B2B Lead Blog

The week before Labor Day, hundreds of marketers descended upon Orlando, Fla., for MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit 2012. Joining them were Pamela Tinsen and Warren Staley, who shared their expertise during free one-to-one coaching clinics:

• Tinsen is a coach for MECLABS. She works with Research Partners to develop teleprospecting programs where precisely the right people are given the right message to quickly convert them to leads.

• Staley is a program manager. He develops and guides lead generation program that efficiently and effectively drive revenue for MECLABS Research Partners.

Last week, they gave me a behind-the-scenes look at the most common challenges marketers discussed with them, and both concluded that these discussions validated research from the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link): 

• 65% of marketers have not established lead nurturing.“The favorite topic of discussion was lead nurturing,” Staley says. “Even though the marketers we spoke with were experienced, about two-thirds were beginners at lead nurturing.”

• 61% are sending leads directly to Sales, so it should be no surprise that 61% say lead quality needs improvement.

“It amazed us how many people didn’t have a documented universal lead definition (ULD),” Tinsen admits. “We know the statistics from MarketingSherpa’s research, but to encounter it in the real world is shocking.”

While the specific conversations with individual marketers must remain confidential, Tinsen and Staley agreed to give me a high-level overview of their most common solutions to the issues marketers brought forth:

Solution #1: Understand your customer

“You can’t know who your best lead is until you really understand who is buying from you and why,” says Tinsen.

Staley points out that this knowledge will also help you determine how to move forward with other marketing decisions: everything from setting keywords, to determining which roles and titles to target, to which type of content might be most effective.

Solution #2: Interview customers and the ones who walked away

Find out information, such as:

• What motivated their purchase

• How they found your company

• Who was involved in the purchasing process

• Their buying cycle

• What they value about your product, and what they don’t

• Why they did or didn’t go with your solution

“Lead nurturing, content creation and even list building all hinge on this sort of research,” Tinsen says.

Solution #3: Define your lead. That means talking to Sales

“Everyone we spoke to thought they knew what a lead was for their organization,” Staley says. “Some figured a lead was anyone who filled out a form at a trade show; others had BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs and Timeline) criteria and specific demographic requirements. But none clarified what a lead was with Sales. They just assumed Sales was in agreement, and then they wondered why Sales rejects their leads.”

We’ve been blogging a lot lately on the importance of a ULD (for good reason, obviously). Find out how to develop your own ULD in this quick read: “Why 75% of Marketers Are Experiencing Lead Generation Pain and How to Stop It Before It’s Too Late.”

Solution #4: Know what to look for when you’re building lists

“Again, knowing your customer, who is involved in the buying cycle, and what kind of keywords they first use when they are seeking your solution are all critical,” Tinsen says.

She adds that purchased lists can fill the gaps.

“Not everyone who could be your ideal customer is going to see or respond to your inbound marketing efforts,” she explains. “But, when you purchase lists, you want to find a vendor who looks beyond SIC codes and can create lists by keyword; the results will be more targeted to what you’re looking for.”

Be sure to check out next week’s post right here on the B2B Lead Roundtable Blog to read Brian Carroll’s advice on building lists with purchased data.

By the time the event ended, Tinsen and Staley noted how excited the attendees were to start their Labor Day weekend.

“Not to relax, though,” Tinsen laughs. “They couldn’t wait to start working on everything they had learned at the Summit, and were really looking forward to making a difference for their organizations.”

Related Resources:

Event Recap: MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012

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

Marketing Research in Action: 65% of B2B marketers are not nurturing

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

Lead Nurturing

In my most recent research project, the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, we identified key behavioral and motivational differences between marketing specialists. Much of what we learned applies beyond HR and can improve your lead nurturing and sales efforts.

The key to navigating your way to a sales-ready lead is navigating through individual personalities. When you apply the human touch, you must establish credibility and, essentially, establish and manage relationships with many different people at many different levels in an organization.

You must, as Brian Carroll put it, ripen some bananas …

“Fully 95% of your leads are like harvested green bananas, and, off the top, your sales team needs only the other 5%, those that are ripe…

“Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful dialog with viable prospects regardless of their timing to buy.  It’s about building trusted relationships with the right people.  In the end, it’s the act of maintaining mind share and building solid relationships with economic buyers.  It’s not a salesperson calling up every few months to find out if a prospect is ‘ready to buy yet.’”

– Brian Carroll, Executive Director, Revenue Optimization, MECLABS

Lead nurturing based on personality

Below are some characteristics you will want to identify in your prospects as early as possible. They will improve your understanding of the people you’re contacting, and set a path for helping them “sell up” or move to the next stage in the buying process.

The person you are talking to in a lead’s organization might be:

As you communicate with each of these three levels, try to identify which of these characteristics are prominent in the person:

Once you have communicated with your first contact or two, ask them about the decision maker so you can prepare them for the process of helping to achieve your mutual objective – putting Sales in touch with a decision maker ready to make a purchase.

Here’s an example of how to make this system work for you:

Scenario #1 – Wants to be a champion, but not very assertive

Let’s say your champion is not very assertive or a good communicator. He is much more detail- and process-oriented as well as very objective about his approaches. That means he will not be very subjective and will have an average or low individualistic profile.

Even if his corporate attachment is strong, he is going to need your help motivating the influencer. On your call, help him understand that you are there to support his efforts and achieve his goals so he can obtain what you are offering.

Work with him until he is comfortable with all the technical benefits of your product. Then ask if you could get on the phone with him and the influencer. Remember: You are his team member. Use phrases like “we,” “our,” and “us” a lot!

Scenario #2 – Is an assertive influencer but not convinced yet

Now, if your influencer is the exact opposite, then he will be less than excellent with details but an excellent relationship person. When you talk to him, focus on how this will help the individuals within the organization and make the department more efficient and effective.

Provide “global” concepts and images since he is more subjective in his thought processes. This is where your role becomes critical, because to influence a decision maker (who is obviously assertive and controlling), you must provide this “people person” with a compelling sales proposition. You must formulate that concept in his mind so it is the first thing out of his mouth when he meets with the decision maker.

Now, since we know the decision maker is assertive, let’s say he is also somewhat analytical and highly objective, only considering the bottom line. Then you must prepare the proposal or PowerPoint for the influencer with a “bottom-line” focus.

You want to help the influencer see that you want to help make him “look good” by identifying the key points most decision makers look for – “What’s it going to do for me today?” It can be as simple as an opening statement like, “How much effort does it take to add $100,000 to the company’s bottom line? ABC can do that with little to no long-term investment.”

However you set your approach, using this form can help you identify the key traits of the people you’re contacting. Instead of marketing to job titles, you can market to people and their personalities.

Related Resources:

Lead Nurturing: 9 questions answered on lead qualification, nurturing, and Marketing-Sales alignment

Lead Nurturing: 12 questions answered on content, tactics and strategy

Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects – not selling them

Marketing Management: What is your company doing to increase knowledge and effectiveness?

Marketing Career: 4 questions every marketer should answer (and what you need to know to start asking them)

Lead Nurturing

A couple of weeks ago, I presented an American Marketing Association webcast, “The One-Two Punch of Effective Lead Engagement: Accurate Lists and Powerful Content” (a replay of the webcast is posted below).

The nearly 500 attendees had so many excellent questions that my webcast could have easily been an hour longer. That’s why I decided to answer nine of the most pertinent questions here today and another 12 in a post on the MarketingSherpa blog tomorrow.

These questions hit on key challenges in lead nurturing today. I hope the answers will help you solve specific challenges in defining qualified leads, nurturing them, and aligning your sales and marketing teams.

How to define a lead

Q: What if salespeople have differing opinions about what a lead is?

A: Bring your best salespeople together and create a Universal Lead Definition (ULD). Here’s a resource that can help: Lead Generation Check list – Part 4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition.

Q: Are there different definitions of ULD for each product?

A: Only if there are different customer segments.

Q: What’s the difference between an inquiry and a qualified lead?

A: A qualified lead fulfills the ULD established by you and your sales team. A qualified lead is ready to talk to Sales; an inquiry is not.

Q: What defines a stale lead?

A: Someone who has not been engaged recently; look at leads in your CRM that have been unopened or unedited in the last three to six months.

Nurturing and automation

Q: Could you review how to convert an inquiry into a lead?

A: Begin with the end in mind. What are the micro-conversions that outline each step in the path? Map out the process. This will determine the path you follow to intensify the inquiry’s intent to purchase and nurture them into qualified leads. It will be different for each organization.

Q: What’s an acceptable opt-out rate for an aggressive email campaign?

A: Know what your present opt-out rate is before nurturing and compare the two. Opt-out rates in the single digits are pretty normal.

Q: What role does marketing automation play in account-based marketing?

A: It’s great for managing and tracking interactions when you have a lot of accounts and have at least 1,000 contacts.

Aligning marketing and sales teams

Q: How do you recommend finding time for the sales team to keep up with new leads?

A: Alignment with your sales team is critical. If your team doesn’t have time to follow up, you may be sending leads that aren’t qualified enough. Maximize the team’s effective selling time. Here are several resources that can help:

• BNET Interviews Brian Carroll: Focus on Helping Not Closing
• Steal a Chapter from the Sales Strategy Playbook to Improve Marketing ROI
• Four reasons why funnels are a marketer’s best friend
• Closed Loop Feedback: The Missing Lead Generation Huddle

In this video, at timestamp 3:19, Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate VP of Marketing Programs at ECI Telecom, explains how critical alignment is to her organization’s success.

Q: How long do organizations usually allow for lead nurturing to take? One year seems right but I get requests for results in three months.

A: Salespeople are always trying to meet their quota and need people who will buy in three to six months. But you have to expect nurturing to take at least as long as your sales cycle.

We must remember that most buying happens when a salesperson isn’t there. You have to be clear that whom you are nurturing will eventually buy; we never stop nurturing until we know the prospect is no longer a fit. If you see someone who hasn’t engaged or opened content in three months, you need to refresh that contact — the person may no longer even be with the company or is simply not interested.

A link to a replay of the webcast is included below. Do you have additional questions? Feel free to ask them in the comments.

Related Resources:

The One-Two Punch of Effective Lead Engagement: Accurate Lists and Powerful Content

The ingredients of lead nurturing and how they work together

How to Get the CEO to Support Your Next Marketing Plan

B2B Marketing Research: 68% of B2B marketers haven’t identified their Marketing-Sales funnel … and it shows

Lead Nurturing

Imagine this:

Boy meets girl. Boy asks girl out.

On their first date, boy asks, “Will you marry me?” Girl says no.

Boy promptly sends her phone number to the bottom of his list. Six months later, boy calls again.

“Want to marry me yet?” he asks. Girl rolls her eyes, hangs up and blocks his number.

I fully realize this is a silly scenario, but it’s really not unlike what sales professionals do when they call prospects every few months to “touch base” and ask “whether they’re ready to buy yet.”

That time between the first “not yet” or “maybe” and the next phone call is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate to prospects — through appropriate contact on a regular basis — the value you can bring to their organizations.

This is what lead nurturing is all about. It’s absolutely essential in the complex sale, where the time from first contact to closing is typically many months. However, appropriate contact means providing customers information they want — not trying to sell them something.


Here’s the lead-nurturing litmus test: Can prospects benefit from the information you provide regardless of whether they buy from you? To help pass this test, here are three tips:


Tip #1. Know whom you’re talking to

Analyze your database and identify audiences with common demographics, such as titles and industries, and common behaviors, such as how they first engaged with you and why. This will help you target the right information to the right people; it will help you identify what information is most relevant to them and how they want to consume it.

Tip #2. Find out where it hurts

Talk directly to each of your audiences to identify what they want to know more about. Ask questions like:

• What sorts of issues keep you up at night?
• What resources help you respond to those challenges? (Do they attend events, read whitepapers, forums, instructional videos, etc.?)
• What kind of knowledge/service would make your life easier?
• What sort of information informs your buying decisions?

Tip #3. Help ease the pain

Identify and/or create content that will help them with these issues. (Remember, no selling!) Email this information to them at regular intervals, every three to six weeks.

Over time, prospects are going to think, “You know, this company has really helped me out. They’ve given me information I can use. They really seem to know what they’re talking about.”

The Payoff:  Next time your salesperson calls, they don’t have to make small talk until they conclude with some lame line about the customer’s readiness to buy. They can conduct a meaningful conversation about the latest whitepaper (or article, or blog post, or instructional video) that was sent as part of your lead-nurturing program.


Another Payoff: B2B marketers who nurture leads have a nearly 30% higher return on investment than those who don’t, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Even better, nurturing leads will give you a competitive edge considering a whopping 65% of B2B organizations don’t have any kind of lead-nurturing program.

Want to learn more about lead nurturing? Sign up for this free webcast scheduled for March 6, when Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Revenue Optimization at MECLABS, will present The One-Two Punch of Effective Lead Engagement: Accurate Lists and Powerful Content.


Related Resources:

No Budget and Less Time? Lead Nurturing in Five Simple Steps

BNET Interviews Brian Carroll: Focus on Helping Not Closing

The ingredients of lead nurturing and how they work together

Have a minute? Find out why lead nurturing is more critical than ever

What’s the best lead generation tactic? All of them.

Email Marketing: The importance of lead nurturing in the complex sale

Lead Nurturing: How much content is enough?

Webinar Replay: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report Reveals How Marketers can Transform Mounting Pressure, Challenges into Revenue

To Call or Email: That is the Question

Lead Nurturing

That’s the word from our own Brian Carroll, who made that proclamation in an interview at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit this week.

Paradoxically, this is why it’s critical to be strategic. He explains there’s a lot of ways to acquire leads, but there’s no determining which ones work best without testing. But what compounds the situation is that marketers don’t have the time or resources to test every potential tactic.

This is why Carroll advises looking at marketing like a portfolio manager looks at a mutual fund. They analyze the financial marketplace. They make choices that balance high risk/high reward with the tried and true to achieve the highest return from their investment portfolio.

To get a complete view of what’s performing in the sales marketplace, Carroll turns to data from MarketingSherpa’s Benchmark Reports. He analyzes what’s working – and what’s not – for other marketers and makes informed decision about which tactics would best complete his marketing portfolio. 

Beyond that, it’s all about building relationships with people. “That’s what we really need to do instead of expecting to drive conversion from a single event or email,” he explains and throws in another analogy, “You don’t ask someone to get married on the first date…the relationship you’re looking to start with customers is built over time with trust.”

He expands on how to make that happen: 

“You need to identify the right people in the right companies. Initiate a memorable dialog that answers ‘yes’ to the questions ‘Is this relevant to me and my needs or my coworker’s or colleagues?’ And then  nurture that dialog with a potential customer on an ongoing basis…If you’re doing these three things effectively, you’re doing lead generation well.”

Take five minutes to watch Brian’s interview here:

This video has been produced in cooperation with GetResponse Email Marketing. See more at: http://www.getresponse.com/promo/emailtv

Related resources

Top Takeaways for Small Business from Email Summit 2012

Email Summit: Mobile marketing panel on the complex sale

Email Summit: Testing, timing and format elements in follow-up email

Email Summit 2012: Meeting email marketing challenges

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, 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

I can’t stress this enough: when it comes to marketing, if we’re not constantly learning, we’re going to find ourselves left behind faster than ever.

Some people say I’m an expert in B2B lead generation because I wrote a book on it, but you know what? I am astonished by what I didn’t know then compared to what I know today. This past year has been especially illuminating thanks to the brilliance of smart marketers who are expanding and perfecting the lead-generation concepts I wrote about years ago.

This year’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinars are testament to that.

In February, Paul Teshima, SVP of Product Management at Eloqua, set the tone for the webinar year. He defined the tenets of the new world of marketing in Revenue Performance Management. “We’ve seen a problem now where, even though marketing is doing a great job of generating leads, sales still cannot handle the volume and they slip away,” explains Paul. “Some of the leading companies today are really focusing on this idea of managing and bringing marketing sales together, in a more effective way, now that they’ve solved some of the tactical problems.”

Paul explains how here: The Future of Marketing: The Evolution from Demand Generation to Revenue Performance Management

In March, Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Global Marketing at ECI Telecom, detailed how she executed an ultra-successful content strategy campaign and how that transformed their entire marketing strategy.

“We had to put ourselves in line with our buyers’ journey so we knew how to engage them at the right level,” she points out. “We had to provide value to our prospects, who have never heard of us before, and position ourselves as a company that understands their marketplace and their business issues – a partner as well as an expert.” Learn more here: How ECI Developed an Entire Content Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results

In April, John Johnston, eBusiness Marketing Manager for Volvo North America, outlined how he streamlined, integrated and automated lead generation for a marketing program for 20 different heavy construction segments for dealers in 125 countries.

“We took online marketing activities, leveraged their analytics and optimized – measure, take action and repeat. It’s a continuous loop that makes the database and the lead-generation process better and better.”

Watch the webinar to find out how John’s efforts are providing customers and prospects the precise information they need to make a smart purchasing decision, and dealers a much more detailed, useful picture of who they’re selling to. And much of this is happening in real time. Learn more here: How CRM Revolutionized Marketing and Lead Generation at Volvo North America

In May, Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, and I expounded on the powerful combination of excellent data and the human touch to make the best use of sales time and resources.

According to MarketingSherpa, 80% of marketing leads are lost or discarded because even though someone may have provided basic contact information, they may not be ready to talk to a salesperson. Teleprospecting bridges the gap.

Make sure you’re setting a strong foundation for your campaigns with an accurate list. Brandon revealed the outcomes of a breakthrough experiment that tested how higher cost/high quality lead data affected the cost per lead. The results were astounding – the difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was $581 per lead. Learn more here: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads and How One Company Slashed Their Cost Per Lead by More than Half

In June, Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research Group, shared why inbound marketing – a strategy where the prospects find you as opposed to you finding them – is critical, and how integrating social media and SEO drives it.

“Companies with integrated social media and SEO achieve 60% better conversion rates…Search rankings are driven by relevance, relevance enhances an organization’s credibility, and this credibility helps to drive conversion rates,” says Sergio. “It’s an essential ingredient to a B2B marketing program.”

To prove it, Sergio shared five steps that helped an email marketer pull in 70% more leads and doubled revenue in one year. Learn more here: How to Integrate Social Media and SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

In July, Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, revealed how companies are leaking significant revenue in their sales and marketing funnels – knowledge gained through analyzing two billion communications with 80 million customer profiles. He outlined astonishing facts like 43% of companies don’t even respond to inbound leads! But for those that know how to respond, the opportunities to make the sale grow exponentially – 78% of sales goes to companies that respond first, not to the company with the best or cheapest product.

It’s no wonder that Dave points out that venture capital firms want companies in their portfolios to have inside sales departments. “They’ll recruit, train and transplant inside sales teams into their portfolio companies,” he says. For more data that will show you how to speed leads into your sales pipeline, go here: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Find out how:

• Clarifying value proposition helped one company decrease cost-per-acquisition by 66% and multiplied monthly profit four times over
• Re-engaging clients helped one company attain grow its business by 64%
• To quickly and easily choose the best lists
• To time lead-generation activities to attain the highest possible return on investment of resources
• Closed-loop feedback makes sales professionals worship their marketing department

Find out much more here: Finish 2011 Strong: Six Funnel Focal Points to Maximize Time, Resources and Revenues Part 1 and Part 2

It all came full circle in October, when Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, discussed what more than 1,745 marketing organizations had to say about their lead generation efforts in 2011.

“It’s increasingly challenging for marketers to achieve success, and challenges are growing in pertinence year after year,” she explains. “Perceived effectiveness of tactics is declining severely. It’s getting more difficult to achieve the same results from the same marketing activities.”

She points out, however, that may be due to the fact that marketers still aren’t optimizing their funnels:

• 68% haven’t identified their sales or marketing funnels.
• 61% send leads directly to sales.
• 79% haven’t established lead scoring.
• 65% haven’t nurtured leads.

Learn how to make 2012 a better year here: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report: How Marketers are Transforming Mounting Pressures, Challenges into Revenues.

We are in the process of planning our 2012 webinar year. What would you like to know more about? What information would help you generate more leads? How can we help you stay on top of lead-generation innovations? Leave a comment below.

B2B Telemarketing, Content Marketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership

I am especially looking forward to the next B2B Lead Roundtable webinar. You should be, too, if you’re eager to find out how your peers are responding to today’s marketplace, and how this represents an unprecedented opportunity to drive the highest performance from your marketing efforts.

Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, will reveal key takeaways from this just-released publication, which is based on a survey of marketers from 1,745 B2B organizations.

We weren’t surprised by their responses. However, to call 2011 a tough year is an understatement, to say the least. Respondents admitted that their marketing tactics simply aren’t working like they used to, and reported  as much as a 50% decline in effectiveness for even their most tried-and-true marketing strategies since last year.

However, Jen will reveal how these challenges merely point to abundant opportunity to improve overall marketing strategy. She’ll show you precisely where that opportunity lies by guiding you through a five-step funnel optimization process that will ensure you produce better marketing results next year. I will be joining her, as will Kaci Bower, MarketingSherpa research analyst. Together, the three of us are going to provide takeaways you can begin using now to overcome today’s marketing challenges and set the foundation for higher marketing ROI in 2012.

If you’re eager to transform this year’s pressures into powerful results, watch the webinar replay below.

View Slides on Slideshare

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy, Webcasts/Webinars

If you attended our most recent B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar, Six Funnel Focal Points to Finish 2011 Strong – Part I, you found out that even though the end of the year is less than 125 days away, there’s plenty of time to drive more opportunity through your sales funnel and to the bottom line.

That’s because Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research at MECLABS, and Pamela Markey, Director of Marketing for MECLABS, revealed some of the most valuable takeaways you can execute right now to drive leads fast. They drew upon MECLABS’ experience – specifically, more than 10 years of research, one billion emails, 1,300 major experiments, 10,000 tested sales paths, 5 million phone calls and 500,000 conversations, as well as hundreds of publications and conferences.

So, if you’re wondering how on earth you’re going to meet your end-of-year sales goals or quotas, don’t worry – there is still plenty of time. Just watch the webinar replay below and be sure to attend Six Funnel Focal Points to Finish Strong – Part II, Tuesday, September 20, 11 a.m. CDT, noon EDT.

View and download slides via slideshare

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

2:55 – Find out the length of the sales cycle for most webinar attendees; it happens to be aligned with how 935 marketers responded to Marketing Sherpa’s 2010 Benchmark Survey.

3:47 – What three top-of-the-funnel approaches will maximize your resources and help you achieve your year-end goals within budget and time constraints?

4:45 – An overview of the source of ideas and insight revealed in this webinar.

7:12 - Clarify and test your value proposition, and then consistently communicate that message across all channels.

9:04 – Experiment 1: A case study of a B2B software organization reveals how clarifying value proposition increased the number of clickthroughs by 21 percent. (But it gets even better…)

11:09 – Value propositioned is defined: “If I am your ideal customer, why should I buy from you vs. my competitors?”

13:01 – Experiment 1 continues. That 21 percent increase in leads from the PPC ad escalated to a 272 percent increase in overall conversion. This led to 268 percent more projected revenue. Combined with the corresponding 66 percent reduction in cost-per-acquisition, this effort produced more than four times the monthly profit – a 302 percent increase.

15:23 – Download a worksheet that easily walks you through the steps of creating a better value proposition: MarketingExperiments.com/ValueProp.

17:25 – Optimize your list approach by testing them, and choose the list source that ensures you get the most leads in the least amount of time. Experiment 2 reveals how a “cheap” list ultimately cost $188,000 more than the most expensive per record list.

20.50 – Learn why the most expensive per record list drove campaign costs down by more than 60 percent.

21:38 - Find out how to run a test yourself to determine list efficiency.

24:47 – Re-engage your base. You can significantly shorten your sales cycle by selling to those who know and like you. Offer upgrades, bundles, new product lines.

25:50 – This case study reveals how a company with a month-long sales cycle gains 37 percent of its business from clients who initially engaged with them three months ago, and 27 percent from those who initially engaged more than a year ago.

31:47 – 70 to 80 percent of marketing-generated leads are discarded because they’re not ready to buy right now. Just because sales ignores a lead, however, doesn’t mean they won’t eventually buy. In fact, only 5 to 10 percent of prospects are ready to buy right now.

34:08 – Quick review of takeaways begins: complete the value proposition worksheet; make sure channel communication is clear and align conversion paths to that.

34:57 – Optimize your list approach. Test to find out how efficiently your sales team can turn those lists into sales-ready leads.

36:53 – Mine your base of existing prospects. What was your last touch and how can you re-engage them?  Complete the conversations you started back in Q1 and Q2.

40:54 Q & A begins

Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads, Web/Tech, Webinar Replay

In this recent interview with BNet Australia, Brian Carroll reminds us that 90 to 95 percent of customers aren’t ready to buy. (Find his comments at timestamp 18:14.)

So what do you do with them until they are?

You nurture them.

Learn more opportunities to leverage lead-nurturing in the video below.

This is the fifth in a series 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 links to the first four clips:

What are the advantages of lead nurturing?

What problems can lead nurturing solve?

What is the difference between lead nurturing and lead generation?

What are the ingredients of lead nurturing?

If you have any recommendations on how I can build on this series, I welcome them.

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy