B2B Lead Blog

Since 2007, InsideSales.com has been partnering with leading academic institutions to analyze data gathered from two billion communications with 80 million customer profiles. During Tuesday’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinar, Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, shared the juiciest statistics and trends from these analyses to help B2B marketers optimize inbound lead contact, qualification and close rates. Here’s a taste of what he presented:

• 78 percent of sales goes to the company that responds first
• An average of 43 percent of companies never respond to inbound leads
• Most sales professionals give up trying to reach a lead after an average of 1.29 attempts, but 61 percent of leads go into the pipeline after the second call.
• If you set an appointment, expect a 20 to 45 percent no-show rate. Decrease no-shows by 20 percent by using Google or Outlook calendar invitations.

Not a minute passes in this webinar without Dave presenting some type of data you can use to speed leads into your sales pipeline. If you’re serious about driving the highest ROI from your inbound marketing investment, be sure to watch the video replay below.

View and download slides via SlideShare.

Want to jump ahead to key points fast? Review these timestamps.

2:20 – Dave outlines the history of InsideSales and why organizations like MIT, Harvard and Stanford are eager to partner with them.

7:00 – There is a revolution in sales, says Dave. In 2009, there were 800,000 inside sales departments. In 2013, there will be 2.3 million. Meanwhile, outside sales will have flat growth. Venture capital firms want companies in their portfolios to have inside sales departments, so much so that they’ll recruit, train and transplant inside sales teams into their portfolio companies.

9:33 – When does a web lead cold go? Immediately! Contact rates decrease 100 times if you wait 30 minutes, as opposed to five minutes, to call back. If you think your company is good at responding, think again, says Dave. InsideSales.com has conducted more than 5,000 audits for leading companies, and the average response time is 44 hours! An average of 43 percent didn’t respond at all.

13:15 – 78 percent of sales goes to the company that responds first – not to the company with the best or cheapest product.

14:00 – Sales professionals will attempt an average of 1.29 calls to reach a lead and give up after that. However, in the B2B environment, 30 percent of leads go into the pipeline after the first dial attempt, 61 percent go into it at the second. It’s worth calling back until the eighth attempt. Some companies see leads move into the pipeline even after the 12^th call.

16:18 – Higher-ticket items require more research before calling the customer. The more you research, the less you will have to dial.

19:00 – Efficient sales reps tend to leave more voicemails because they’re making more calls. That means they can spend more than two and a half hours a day leaving voicemail. However, about four percent of those voicemails result in a call back which goes directly into the pipeline. Script voicemails to ensure more call backs, and even automate them.

22:11 – Make the most of every call by capturing permission to communicate with them in the future. A single rep can capture 7,500 permissions in the course of a year, “That’s enough contacts to fill a webinar without making another phone call,” Dave points out.

26:23 – No-show rates to appointments can be as high as 50 percent. Prevent that with a “hot transfer” – ask if they would have 10 to 15 minutes to talk immediately.

27:42 – Build a direct dial database. Contact rates increase by 300 percent when using direct dial.

29:21 – If you can’t do a hot transfer, do appointment reminders via Google or Microsoft Outlook, there will be a 20 percent greater chance that they won’t cancel.

30:32 – If you call between 8 and 9 a.m. and 4 and 5 p.m., you’re 150 percent more likely to connect. If you call on Wednesday and Thursday, you’re 80 percent more likely. Always call before emailing. And don’t limit communication to email – leverage Twitter, LinkedIn and fax. Dave reports fax pulls seven times better than email.

33:53 – Show a local presence. When callers used a local number, there was at least a 60 percent increase in contact rates. Emails sent with a local number received a 40 percent higher response and 33 percent lower negative response rate.

39:08 – Review of key takeaways

41:08 – Q&A begins

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Webinar Replay

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, almost 70 percent of B2B organizations increased their inbound marketing budgets this year. This includes website design, management, and optimization, as well as inbound-marketing tactics including social media, virtual events and webinars, SEO and pay-per-click.

If you’re making the same investment, you will definitely want to attend our next B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar on July 19, Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions. David Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, will share how his company has joined forces with these academic leaders to study how companies are managing the leads they’re generating through inbound marketing efforts.

The results are going to surprise and may even alarm you.

Consider this: merely responding to the leads you receive will put you ahead of 40 percent of B2B organizations! Companies are spending more money than ever to drive leads through their websites and the Internet, and yet, nearly half don’t follow up! That means there’s outstanding opportunity for those who do. David will give you practical, easy-to-implement ideas, underscored by case studies, to make sure you hold onto leads once you get them. The discussion will include:

• The speed at which leads go cold – it’s a lot faster than you think – and what to do about it
• The average time it takes companies to respond to leads
• The average attempts sales people make before they give up
• Why caller ID matters – even for B2B sales calls
• The best time of the day and day of the week to follow up with prospects

Watch the webinar replay:

B2B Telemarketing, Lead Management, Webcasts/Webinars

Marketing professionals, have you ever had to deal with sales teams that rarely moved forward on the leads you provided?

Sales professionals, have marketers ever bombarded you with leads that just weren’t going to result in a sale?

If you have experienced either situation, then you need to watch this two-and-a-half-minute video to find out how to respond.

This is the third in a series of five two-minute videos I developed for a leading IT organization to teach their channel partners about lead nurturing. My purpose was to make the concept easier to understand and accessible. Here are the first two clips:

What is the Difference Between Lead Nurturing and Lead Generation?

What Are the Ingredients of Lead Nurturing?

If you have any recommendations for this video series, let me know in the comments below. I welcome your insights and ideas.

Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more…

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

This is a must-see webinar for any marketing organization that is contemplating the value of a CRM system or would like to leverage theirs more fully.

John Johnston, eBusiness Marketing Manager for Volvo North America, frankly reveals what business was like before CRM, which included temporary employees manually distributing leads to sales and the communications challenges that ensued. He then details every step he took to resolve those challenges, increase conversions, accelerate the sales cycle, and close the marketing-sales loop both online and off. Watch the video here:

How Volvo Construction Improved Leads, Increased Sales by Bridging the Marketing-Sales Communication and Technology Gap from B2B Lead Roundtable on Vimeo.

View and download slides via SlideShare

CRM, Lead Generation, Lead Management, ROI Measurement, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay

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

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

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

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

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

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

But so what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more…

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

As promised in my most recent blog post, below is the link to the MarketingExperiments Web clinic replay that looks at how one organization overcame stagnant sales, regardless of more marketing activity, through lead nurturing.

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/marketing-optimization/converting-leads-to-sales-.html

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director of MECLABS, joins me in discussing how we worked with them to execute a lead-nurturing program that launched them from their sales rut into $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in eight months.

I encourage you to watch this replay if you want a better idea of how lead nurturing works in the real world. If you have further questions, feel free to comment below.

Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay

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

If your 2011 marketing budget is tighter than you want it to be, trying giving sales less leads.

According to Marketing Sherpa’s just-released 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, a whopping 80 percent of the 935 respondents said they pass unqualified leads along to sales. That’s a costly mistake. 

Let me explain why: 

For every 100 raw leads, only 4 to 7 are ready to buy. It’s no wonder that the 1,800 companies surveyed as part of CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization Report said their sales teams spend 20 percent of their time generating leads. (And I’ve known of sales departments spending a lot more time than that.)  In essence, they’re sorting through the raw leads that marketing sends them to get to that 4 to 7 percent who might actually buy.

What if marketing did a better job of qualifying leads before sending them to sales? In his webinar, Trends and Challenges of Lead Generation in 2011, Dave Green explained, in graphic detail, the impressive amount of profit that could result.  

Think about it: What if you were able to reclaim 10 or 20 percent of your sales budget by increasing sales productivity? What if a mere percentage of that was diverted to your marketing budget to invest in better lead-qualification tools such as marketing automation, content strategy, lead nurturing, and telequalification? How much revenue could that potentially drive? How can you make a water-tight financial case to your CEO to prove that giving marketing more money will help significantly increase sales productivity and revenue capacity?

Get the answers by listening to the webinar replay.

 Watch the webinar recording

 Download the presentation slides

Read more…

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads