B2B Lead Blog

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

For the past seven years, trade shows have surpassed websites, email marketing and paid search to secure the top spot as B2B marketers’ biggest investment, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

But, do marketers make the most of this investment? I can’t help but wonder given my own trade show attendance experience.

For weeks after, I unsubscribe from newsletters and sales pitches from companies I barely recognize.

Here’s what I suspect happens:

• They sponsor the event and set up a booth.
• They put together a list of attendees’ contact info based on collected business cards, contest entries and captures from the dreaded lead guns, which instantly gather contact information by scanning trade show badges.
• They dump this list into their database.
• Attendees automatically receive whatever they’re already sending to their email lists.

Trade Show ≠ Instant Engagement

Just because someone attends a trade show does not mean that every organization in attendance is relevant to her, or that she is eager to receive newsletters, the latest product updates or a sales call. Too many companies wrongly assume trade show attendance equals instant engagement.

If you don’t want to be banished to the spam file or voicemail, take the succeeding steps when following up with trade show prospects:

1. Invite or welcome them to your email list. Explain how you attained their names, make it personal and connect back to their motivation. Example: “I hope you enjoyed the conference as much as I did. We really believe in (core event values).”

   If they chatted with a sales professional, reference that conversation. Do what you can to show what you have in common (primarily, the event) and why they should engage with your company.

2. Create event-related content. Again, the event is what connects you. Write articles and blogs about it. Interview the event’s subject matter experts. Bring along a reporter. Demonstrate your value to attendees by providing a fresh perspective and helping them assimilate even more knowledge. After all, that’s why they attend conferences and trade shows. Use this content as part of a nurturing campaign, as outlined below.
3. Don’t sell, nurture. Only 5% to 15% of inquiries are ready to speak to Sales, so the rest require nurturing until they fit your universal lead definition (ULD).  (Don’t have one? Make one. Find out how here: “Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop.”)

   Develop a lead-nurturing campaign to guide prospects through the marketing funnel until they’re ready to speak to Sales. Find out how to do that here: “Lead Nurturing: You could be losing as much as 80% of your sales; here’s how you keep them.”

4. Encourage your salespeople to make personal connections. Make sure your sales professionals individually follow up with the people they spoke with, whether that’s through sending email, connecting on LinkedIn, or following them on Twitter. People build relationships with people, not companies.
5. Keep them engaged, even if they’re never going to be a customer. Don’t discard attendees who are not a fit; they could become a champion of your brand, or possibly a partner or collaborator. Engage them by developing a nurturing campaign that will keep them abreast of what’s happening in your organization. Invite them to subscribe to an online newsletter, attend online events, or connect via social media.

Want to learn more about how to make the most of your trade show investment? Check out this article: “9 Simple Tactics to Drive a Higher Return on Trade Show Investment.”

Do you have additional recommendations to optimize trade show follow-up? Feel free to share them in the comments. I would love to hear your ideas.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 – February 19-22 in Las Vegas

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

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

In his most recent post, Dave Green pointed out how marketers invest most of their budget on trade shows even though it ranks fourth in effectiveness. He went on to explain how to get a better return on your trade-show investment through lead scoring.

Now I’m going to share nine tactics that will drive those lead scores – and your ROI – even higher:

Do thorough research. Find out which attendees fit your Universal Lead Definition. If you have access to the registration list, analyze it. Look up registrants on LinkedIn. Develop a list of targets you want to seek out during the event. Research the sponsors, too. They should all be on the event website. There may be ways to join forces with them to reach your audience.

Leverage social media before, during and after the event. Connect with attendees and build your profile before the event through your blog and updates on Twitter and LinkedIn. Tweet relevant content during the event. Invite customer feedback afterward. There’s so much more than can be addressed in this post, so I advise looking online for more great ideas.

Creatively partner with event organizers. If you’re holding an educational or social event, brainstorm with them to see how they can help you attract more and better attendees. This could be everything from sending pre-event emails to including information in registration packages. Negotiate support before signing contracts to minimize costs and maximize opportunity.

Get involved with the event. Don’t just be a statue at a booth. Try to attend a few sessions, switch off with your team members to sit with attendees at lunch and engage on a personal level. It will help you build relationships and you will be able to strike up more relevant conversations if you just sat through the same keynote. Best of all, the conference will be more fun and you’ll learn a lot more.

Provide value, not trinkets. People attend events to gain knowledge and share it with their teams. Time is always tight as they try to take care of work back at the office while absorbing as much information as they can. That’s why you must always think about what’s in it for them to engage with your brand. Provide what they really can use: resources to drive their business to the next level – whether that’s a strategic piece of content, a tool or an opportunity to network with their peers.

Focus only on those who have expressed genuine interest. Trade shows often reward people if they visit as many booths as possible. At too many events, I’ve witnessed sales professionals requiring attendees to sit through a 10-minute presentation to “prove” they’ve visited the booth, when the attendees clearly don’t care about their product.

Are they interested? Take note. At minimum, jot your name and notes about their issues on their business card, and assign one person to collect and enter information into your database for follow up. Include the solution they’re interested in, the issue they’re trying to resolve, other contacts they’ve had with your organization, and any qualitative intel that will help the person following up – such as “launching a new website in Q2” or “unhappy with solution X.”

Promptly and professionally follow up. Before the event even begins, be ready to follow up. Prepare a brief, customizable email template to send out immediately afterward. It can come directly from the sales professional who spoke with the prospect, or it could reference the conversation and any key information you were able to capture. If the prospect doesn’t respond, follow up with a thoughtfully scripted phone call where you position yourself as a resource they can turn to when they are ready to talk. Don’t stalk and don’t be pushy, but do be responsive and close the loop. And be absolutely sure that only one person is doing the follow up. (This is why it’s critical to work from a single database.)

Track and measure the results. After the follow-up emails have been sent and calls have been made, note how many are still in your marketing and sales funnels, and how many deals closed. Monitor this throughout the year to determine whether the trade show is worth investing in the next time.

Do you have additional ideas on how to make the most of your tradeshow investments? I’d love to hear about them. Share them in the comments below.

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, ROI Measurement, Sales Leads, Social Media

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

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

Lead generation remains the top reason most companies exhibit at events and tradeshows. And B2B marketers are constantly looking for ideas they can use to drive more ROI from their events budget.

I came across this helpful post by Mike Thimmesch on 100 Trade Show Lead Generation Ideas that’s worth checking out. The following is a sampling of Thimmesch’s tips that I though were useful:

4. Go to fewer trade shows, but put more effort into booth staff preparation and promotions for each remaining show.
6. Track leads to determine and expand in the shows with the best ROI
9. Get a booth space closer to the hub of traffic, or by a bigger competitor
28. Have your sales people invite their prospects to visit your booth and set up meetings in advance
29. Send an email invitation to the show’s pre-registered attendee list for this year, and the registered attendee list from last year
30. Use social media to reach more attendees
32. Post your trade show schedule on your website with a link to sign up for appointments
45. Giveaway something useful to your target audience
46. Have a contest for attendees in your booth

After reading the list of 100, here’s a few more tips I would add:

1. Follow-up quickly after the event. Think about your follow-up process before the event happens not afterwards.
2. Create event follow-up content pieces, talking points and email templates for your sales team to use to add value and continue the conversation in a relevant way rather than “pitching” everybody.
3. Develop a nurturing track that for event attendees connects with the theme or the content of the event. Try to do this at least for a few months at minimum.
4. See the event as a conversation (or conversation starter) not a acampaign. Don’t stop the dialog. Brainstorm ways you can keep the dialog going.

What other tips would you add to this list?

Related posts:
Lead Generation tips for Tradeshows Conferences

Direct Marketing, Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, 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 that time of the year again – MarketingSherpa is sending out a call for speakers for their 7th annual B2B Marketing Summit, which will take place in October in both Boston and San Francisco.

This year’s Summit is focused on providing you with the interactive training, practical tools and proven techniques you need to generate more highly-qualified leads to improve your companies’ results, from the top of the funnel to your bottom line.  

If you have a great B2B marketing success story to tell, or have learned valuable lessons you want to share with your fellow marketers, MarketingSherpa wants to hear from you.The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, May 12 and they’re interested in sessions that will help marketers improve:

• Lead generation
• Lead nurturing
• Lead scoring
• International demand generation
• B-to-B email
• Paid search advertising and SEO
• Content development
• Social media marketing

Share the details of your proposed session

If you’re not interested in speaking but rather attending the summit, don’t miss out on the Early Bird sale. If you reserve your ticket before May 14, you’ll save $700. The dates of the summit are:

• San Francisco, CA – October 4-5
• Boston, MA – October 25-26

Submit your speaking proposal

Register to attend the summit

Event Marketing, Thought Leadership

As I’ve written before, when dealing with the complex sale, most people aren’t coming to your website to buy; they’re coming to your site for information. And people are hesitant about giving up too much info on forms before you’ve earned their trust.

Have you thought about your web forms? How much information are you asking for before you’ve earned their trust?

I’ve invited Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director of MECLABS Group (parent company of MarketingExperiments, InTouch and MarketingSherpa), to show us how to optimize our web forms to increase conversion of that traffic. 

During this complimentary webinar, Dr. McGlaughlin will be performing live optimizations and providing specific advice on improving your online lead generation efforts. You can check out this short video of Dr. McGlaughlin speaking on optimizing email responses.

Watch Online Lead Generation Webinar: How to optimize forms to convert “window shoppers” into leads

View recorded webinar on demand (no registration required)

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Sales Leads, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars