B2B Lead Blog

Marketers use lead scoring to slice all the potential deals in their pipelines and serve the sales team what it’s hungry for — leads that are ready to buy.

Values are assigned to each prospect based on attributes like authority, title, vertical and timing to buy, as well as behavior. For example, did the person:

• Download a video?
• Watch a webinar?
• Review a price sheet?
• Make this action in the last week or month?

Each attribute and action adds to a lead’s total score. When the score hits a pre-determined threshold, the lead is served to Sales.

It’s a process that works very well, according to the soon-to-be-released MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Lead Benchmark Report.  The report reveals that companies that use lead scoring see an average 138% ROI on lead generation, and companies that do not use it see a 79% ROI.

Select ingredients for the healthiest score

Lead scoring is a simple premise. However – like any great recipe – you need the right ingredients in the right amounts. How do you make sure you’re selecting the right attributes and activities to score? And, how do you ensure you’re ranking them correctly?

I posed those questions to Paula Reinman, SVP, Marketing, Bersin & Associates, a human resources research and consulting organization. Over the past several months, she has been in the thick of establishing and executing an automated lead-scoring program. These efforts have already produced a whopping 41% increase in revenue.

If you’re looking for the same kind of results, Reinman advises that you:

Work collaboratively with Sales from the outset

Keep Sales’ strategy, structure and culture top of mind. For instance, if you have a large inside sales team, you might want to set the threshold a little lower because of the number of people who can qualify leads further with a phone call. If you have only a handful of business development representatives, you might want to set the bar higher. But, the threshold also depends on company culture, points out Reinman.

“Some sales teams want only people who are director-level or higher — whoever is the economic buyer — so they know the budget is already there for their products,” she explains. “Yet, I have talked to other companies that say they don’t care if it’s a janitor. If it’s their target organization, they want to talk to them because they believe they can network their way up.”

Analyze content and customers

Examine how customers responded to your content as they progressed through the buying cycle. Look at your website and your content strategy. What did they receive from you via email or social media? You may even want to contact a handful of your best customers to find out what content they engaged at each stage of their buying processes.

“Think about how your best prospects would engage with you when they’re thinking about making a purchase,” advises Reinman. “For instance, someone who watched a three-minute demo, and looked at the product-specification and price list in the past week …would get a higher lead score than someone who downloaded a couple of whitepapers over the past six months.”

Continuously refine your process

Bersin uses a Customer Relationship Management system that allows anyone in the organization to see — in real time — how many leads are being generated, where they’re coming from, and what percentages are new, qualified or recycled. The marketers know precisely where lead generation resources are going and what they’re delivering.

“We watch those numbers all of the time,” notes Reinman. “If the percentage of dead leads are picking up, Sales is accepting fewer and fewer leads, or more leads are being recycled, then we know we’ve got a problem and we need to review what we’re scoring and the weight we’re giving it. The sooner you can catch issues, the better.”

She also suggests meeting with Sales at least quarterly to audit trends and activity, and adjust scores if necessary.

Want to learn more about how Reinman established a lead-scoring system? Go here: The Complex Sale: Lead Scoring Efforts Increase Conversion 79%

Photo by: Another Pint Please…

Related Resources:

Lead Scoring: CMOs realize a 138% lead gen ROI … and so can you

The Lament of the Inside Sales Team: Data, Data Everywhere, but Who’s Ready to Buy?

How to Use Lead Scoring to Drive the Highest Return on Your Trade-Show Investment

Funnel Optimization: Why marketers must embrace change

Lead Scoring

As the MECLABS Research Partnership analyst team, my colleagues and I speak with professionals who attend our events (like the next month’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas), purchase our publications, and want more information about how MECLABS can help grow their business. So every day we hear about the challenges they’re facing.

One issue that surfaces all too often is optimizing databases: When you have a database of thousands upon thousands of names, how do you help your team easily and effectively prioritize who to contact? Nearly every company I talk to does some kind of lead scoring, but rarely do those lead scores align with their database in a way that allows their sales teams to determine – at a glance – which prospects are the right fit at the right time.

This hit way too close to home. Here at MECLABS, my team was struggling with the same issue. Through events, publications, and general inquiry, we add hundreds of interested potential partner inquiries to our database every few weeks, sometimes even thousands. We have an ace IT team that has set up platforms so we can quickly identify who fits our Ideal Partner Profile, and we’d contact them as soon after they express interest in our Research Partnership program. We are very well aware of the importance of timeliness for marketers who are struggling to optimize their sales and marketing funnels. And we’d follow up based on the next action that was associated with their file.

But it took Brooke Bower, our data-analysis whiz, to help our team look at our database from a new perspective, one that would help us get the highest return on our time by focusing on the most promising potential partners, as opposed to merely the most urgent.

What we realized was missing was a comprehensive at-a-glance snapshot that basically shows us the key factors that define a successful research-partnership engagement:

• If the individual making the inquiry is a decision maker or an influencer
• How many events the individual, and his team, have attended and publications they’ve purchased compiled in an easily sortable list
• Their organization’s firmographic details – such as revenue, marketing budget, sales cycle and size

We enlisted the IT department to add fields to our existing platform to bring together these details into a single “opportunity grade” that would be applied to each potential partner’s account. (The concept of an “opportunity grade” was recommended to us by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS.) The higher the grade, the better fit for a long-term, strategic research partnership.

Within just a few days, through the teamwork of IT, marketing and sales, we have sorted our database so that it reveals to us that “opportunity grade” for each partner. It wasn’t rocket science, just taking the time to ask the hard questions (thanks Brooke), and look at what we do from a fresh perspective, to give IT the parameters they needed to bring it all together. This is a project that will never be completed, of course. We’re going to continually work with Brooke to analyze what qualities make up our most qualified research partners and make sure our database can easily and accurately help us identify them.

Great results happen when people and departments with different skill sets take time to put their minds together — in this case it was Brooke’s data savvy combined with my hands-on experience talking to potential Research Partners about their challenges.

I’d really like to hear about your experiences in building a database that helps you engage more efficiently and effectively. I welcome you to share them in the comments.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy, Sales

In the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, 1,745 marketing organizations revealed that trade shows took up the biggest chunk of their marketing budget – over 21%. Yet, they only ranked fourth in marketing effectiveness, under websites, SEOs, and emails.

I suspect that part of the ROI problem may be due to improper prioritization. Smart marketers apply some type of lead scoring to leads generated from website, SEO, and email initiatives. They need to do the same with trade shows. I recommend ranking trade show leads using the point-system outlined below – the higher the ranking, the hotter the lead.

1. Trade-show registration lists. While useful to build your marketing database for lead nurturing, a trade-show registration list is the least-qualified lead source because some aren’t remotely interested in your solution. In fact, they may not have attended the trade show at all. If the trade show closely aligns with one of your solution offerings, then the quality of these kinds of leads will be better. The more broad based the trade-show appeal, the less aligned it will be with your product/service categories and target market, so the conversion rate will be lower.

2. Those who attend a widely publicized trade-show social event sponsored by your organization. Obviously, such events give you time to engage prospects and customers in a more relaxed atmosphere. At times, however, these social events are so large that many of those in attendance never speak to anyone from your team. If that’s the case, the overall conversion rate of attendees is unlikely to be very high. Still, there’s an indication of awareness and interest in your company.

3. Booth visitors. Make sure their reasons for stopping by aren’t for merely collecting a tchotchke or fulfilling a requirement to win a prize.

4. Those who attend a special public event. Often, marketers will create an event within their booth in which someone presents to a small group. There’s typically one-way communication, not a conversation. Depending on the nature of the presentation, this indicates a relatively early stage in the buying cycle. The buyer enjoys a level of anonymity while gathering information to determine whether the solution warrants a conversation. These attendees generally have a deeper level of engagement than someone who stops by your booth to window shop.

5. Those who attend a learning event. These events can be executive roundtables or seminars held during the trade show. You can specifically target the audience and their attendance indicates significant interest.

6. Those who interact with a team member. This group is obviously more qualified than a booth visitor. The challenge is capturing this information. One way is with radio-frequency identification which tracks visitors’ movement. It can tell who stopped by, where they specifically stopped and for how long.

7. Those who attend a one-on-one meeting. Trade shows can be great places to meet individually with key decision makers in target accounts.

This type of trade-show lead scoring can supplement your larger lead-scoring model that includes information like the title, industry and organization size, or the number of responses from the prospect’s company over time.

Most importantly, it can help you determine, as you sort through the massive amounts of leads that trade shows generate, who is most worthy of your attention.

Image: AAPEX Shows

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Sales Leads

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 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 week I was in San Francisco doing a live, streamed presentation, Uncovering Trends and Best Practices in Lead Generation, for Cisco. It’s part of their on-going Partner Velocity Program which provides in-person events, in-depth resources, and online marketing tutorials to their value-added resellers worldwide.

I believe Cisco sets the standard for how to engage channel partners, and am honored that they asked me to share my ideas around where they need to focus their marketing attention and resources. In essence, smart marketers approach their work like a portfolio manager; they’re constantly thinking about and testing the optimal investment strategy.

