It’s no wonder that when marketers are obsessively focused on what’s in it for their prospects to open an email, remarkable things happen – like several million new subscribers.

That’s precisely what Citrix attained through a campaign to grow their subscriber base. Typically, when organizations want to grow their email lists, they do things like coming up with a gimmick, giveaway or contest to convince people to sign up. Instead, Citrix decided to leverage their lists to attain new subscribers. They emailed content their existing subscribers valued so much that they eagerly shared it with their colleagues and Citrix made it easy for them to do so. The subscribers’ colleagues appreciated the emails so much that they decided to subscribe too.

The result: an overall email list increase of several million contacts (35%), “which has greatly increased our media spend efficiency. We are generating demand without having to directly pay for the usual media channels like banner ads, Adwords, etc.” explains Baxter Denney, Manager, Database Marketing at CitrixOnline.

It also resulted in receiving the 2012 Email Marketing Awards’ B2B Best in Show. To read the details of how the Citrix email campaign conclusively proved the value of sharing vs. selling download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report. It features more than 100 pages of the industry’s smartest, most-effective innovations, as well as campaign descriptions, sample emails, extensive results metrics and judges’ analyses.

And if you want to learn even more about the most innovative and effective ways marketers are using email to drive more opportunity and revenue, consider attending the next Email Marketing Summit, Feb. 7 – 10, at Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. To review an agenda go here: 2012 Email Marketing Summit. Receive an extra $500 off registration by entering promotion code 192-ST-1004.

Email Marketing, Social Media

Last week, I attended the first-ever MarketingSherpa/MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit in Atlanta. It was an
evidence-based marketer’s dream, three days chock full of real-world case studies and analyses that drilled down to the intricacies of what makes some online marketing campaigns convert better than others.

What surprised me, however, was how little this has to do with website or landing page design and how much it has to do with a prospect’s mindset. These marketers definitely weren’t learning where to place button “A” to get the most conversions, in fact, they learned that no matter how successful a landing page, chances are, copying the treatment simply won’t yield the same results.

That’s because no matter how brilliant the landing page, you’re not going to be having the same conversation with your customers as the brilliant designer is having with theirs. Which brings me back to the points of this article, “Integrate Online and Offline Marketing Efforts to Continue the Conversation.” Even though we use different mediums, lead generation is all about having a conversation that engages our customers and guides them along the buying cycle.

And these days, that buying cycle typically brings them to a landing page that will further speak to them in a way that will ultimately drive them closer to a sale. That’s definitely not about where to place a button; it’s about thoroughly understanding what motivates the customer to “click here.”

As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS, put it: “You don’t optimize landing pages, you optimize thought processes.”

Online marketing optimization leverages testing to make sure you’re speaking as clearly as possible and really getting through to prospects. As Adam Lapp, Associate Director, Optimization and Strategy for MECLABS Conversion Group, explains in this post, “Landing Page Optimization: Is it actually possible to optimize a landing page?,” that’s a never-ending journey.

While it certainly would be simpler to copy what someone else is doing successfully and apply their ideas wholesale to your online marketing campaigns, you must understand where your own customers are coming from and what’s driving them forward.

If you’re interested in more takeaways from the summit, I encourage you to check out these links:

Optimization Summit Wrap-up: 6 takeaways to improve your tests and results

Test with Poor Results Can Improve Marketing

Why Landing Page Optimization is So Important

Live from the Optimization Summit: Landing Page Optimization with Boris Grinkot

Live Experiment (Part 1): How many marketers does it take to optimize a web page?

Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Web/Tech

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

Last Thursday, I spent a solid half hour explaining the intricacies of how we helped one organization execute a lead-nurturing campaign that generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in eight months. Look for the replay of this MarketingExperiments webclinic later this week.

I delved into setting up lead-nurturing tracks, documenting the lead-nurturing process, measuring lead-to-opportunity conversion rates and the like. (Want clarity on what lead nurturing is?  Watch this two-minute video: http://bit.ly/fvJVL6)

At the webclinic’s conclusion I was asked, “What’s the quickest, cheapest way to implement lead nurturing?”

I get that question all too often.  So I thought I’d use this platform to share my barest-bones lead-nurturing strategy. I’ll do my best to resist the urge to elaborate. Volumes could be written about each bullet point. In fact, they have been.

1. Set up your nurturing database. Include all of the people you could potentially sell to: people you’ve met at trade shows, who have spoken with your sales team, who have responded to your website, etc.
2. Review your database. What do you know about the people in it? What industry are they in? What are their titles? Where did you get their names?
3. Decide what information would be most relevant to them. Begin by asking your sales team, “What questions do your customers ask most often? What do they care about? What issues are they facing?” Find content – articles, blogs, whitepapers, and the like – that addresses these issues. Pass this content by your sales team. Ask them whether their customers would value it.  As much as you can, repurpose content. For instance, whitepapers can be transformed to articles and articles to blogs.
4. Email prospects this relevant content, but whatever you do, don’t pitch. These should be simple emails that are written as if you are speaking to them directly.  Be genuinely helpful. Provide your sales team email templates so that they can follow up and engage in their own conversations.
5. Follow up with a human touch. Make a personal connection and follow up emails with phone calls to directly gauge prospects’ interest. Never rely on email alone.

Lead nurturing can be executed without expensive marketing automation tools; there are plenty of simple, low-cost platforms to start off with. You can create databases in Excel and run mail merges from Microsoft Outlook.

I hope this quick-and-dirty rundown of lead-nurturing execution is helpful. If you want more details, look for the webclinic posting later this week. Check out my  free eBook, too.

Related article: Lead Nurturing is Walking the Buying Path with Your Customers

Finally, let me know if you want me to simplify this explanation even further.  After all, Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Email Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, 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

In just a couple of days, I’ll be in Barcelona speaking at the Cisco Partner Velocity Conference. 

To say I’m looking forward to this opportunity is an understatement. I’m honored to be asked to share my insights with their channel partners from around the world. And I can’t wait to hear firsthand the challenges and opportunities these marketers are dealing with.

The timing of this event couldn’t be better. Marketing is undergoing a remarkable evolution at this moment. The multitude of mediums we can use to speak to our marketplace is revolutionizing how we work. I believe the days of campaigns – where we start-stop-measure-tweak and start all over again – are over. Today, for marketing to effectively drive revenue, it must be a continuous, meaningful conversation. 

The most successful marketers will know how to lead that conversation both internally and externally so they can communicate to their customer the right things in the right way at the right time. Here’s a snapshot of what I mean and some of what I plan on sharing in Barcelona: 

You speak through channels: make sure what you’re saying makes sense 

If you’re going to say something to customers, make it meaningful to them. Here’s the acid test: anything you tweet, email, or blog should be valuable to them even if they never buy from you. And if you lure them in with that tweet, email or post, make sure that conversation stays on track throughout the sales process. Consider an experiment that the MECLABS Conversion Group conducted with NetSuite: 

• They optimized a pay-per-click (PPC) ad to specifically outline what makes them stand apart: the world’s #1 on-demand software with 6,459 customers worldwide.
• They changed the landing page that customers were directed to from the PPC ad. The page’s messaging and images continued the conversation by directly connecting to key messages on the PPC ad. There was no question that customers knew they were in the right place doing the right thing.
• They changed the order form, a place where many clients experience anxiety about whether they should proceed, to reiterate what motivated them to start the transaction in the first place. 
• The result: a 272% increase in responses to their lead generation form, 268% more projected revenue and a 302% increase in monthly profit.  

You use channels – in this case, the PPC to landing page to order form – to converse with the customer. Make sure the entire channel is optimized, not just an ad, not just a web page.  When you conduct marketing in a vacuum, you start a different conversation in a different way over and over again with the same audience.  If someone did that to you in real-life, real-time, you’d get annoyed and walk away. 

Pinpoint the best time to bring sales into the conversation

Read more…

Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech

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

The January sales push well on it’s way and most B2B marketers I know are looking more ways to generate leads faster. But here’s a question to ponder…

Do you have a process have a process for handing leads (from sales) back to marketing when they are not sales ready? If not, I recommend you consider at re-engaging the leads you already have in your database and pay special attention to the leads your sales team didn’t convert last year.

I’d like to share what we learned from a lead re-engagement test we just completed for a large communications company. We tested a lead nurturing program to re-engage the following types of “old” leads:

1. Leads that were “open” but not touched by a sales person in 90+ days
2. Leads worked by sales but marked as “closed – lost” meaning they didn’t buy

We started with a simple multi-touch lead nurturing program that included: a 3 touch email track, the emails connected to educational articles, and our teleprospecting team made follow-up calls (based on email engagement replies, clicks and opens).

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Email Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Sales Leads