B2B Lead Blog

Regardless of whether you’re selling to people who are purchasing something for their workplace or themselves, you’re still selling to people – especially when it comes to digital marketing. Consider the words of Shawn Burns, Global Vice President of Digital Marketing, SAP:

“The B2B space has the same opportunities as the B2C space when it comes to digital marketing. We’re dealing with people, and all people behave the same. They use search, they use social and they visit websites when they’re considering a purchase. This means everything that works for consumer marketers online can also work to optimize business purchases.”

Burns will be presenting at the MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013, May 20-23, in Boston, which looks at the many ways organizations can leverage A/B testing to squeeze the highest amount of leads and revenue out of marketing efforts.

“Testing is about mindset,” Burns said. “A small marketing department can drive more business from the current Web traffic by looking at clickthrough reports, understanding the content that is getting traction and doing more of that.”

Furniture company website sparks idea, nets 400% increase in leads

It’s why Joy Gendusa, Founder and CEO, PostcardMania, a direct-mail company, builds her marketing around A/B testing. What she has learned in the process reflects Burns’ observation: B2C digital marketing techniques she and her team discovered during their off hours work very well in B2B.

For instance, one evening she was doing some online shopping. A Google search led Gendusa to a home-furnishing company’s Web page. A pop-up form appeared asking her to join their mailing list. It was her untypical response that gave Gendusa pause.

“I instantly felt comfortable and willing to give my contact information,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, I’m always getting asked to give my contact information. What made me respond so quickly now?’”

She determined it was the design of the pop-up form: It looked like it was drawn by hand.

It motivated her to test a standard pop-up form against one that looked hand-drawn on PostcardMania’s home page. Within two weeks, the team noted a 400% increase in people who filled it out. This didn’t surprise Gendusa, considering her initial reaction to the home furnishings company’s form.

“Whether you’re selling B2B or B2C, you’re still trying to change people’s minds, convince them to like your product more and move forward on the buying cycle,” Gendusa said. “It’s universal for all marketers and any product or service.”

Have you produced great results from testing a B2C marketing technique with your B2B marketplace? I’d love to hear about them. Feel free to share in the comments below.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit, May 20-23, Boston

Testing and Optimization: SAP’s Test Lab increases digital leads 27%, leads to 20% budget savings [Part I]

Testing and Optimization: SAP’s Test Lab increases digital leads 27%, leads to 20% budget savings [Part II]

B2B vs. B2C: What Does It Really Mean?

Call for Speakers: Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco – We’re looking for both B2B and B2C lead generation speakers

Lead Generation

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just collect hot leads by spending a few minutes a day on LinkedIn?

A member of our B2B Lead Generation Roundtable LinkedIn Group was likely dreaming about this when he asked the group for a way to generate leads through LinkedIn that “doesn’t require a lot of time, engagement and endless keyword searches.”

I posed this question to Ellie Mirman and Shreesha Ramdas. Mirman is head of SMB (small and medium-sized business) Marketing for HubSpot, and Ramdas is General Manager of LeadFormix, both are marketing organizations specializing in B2B lead generation.

Guess what? They said it is possible to generate hot leads in a few minutes a day.

But, here’s the rub: It’s going to take time, effort and content to reach that point.

(If you have heard the term “content” tossed around in marketing, but aren’t quite sure what it is, it’s just a fancy term for information. Content could be anything from a link to a newspaper article, to a blog post. Every time you see the word “content,” just think, “Oh, they mean information.”)

Here are their five essential tips to getting to the point where it’s easy to generate leads on LinkedIn.

1. Know and segment your audience.

Ramdas advised following groups, individuals and companies so information about them fills your LinkedIn stream. You’ll see what’s important to them through the information they’re posting, and the questions they’re asking. From that, you can determine what content they’ll value.

But, you only have so much time in the day, so he also advised being selective about the companies and people you follow, and the groups you join. To those ends, Ramdas suggested taking advantage of the advanced search option on the upper right corner of the LinkedIn page.

It enables you to search people by:

• Past and current employers
• Industry
• Location
• Title

For groups, he advised using the keyword function to:

• Search by industries in your marketplace, e.g., “semiconductors”
• Search for the roles that populate the influencers and decision-makers in your marketplace, e.g. “semiconductors, marketing”
• Selecting the groups where they are most active – some will be open and anyone can join, others will require approval for you to join.

“Those that require approval will have very relevant members,” Ramdas said.

2. Proceed with caution if you don’t want to be perceived as a spammer.

Once you have a list of names or are a member of a group, take it slow and move forward thoughtfully.

“Build up your credibility,” Ramdas advised.

3. Post content to groups and your own LinkedIn stream that matters to your marketplace.

To do so, Mirman offered these tips:

• Don’t sell. “The main rule of thumb is speaking to your target market’s problems or common challenges without selling your product,” she said, “and offer content that can help them – regardless of whether they buy from you – at least once or twice daily.”

• Keep it current. “Latch onto anything around recent news and current industry events,” she advised. “Find ways to marry current events to your industry.”

• Stay within the channel. “Stay specific to your social network, for instance, LinkedIn news does well on LinkedIn. Facebook news does well on Facebook,” Mirman said.

• Be proactive with blogging. She advised posting at least once weekly on real industry issues that point back to your solution.“Sales and Marketing should work closely together. The marketing team should be creating blogs and other content, and Sales can help ensure they are creating the right content by letting Marketing know what their prospects care about,” she explained.

4. Is time of the essence? Consider a paid program.

They’re often the fastest way to get your message in front of your prospects, Ramdas said.

“So, for example, if I am going to target a VP of marketing and irectors of marketing, I can run a LinkedIn banner ad promoting a white paper to all those members; it’s easier than joining groups and following discussions,” he explained.

But, those ads probably aren’t going to be as effective if there isn’t the groundwork of an existing relationship.

You can also pay for programs that can extract contact information from LinkedIn Groups so you can contact members directly.

“I wouldn’t advise doing this unless what you have to say is very relevant to the members,” Ramdas added. “Again, build up your credibility first.”

5. Message unto others …

Mirman believes there’s a golden rule to LinkedIn messages – contact others as you would like to be contacted.

“I get all of these LinkedIn messages from people I have no relationship with, maybe some sort of exchange at some point, but they have jumped way far ahead of the sales and marketing process by contacting me,” she explained. “They’re pitching me on an idea, solution or product that has nothing to do with my issues. It’s very irritating and I tune them out.’

The key, she said, is to share content your prospects will find interesting, share with their peers and motivate them to click through to your website and contact you.

“When you do that, you’re reaching more than just a few prospects, you’re reaching your prospects and their networks,” Mirman said. “The return on your time invested will increase exponentially and lead generation will become much easier – prospects will be seeking you out.”

Related Resources:

Social Media Marketing: 6 tips for running a valuable LinkedIn group that attracts prospects

How IntraLinks Used Social Media to Generate Twice as Many Sales-ready Leads as Any Other Channel

Lessons from a B2B Summit Coach: Five Steps to Cut through the Noise, Turn off the Hype and Create a B2B Social Media Program that Works

Social Media Pays Off Big for Over 1,000 Marketers Reporting 150% ROI or More

Is Social Media Really Living Up to Expectations?

Lead Generation

According to MarketingSherpa’s just-released 2013 Analytics Benchmark Report, only 37% of respondents said they routinely used analytics for their marketing planning. It’s no wonder the highest priority for 66% is to do a better job of acting on data to improve marketing performance.

They would be wise to follow the lead of Aimee Miller, Vice President of Marketing, AppFolio, a property management software company. She is able to:

• Track every penny of her marketing investment and its business impact
• Help her sales team identify the hottest prospects faster in the company’s database
• Help her marketing team do more in less time

“We are able to do 30% more marketing activities. When you increase your workload by 30%, that means not hiring more people, so the efficiency is a huge gain for us,” she explained.

She achieved this by maximizing all of the functionalities of her marketing automation program, and brought in a marketing automation consultant to help. Aimee had been an early adopter of marketing automation, and she witnessed its value in her previous position. However, she knew the system could do more than what she was using it for, especially with recent product upgrades.

The consultant helped by using marketing automation to enhance AppFolio’s lead-lifecycle performance reporting. AppFolio was collecting many names for its database, but the consultant wanted to make the following distinctions crystal clear:

• Which were qualified leads
• Which ones were accepted by Sales
• Which ones resulted in revenue

The steps AppFolio took to achieve its lead-management goals

1. The team collected 90 days of lead data to develop a baseline to understand where there was the most room for improvement. This included:

• The number of new leads created during that period
• The number that were qualified and added to the pipeline
• The number that closed

2. Marketing and Sales clarified their lead definition and what it looked like at each stage of the marketing/sales funnel. (Learn more about that in this article, “Why 75% of Marketers Are Experiencing Lead Generation Pain and How to Stop It Before It’s Too Late.”) This wasn’t too much of an issue for AppFolio, because its definition of a qualified lead was simply anyone who asked for a demo or trial of the software.

“Obviously, we get fewer leads, but they are higher quality because people are raising their hands for the solution,” Aimee explained. “But we also wanted to give visibility to those who weren’t raising their hands, but showing signs of interest.”

AppFolio achieved this by developing a lead scoring system that attached points to prospect behavior, such as:

• Clicking to the “Features and Benefits” page
• Registering for an educational meet-up (AppFolio hosts 17 every quarter)
• Downloading content
• Reviewing the pricing page

Once prospects reach a certain point threshold, the system alerts sales professionals to move forward.

3. They make it simple for Sales to participate in the process. All they need to do is update one or two fields in the automation system to report lead progress.

Aimee said whether a lead is rejected or advanced in the automation system should give marketers plenty of information on its quality.

“Sales shouldn’t have to check all these different boxes to rate and respond to a lead. Whether they accepted a lead or not should tell us whether the lead is moving forward,” she said. “Furthermore, Sales should be focused on closing business and generating revenues, not updating forms.”

Aimee said she is in good company when it comes to the challenges of understanding the marketing funnel, but points out data alone isn’t the answer.

“A lot of companies are investing in marketing automation to collect data, but if you’re not making sure you can look at the data and understand how what you’re seeing and how your marketing is performing in a concrete way, then it’s not a good use of time or energy,” she said.\

Sources:

LeadMD – AppFolio’s marketing automation consultant

Related Resources:

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

Sales and Marketing: The technology behind CRM

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

B2B Marketing: 7 tactics for implementing marketing automation from a fellow brand-side marketer

Lead Generation

TERRA Staffing Group has been serving the Seattle area for three decades. It built a strong reputation for excellent service and was extremely well networked in that community. However, when TERRA opened a new division in Portland, Ore., in 2012, it had to start fresh – the company had no reputation to fall back on.

Jenifer Lambert, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, TERRA, decided to use this opportunity to launch her sales efforts into the 21^st century. The company’s existing sales process was proving to be a dinosaur predicated heavily on “intentions, moods and temperament.” She couldn’t afford that in Portland, considering this was TERRA’s first expansion outside of Washington state.

“We had to produce a quick return on investment, and I needed a profitable, predictable sales engine,”
she explained.

Fortunately, Lambert already had an ace team of closers – recruiting and staffing professionals who worked directly with clients to deliver results.

“They outperformed direct sales because they simply had more credibility,” Lambert confessed. “They intuitively knew the questions to ask to provide solutions our prospects needed.”

What she didn’t have were the prospects for her team to talk to, and they had neither the time nor know-how to obtain them. Inspired by a MarketingSherpa article, she decided to outsource a lead generation company to generate leads they could close.

In 90 days through teleprospecting, TERRA Staffing had 242 qualified leads, 27 appointments, and closed three deals. This more than paid for its investment. Most importantly, the staffing company established a predictable sales engine through the following:

Measurement. The first priority was to establish a benchmark to measure the team’s progress. After analyzing the Portland marketplace, the team determined:

• The size of their target market
• How much of that market might be urgent buyers
• The response rate and deal size necessary for ROI

The team set out the exact metrics and determined the exact triggers to decide if the campaign would make sense. Thanks to this benchmarking, at any point in the program, they could determine whether they were on track or off.

Clarifying messaging. Teleprospectors followed a script that included how to respond to objections. They worked directly with TERRA’s staffing professionals to develop appropriate responses.

“This process has, frankly, helped us refine our own messaging,” Lambert said. “It has forced us to be much clearer.”

Determining cadence. After testing how many calls produced the best results, the outcome proved fewer calls to a broader audience was optimal. Most of the appointments came early in the prospecting process.

Optimization. The team used a software system that made the progress of the lead generation effort completely transparent. TERRA could look at data, note which messages were resonating most, and see precisely which leads were progressing and which weren’t.

“In the beginning, we noted we had an unusually high number of leads that were just not moving forward,” Lambert recalled. “By looking at the data … we discovered a commonality: The companies were all too small.”

TERRA adjusted its qualified leads to include only companies with a larger employee and revenue base, and noticed significantly more calls converting into appointments. It also helped the team work more efficiently – they stopped wasting time trying to win over prospects who weren’t in a position to buy.

“While sales used to be based on personality and persuasive abilities, today it’s much more of a science,” Lambert said. “At the end of the day, it’s about initiating a sufficient number of contacts with people who can buy from you. Having this partnership has made that very clear to me and, thanks to that, I’m going into 2013 with a much more predictable sales engine.”

Sources:

LeadJen – the outsourced lead generation company TERRA used

Jesubi – software system used by the team

Related Resources:

Intro to Lead Generation: How to determine if a lead is qualified

Thriving in the Pressure Cooker: 5 tips for optimize your time, knowledge for better lead gen

Ideal Customer Profiles: 5 steps to ensure your lead generation stays on target

Why 75% of Marketers Are Experiencing Lead Generation Pain and How to Stop It Before It’s Too Late

Lead Generation

How can a marketer, in one fell swoop …

• Capture the attention of millions of potential prospects?
• Meet with executives at a Fortune 500 company?
• Engage with existing customers?
• Create a centerpiece that enhances employee pride?

KeyedIn Solutions, a software technology and consulting company, has achieved it all with the sponsorship of up-and-coming golfing professional, Scott Piercy.  The company, not even a year and a half old, took a gamble on Piercy, as its leadership had previously witnessed success in sponsoring PGA Tour pros with another software organization.

It was a smart decision. Despite ranking below 170 on the World Golf Rankings at the start of 2012, Piercy now holds the 41st spot at the end of the season. For KeyedIn, this has paid off in many ways …

Brand exposure

Karen Adame, Chief Product Officer, KeyedIn, set up the sponsorship knowing it would draw attention. She notes that 45 million people a week watch the Golf Channel,  so every time Piercy achieves a prominent position on the leaderboard, KeyedIn does the same.

“Every great shot is replayed, and so is KeyedIn’s logo — it’s everywhere Piercy is,” Adame said.

It is no wonder KeyedIn typically receives one or two prospect inquiries after golf events.

“When Piercy has a good round, there are interviews and photographs that millions see,” Adame said. “And our logo, which includes our full name, appears on the screen every time.”

KeyedIn promotes wins in advertisements, on its website and in emails.

Prospecting with top executives

After winning the 2012 RBC Canadian Open, Piercy was eligible to participate in the Bridgestone Invitational. Adame was there and had an opportunity to join Piercy in networking with executive leadership.

“He has a lot of interaction with executives and knows our company and our solutions very well, so Piercy actually does some prospecting for us off the course,” Adame said.

Customer engagement

KeyedIn hosts golf events for its best customers to give them a chance to play and socialize with Piercy.

“Even though some may not be golfers, it can be cool for them to come out and rub shoulders with a celebrity,” Adame said. “Golfing is a social sport; you tend to see more business-to-business interaction within the golfing community, and you can enjoy the game no matter your skill level. It’s good for up-and-coming people and businesses, and gives them easier access to people they normally wouldn’t have an opportunity to meet.”

Employee engagement

Adame said sponsorship gives employees a common cause — someone to root for, a source of pride, and even a conversation starter.

“They could be on a plane sitting next to a golfer and say, ‘Hey, do you know we sponsor Scott Piercy?’ That can instantly spark interest and a conversation about KeyedIn,” she said.

If these benefits impress you enough to consider sponsoring an athlete, Adame outlines the four questions to ask yourself before doing so:

1. Do you want to invest in this person for the long haul?

If he is on his way up, a longer contract may pay off because if he continues to perform, you will see a bigger return on your investment.

“We had a good feeling about Scott, so we created a longer-term contract,”  Adame said.

She advised building in bonuses for performance as an incentive.

2. How many corporate events will they participate in?

Specify in the contract every event they must attend and their required duties. Set crystal-clear expectations.

3. What circumstances will affect the contract?

“We selected Piercy for his playing abilities and his reputation as a devoted father and husband,” Adame said. “For other organizations, this might not be important, but it ties in well with our values.”

“Of course, depending on the sport, you may want to consider what happens if the player gets injured or something negative happens that affects him.  As in all contracts, it’s important to plan for any potential issues in advance,” she added.

4. How well does the athlete match your brand identity?

One of the primary reasons KeyedIn decided to sponsor Piercy was because his success reflected the success of KeyedIn.

“Piercy is one of the rising stars on the PGA Tour, which is underscored by him advancing more than 130 places in the World Golf Rankings in 2012,” Adame said. “This perfectly illustrates the trajectory that KeyedIn is on in terms of our growth and our drive to help clients achieve.”

Related Resources:

Test Before Putting Pedal to the Metal on Sponsorships

Storytelling and Brand Resurrection in the Age of Social Media

Customer-centric Marketing: Tap into your culture to differentiate from the competition

Guided by Buyers: 4 tactics to create a customer-centric sales and marketing strategy

Lead Generation

Dear Daniel,

First of all, happy new year!

I thank you so much for your complete and interesting feedback. It has been very useful for me.

Just one thing: may you give me some objective parameters to define a lead as qualified? I found so many definitions, and I’d like to ask for your support to point my attention to the best definition you’ve in mind.

I thank you again for your kind cooperation and, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep you updated to this project we’re carrying on in these first months of 2013.

With my best regards

Felix Mathew, marketing director, Rome, Italy

Felix had earlier asked me some questions about cost per lead, which I won’t share here, since the information is private to his company. However, I thought it would be helpful to publicly answer his follow-up question, about lead qualification, on the B2B Lead Roundtable Blog. I thought it might assist many readers, especially those newer to the complex sales and marketing process (and thank you to Felix for allowing me to share this publicly).

Lead qualification is …

First, let’s start with a basic definition. Defining a lead as qualified basically means they are qualified to talk to a sales representative. Essentially, this is a prospect who has a high likelihood to buy and is ready for sales engagement. Simple enough, right?

Well, that’s where simplicity breaks down. There is no one single way to determine what makes a lead qualified or not. Just as, to wax philosophic for a second, there is no single definition of beauty or love or good art or what good music is (or else my daughter would listen to much more Pearl Jam).

The best place to start is with a universal lead definition. This involves a sales-marketing huddle since, much like good art, it is not only the artist but also the art viewer and buyer that must agree on a definition. To put it more bluntly – if Sales doesn’t think the lead is qualified, it ain’t qualified.

Some of that involves actually listening to Sales and understanding what works for them, and some of it involves a little soft marketing power to sell the sellers, if you will, on why you define a qualified lead a certain way.

Now that we’ve defined a qualified lead, let’s focus on the question itself … objective parameters. Here are a few parameters you might want to consider, from least to most complex. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather a starting point to help get your juices flowing in conversations with Sales.

Contact information

This is the weakest qualification criteria I can think of, and would not constitute a truly qualified lead for many organizations, except in the rare case when …

I worked with a tech company in a market niche that hadn’t yet had any real competition, yet was extremely fast growing. If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in a similar situation – a low competition, very high-growth market – it might not take much to qualify a lead. This is as close as you’ll ever get to “the product that sells itself.”

In this case, the biggest challenge is throughput, closing as many leads as possible before the competition enters the market (and, they will inevitably enter the market if things are really this good). The sales conversation tends to focus on areas such as contract terms or service availability, and Sales might simply want you to give them names and get out of the way.

Again, this is a very rare case, but if this is your situation, you might find by talking to Sales that all they want is contact information, and they can close the deal at that point.

Firmographics

This won’t be helpful to every sales department, but simple firmographics is also information that is on the easier end of the spectrum.

For example, if your organization is far and away the leading service provider in a certain geographic area, for a certain organization size, or in a certain industry, this might be enough information for Sales to consider the lead qualified.

However, if you are, say, the leading systems integrator for a certain technology in Jacksonville, you are only wasting Sales time by giving them a lead from Seattle. That would not be a qualified lead.

BANT

BANT stands for Budget Authority Need Timeline (or Timeframe). This is a lead qualification and scoring methodology originally developed by IBM, but now commonly used.

You can instantly see how this would be helpful for a sales force, and where it takes place in the sales-marketing continuum can vary by organization.

Based on your organizational needs, you might decide that one or all of these factors are necessary for a lead to be considered qualified.

Also, by understanding some of these aspects, even if you’re not identifying a qualified lead, you are identifying excellent candidates for a nurturing track that eventually results in qualified leads (for example, Timeframe or Authority).

Behavioral analytics and lead scoring

Lead scoring (most effective when combined with behavioral analytics) is a more thorough, and therefore more complex, way of determining a qualified lead.

Much like with a blind date, with lead scoring you are essentially giving points to different characteristics or actions that signal a (sales) engagement is a likely outcome of this relationship (she’s physically attractive, +2; she keeps talking favorably about that political candidate that I think wants to ruin our country, -114).

The benefit of including behavioral analytics is that you can use the prospect’s actions to help qualify them. For example, if they download a whitepaper on your company’s specific wireless display architecture, that might warrant more points than simply checking a box on a lead form indicating a general interest in display standards.

To help with your own lead scoring efforts, here is a look at the top factors your peers use in lead score calculations, from the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Handbook …

Q. What actions or traits are currently considered in your lead scoring calculation?

Predictive analytics

This is on the harder end of the lead qualification spectrum because it involves math. It is also a non-traditional way to qualify a lead (and is used more often for lead generation).

But if you have a big old messy database, terms like predictive analytics, partition analysis, and regression analysis might be good to discuss with your data analysts … and might help you find some hidden treasure.

At a very basic level, you want to ask your data analyst to look for any commonalities between those already in your database of leads and your current customers. What attributes of your current customers might you have perhaps overlooked in leads that have gone cold?

This whole process might help your entire lead qualification effort, as well, by uncovering attributes that neither Marketing nor Sales has identified as predictors of the likelihood that sales engagement will lead to a closed deal, information that you can then use in your lead scoring or other lead qualification efforts.

Hand raiser

This is, by far, the hardest way to qualify a lead. These are also, in my opinion, the most valuable qualified leads.

By “hand raiser,” I mean someone that is actively in search of sales engagement from your company and is volunteering information and urging you to get in contact with them.

From my experience, this usually only happens with a really good lead nurturing or inbound marketing program.

Related Resources:

Why the Term “Marketing-Qualified Lead” Creates Serious Confusion – Part I

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

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

Optimizing the Lead: 4-step lead generation analysis

Lead Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Resources:

Email Summit 2013 – February 19-22, Las Vegas

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

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

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

Lead Generation

In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, we asked 1,915 marketers about traffic volume and traffic that converts. Here’s what the data revealed …

Q: Which of the following sources generates the GREATEST VOLUME of traffic coming to your site?
Q: Which of the following sources generates traffic with the greatest CONVERSION RATES on your site?

Click to enlarge

In the chart above, the darker bar on the left shows response to the “greatest volume” survey question, while the lighter bar on the right shows response to the “conversion rate” question. Let’s look at what your peers thought of this data …

Start with SEO and Email Marketing

“We have over 1,500 clients, and they concur with your research findings … a lot of people in the market over the last two years have been asking me about what they should be doing on social media,” said Tracey Voyce, Director, Bloomtools. “Now it has its place, but, everyone, please don’t invest, as a company, too much time and money in these areas until you have mastered SEO and email marketing, as they keep on delivering time after time.”

“It’s an interesting study, but worth remembering, and I am in complete agreement with Tracy that getting the basics sorted first is a must,” said Daniel Lack, Email Marketing Specialist, Intelligent Visual Communications. “Yes, SEO brings in more traffic, but in terms of cost against conversions, direct marketing has to be the starting point, with email campaigns consistently providing the best ROI – less traffic but similar conversions, and at a much lower cost.”

“Obviously SEO and social have their place and are effective marketing tools, but it’s about finding mediums that work for you rather than finding a way your business can use a medium,” Daniel said. “Just because it’s available doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for your company or worth a huge investment in not just money, but time as well.”

Industry breakdown

“Great data. Thanks for sharing this,” said Fern Yit Lim, Online Sales Manager, Lufthansa. Based in Singapore, Fern was interested in industry and country breakdowns.

“Just curious in which industry and country was the data collected? Because the traffic and conversion rate from social channels really surprised me. In our developing markets, paid search still has the highest conversion rate, and in developed markets, it will be email for sure.”

This survey was fielded internationally. Here is a breakdown of respondents by industry …

Q. Which best describes the type of organization you work for?

Click to enlarge

Reality-based metrics

And, I’ll give the final word to Debra Kline, President, Business Wise: “Thanks to MarketingSherpa for reality-based metrics rather than hype. The hype often turns us away from what ‘works’ to what’s new or what’s cool. Here’s three cheers for reality!”

If you’d like to be featured in a future blog post, simply sign up for the free MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week newsletter and share your actionable advice on a future marketing industry chart.

Related Resources:

Webinar Replay: How to Integrate Social Media/SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

B2B Social Media Marketing: Focus on leads, not likes

Marketing Research Chart: Most effective traffic sources for website conversion

6 Tactics for Increasing Site Traffic and Improving Content

Lead Generation

When you think of the word optimization, you might think of writing keyword-stuffed blog posts for search engine optimization or running split tests for landing page optimization. But, in reality, any marketing process can be optimized. Including lead generation.

On a webinar today for ReadyTalk at 1 p.m. EST – “Planning for 2013: How to best utilize top lead gen tactics in the New Year” – David Kirkpatrick, Senior Reporter, MECLABS, and I will review the basics of the lead generation funnel. We’ll provide a few back-to-the-basics tactics that you can consider as you work on planning your campaigns and budgets for 2013.

Among other things, we’ll take a basic look at conducting a lead generation analysis, to help you optimize your lead generation process, campaigns and programs. It’s really quite simple, but it requires taking the time during an already hectic Q4 close to evaluate what really works while building a deeper rapport with an equally (if not more) busy team of quota-carrying sales reps.

Step #1: Review closed deals

The best way to determine what will work is to look at what has worked. Begin with an analysis of the deals that have closed.

How did these closed deals enter the system?

Here are a few pieces of data you want to record during this review for each channel and specific campaign (and you likely want to add a few attributes that are unique to your company, as well):

• Number of deals won
• Total revenue
• Average deal size
• Buyer persona traits

Step #2: Review new leads

Now that you know what works, take a look at what you currently have. Break down your pipeline by marketing tactic used, and determine:

• Total lead volume – How many leads does each tactic generate?

• Qualified lead volume – How many of these are qualified leads as defined by your universal lead definition?

• Percentage of qualified leads per marketing channel – Determined using the above numbers

• Cost per lead – How much did these leads cost?

• Buyer persona(s) targeted – Which ponds are you fishing in, and whom are you trying to catch?

Step #3: Ask Sales

Check in with Sales to gather feedback on the performance of lead generation campaigns. You want to back up your data with real human experiences. What type of leads works best for Sales in their opinion?

This human interaction might help you uncover that although a certain tactic generates leads that close, they require many more resources from Sales to close the deal, while other leads are much easier to close. (For example, leads from a lead generation vendor may take a lot more work from Sales than leads that came in from a detailed content marketing program that provided all of the necessary info, and they’re much closer to having a discussion about contracts with Sales instead of simply requesting a RFP.)

Step #4: Identify opportunities

Use this complimentary data to identify the most effective channels and campaigns.

Consider what KPIs to optimize for, which may include lead volume, qualified lead volume, percentage of qualified leads per channel, and percentage of closed leads per channel.

Now that you know what has closed and what types of new leads you’re generating, where are there overlaps? Where do you fall short? For example, if you’re investing a lot in a tactic that generates many leads but they never close, you may want to shift some of that money to a tactic that generates a lower volume of leads that are more likely to close.

Not only will this help you optimize your marketing investments and lead generation capabilities, it can help optimize your relationship with Sales. When you have specific reasons to back up why you’re investing budgets in a certain way (which they may or may not agree with), they are more likely to support your decisions.

If nothing else, the human interactions of a Sales-Marketing huddle shows that you’re actively seeking input from Sales to help serve them better, and not allocating your budget and resources in a vacuum.

Related Resources:

Ideal Customer Profiles: 5 steps to ensure your lead generation stays on target

Lead Generation: 5 steps for managing cost and quality of leads (via MarketingSherpa blog)

B2B Lead Optimization: Why cheap leads can be so expensive (via MarketingExperiments blog)

Lead Generation

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

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

“Uh, who?” they queried.

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the steps to developing an ICP:

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

   Common trigger events include changes in:

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

Data analysis = Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Resources:

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

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

Lead Generation: 4 critical success factors to designing a pilot

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

Lead Generation