In the playback below I examine how to make the best investments of marketing time, money and energy, and point out the areas where too many marketers are squandering opportunity and resources. I cover:

• The latest trends in lead generation.
• How to create buyer personas.
• Social media as a lead generation tactic.
• Steps to optimizing the B2B mix.
• Guiding principles to effective B2B telemarketing.

Of course, I only had an hour to speak and each of these topics could be a webinar on their own. In fact, that’s precisely the case next week, considering the topic for the next B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads – How One Company Slashed Their Cost per Lead by More than Half.

What other points would you like me to expand on? Let me know; watch the broadcast replay and review Cisco’s excellent blog post about my presentation. I’d love to hear from you.

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay, Weblogs

Watch our latest B2B Lead Roundtable webinar for a powerful case study on how to execute content marketing strategy in the real world and discover how it can build powerful alignment between sales and marketing.

View webinar replay:

How ECI Telecom Developed a Content-Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results from B2B Lead Roundtable on Vimeo.

View and download slides only here

I met Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Marketing Programs for ECI Telecom, when she served on my panel at MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit in January. She had the floor for just 10 minutes to present her company’s content-marketing strategy. But what she had to say, even in that short time, was so rich with actionable takeaways that she definitely deserved more time to share her story.

That’s why I invited her to present at this month’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinar. Michelle candidly revealed what it takes to drive results through content marketing in the real world. She explained why it’s critical to:

• Deeply understand your potential customers, what they want and when they want it, and gain alignment around that from your entire organization.
• Identify each piece of content you have and how it fits into each turn of the buying cycle. She explains why it took four interns 10 months, as well as the input of the entire sales and marketing organization,  to complete that process at ECI.
• Provide information responding to business issues your prospects are facing and why it’s smart to leverage third-party resources they respect to do so.
• Repurpose content if you have limited resources and how to go about it.

Well, I could go on and on, but I recommend that you review the webinar video above, even if you’re not directly involved in content marketing. Here’s why: the process of executing a content marketing program is transforming ECI’s entire marketing and sales organization, making them more aligned and responsive to customers’ needs and each other.

In, literally, the last minute of the webinar, Michelle explained what she considers one of the greatest benefits of her content marketing strategy: sales alignment. Every week, she meets with sales teams worldwide to discuss what marketing is doing.

“It’s critical they understand our activity,” said Michelle, “The emails that were opened, what was sent…showing them the value marketing can provide and aligning our whole process with sales activities.

“This is one of the hardest alignment programs I’ve done, but one of the most beneficial…You can see from the beginning where you generated that lead, how you nurtured that lead, when you passed it to sales, how they accepted it. And now we’re seeing real opportunities that have come as a result of those marketing-sourced leads.”

Read more…

Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads, Thought Leadership, 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

If you didn’t get a chance to attend MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit in San Francisco a last week, you missed an excellent opportunity to gain knowledge you could  have used right away for better results. I had a great time.

For me, what was most valuable was learning and connecting with fellow attendees and hearing about how they’re driving results for their companies. I’m looking forward to gaining even more insight at the B2B Marketing Summit in Boston, October 25-26.

If you haven’t signed up for the B2B Summit, I  encourage check it out, since they’re offering a special rate saving you $400. Register here.  

If you want to find out what you missed and could use some fresh ideas to immediately improve your lead generation check out the following posts:

• B2B Marketing Summit ’10 Wrap-up: Seven takeaways to help you engage potential customers, generate high-quality leads and more
• Lead Generation: Drive better ROI from your marketing campaigns
• Nuggets of Wisdom from Marketing Sherpa’s B2B 
• Our 14 Favorite Take Aways from MarketingSherpa #B2BSummit
• Seven Sales & Marketing Insights From Recent Events
• Four takeaways from Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Summit

If you did get a chance to attend, it would be great to hear from you about what you considered most valuable. You can also follow the conversation on Twitter at #b2bsummit

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Sales, Sales Leads

I asked InTouch client, Cheryl Hatlevig of Adesso Systems, to share her philosophy on doing lead generation for the complex sale.  She has a brilliant perspective that I wanted to share.

“I look at our lead generation efforts, specifically in this economy, as a financial portfolio. If I can’t measure the tactics or programs in terms on return on invest to the organization…leads generated, business closed, opportunities in the funnel, then why should I expect the company to invest in my fund.”

I agree her completely – lead generation for the complex sale requires a holistic, disciplined and multi-modal approach.

A while back, I did some brainstorming for my forthcoming book, Start With A Lead: Lead Generation Strategies for the Complex Sale, I mapped out some of the main lead generation modalities.

Here’s the lead generation modality mindmap that I came up with. (Click image to enlarge)

Are there any tactics/modalities that I’m missing?

Related posts

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy, Podcasting, Public Relations (PR), Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs