B2B Lead Blog

There have never been more ways to connect with customers, but how can we cut through all of the options, stay within our budgets, and choose what works best for our specific marketplace?

Cindy Humphrey advises going back to marketing basics.

With more than two decades in B2B sales and marketing leadership positions, most recently at a Fortune 500 telecommunications company, Humphrey is an expert at navigating B2B’s ever-changing marketing landscape. She says marketers need to create a process to evaluate and execute new efforts to produce consistently strong results.

“There are platforms and tools that never existed just five years ago,” Humphrey says. “It’s too easy to get lost in the noise.”

Humphrey recommends the following three-step process to keep your marketing on target:

Step #1. Focus on the goal

What’s sexy can overshadow what works and take your marketing — and your budgets — off track.

Humphrey recalls when a budget reduction forced her to end cable television advertising. This disappointed the company’s salespeople because they loved when customers mentioned the ads. So, she asked them a tough question: Were these ads producing what they wanted?

“Having been in sales leadership before becoming a marketing VP, I know the constant mantra marketing hears from salespeople is, ‘These are terrible leads,’” says Humphrey. “So I asked them what kinds of leads they could use.”

Shifting Sales’ POV

This conversation inspired a direct mail campaign that cost only a fraction of television advertising:

• The sales team gave Humphrey the names of the highest-potential — yet seemingly out-of-reach-prospects — CIOs who simply refused to become engaged in a conversation.

• She sent them what they were surely going to consume: a brownie. It included a note from the salesperson saying to look for an architectural tube in the mail.

• Within a couple of days, the architectural tube with a network design — created from public information — arrived. It also contained a letter with a personalized URL to a video of the company’s CTO. He pointed out that if they like the networking map, they’ll love what his team can do for them when they meet.

Hitting the Sweet Spot

This mix of media drove 35% of those non-responsive prospects to pick up their phones and call Sales; 20% of them ended up buying services. Additionally, those purchases opened the door for more sales opportunities.

Suddenly, television advertising lost its glow to marketing that keenly focused on the goal.

Step #2. Research the audience

Once Sales and Marketing agree on the kinds of leads they want (developing a universal lead definition helps), Humphrey advises conducting thorough research. Understand whom you’re talking to, and where and how they want to hear your message.

Key resources that she has turned to in this process include:

• Consumer databases like MRI and Simmons
• Popular press, including Intelliquest Business Surveys, Wired, IDG Enterprise Research and Endgadget

This research was the foundation for a top prospect’s persona. Here’s a sample excerpt from a persona profile:

“Steve is a technical decision maker at a Fortune 500 company. As a kid, you’d likely catch him building spaceships with his Legos. In his teen years, he was likely reprogramming his CPU to do more and do it faster. Today, you’d see someone who loves technology, puzzles and problem solving …”

This persona inspired a social media campaign that those game players and problem solvers found irresistible: a challenging 50-question online puzzle that could launch them onto a leader board of elite problem solvers.

The campaign increased unique website visits from 3,500 to nearly 100,000 and clickthrough rates by 258%.

Step #3. Test to impress

Regardless of research, though, Humphrey never launches a marketing initiative — whether it’s a print ad or a landing page — without testing first.

“By testing on a small scale, you’ll find out what works and what doesn’t, so you can move forward with confidence,” she says.

It also builds engagement with Sales. Remember that direct mail campaign that achieved a 35% response rate from the highest-potential, toughest-to-reach prospects? Humphrey launched it with just a handful of salespeople.

“If you roll a campaign out for thousands of sales professionals, you might have a few who are excited, but the rest may not really care,” she explains. “However, if you roll it out with a few dozen salespeople and it turns out to generate great leads, other branches will be contacting you to move forward.”

That’s precisely what happened with Humphrey’s direct mail campaign.

“Always ask yourself, ‘What is most important to my buyer and my seller, and how am I going to best maximize my budget to reach our objectives?’” she advises. “Combine that with research and testing for the clarity to make the wisest marketing decisions.”

Related Resources:

Targeting for Better Lead Generation Results and ROI

B2B Social Media: Gamification effort increases Web traffic 100%, employee collaboration 57%

How to make B2B marketing messages more memorable

How ECI Telecom Discovered the Surefire Sign that Sales and Marketing Are Aligned

This Just Tested: How much impact does an offline campaign have online?

Marketing Strategy

To successfully ride the winds of change, emphasize the positive:

Look at what your customers value most about you, and make that the focus of your marketing communications.

This approach enabled Celarity, a marketing and creative services staffing and recruiting firm, to double the number of candidates it places and increase revenue by more than 35% over the past two years. This is especially impressive considering it was during a period that has been tumultuous for the “hypercyclical” staffing industry.

John Arnold, Celarity’s Marketing and Operations Manager, shares a simple two-prong approach that contributed significantly to this growth by helping increase the number of inbound leads by about 100%.

Step #1: Clarify value

When Arnold came on board two years ago, he noticed that the look and feel of Celarity’s marketing communications was inconsistent.

“Consistency in message – how it looks and what it says – is critical to building recognition, trust and relationships,” he explains.

To create a communication style that would reflect the best of the organization, he conducted:

Competitive analysis

He spent six months examining what differentiated Celarity from the competitors and analyzed competitors’ performance. This included:

• Reviewing  marketing materials
• Monitoring social media
• Gathering feedback from clients and recruits who had worked with them

Sales team interviews

He turned to his sales professionals who were speaking with employers and recruits every day. He wanted the unvarnished truth about marketplace perceptions regarding where Celarity excelled and where the organization fell behind.

He discovered that Celarity’s emphasis on helping candidates grow in their careers, as opposed to merely filling a position, made the organization a favorite among people looking for jobs. This is important because the candidates Celarity places on a temporary basis often end up in permanent positions. When they need temporary help, who do they call? Celarity, of course.

“Social media has made organizations transparent. Your marketing must match your product or you’ll foster distrust and hurt your relationships,” he explains. “Marketing today is about what you’re doing, not what you’re saying.”

Step #2: Communicate that value

Armed with this information, Arnold developed communication to spread Celarity’s value message of advancing opportunity for both the candidates and the clients who employ them. This included the following tactics.

Establish monthly newsletters

Celarity launched separate email programs to reach its three primary audiences:

• Candidates – Those who are looking for temporary positions. The newsletters focus on helping them take their careers to the next level. They include career advice and job-hunting tips, job openings and local marketing events.
• Clients – Employers who have positions to fill. Newsletters include articles on how to interview candidates, check references and general management tips.
• Employees – Those who have already been placed. Their newsletter provides advice on how to succeed at work, and keeps them in the loop on changing processes, procedures and opportunities to engage with other Celarity recruits.

Arnold says each newsletter distribution increases website traffic by at least 30% and provides a meaningful follow-up opportunity for salespeople; the email platform allows them to see who has read an article. Furthermore, Arnold analyzes clickthrough rates and feedback to determine what type of content their marketplace values most, and produces more of the same.

Leverage social media

Celarity has accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and later Google+. Until Arnold came on board, the company wasn’t using them much. So, Arnold started tweeting articles featuring career advice, news about upcoming events and job openings, in addition to blog updates.

In a few months, Celarity’s Twitter following mushroomed from 100 to 2,000. He started a LinkedIn group that now has more than 300 members. Most importantly, Celarity is now a well-recognized brand among Minnesota creatives, he says.

“When I told people about where I worked when I started at Celarity, it was hit or miss on whether they would know the company,” says Arnold. “Today, I rarely come across someone who doesn’t know who we are.”

Send direct mail

Celarity started sending postcards to both potential and present clients. The postcards are sales-focused and emphasize the quality of the company’s candidates.

Celarity cycles through its client and potential-client database, sending organizations a postcard every quarter. The team includes existing clients in this campaign because they may be interested in hiring additional employees.  Arnold says the effort always produces four or five sales-ready leads and one or two sales.

“People think direct mail is a dinosaur.  I’ll let them keep thinking that, because the more they believe that, the more attention our direct mail will get,” laughs Arnold.

In a marketplace inundated with fresh ideas, platforms and strategies, it’s easy to steer marketing off course, especially in a harsh business environment, warns Arnold.

“Always do your due diligence; take the time to examine your value, make sure it aligns with your message, and you’re spreading that message where your customers are most likely to get it,” he says.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa Careers Newsletter

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

Marketing Optimization: 4 steps to discovering your value proposition and boosting conversions

B2B Marketing: Value proposition discussion with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin

Email Summit: What’s the best lead generation tactic? All of them

Steal a Chapter from the Sales Strategy Playbook to Improve Marketing ROI

Marketing Strategy

On the way home from the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit, I caught up with one of our clinic coaches, Craig Mullenbach.  A Program Manager for MECLABS, Craig used his decade-plus years of experience in lead-generation and content strategy to help attendees at the event. But he often felt like his hands were tied.

He voiced his frustration to me: “Nearly everyone I talked to said that they knew all of the best practices but can’t execute them because they don’t have executive support – and the budgets that come with it.”

I feel his pain. Unfortunately, as much as I wish I could write a blog titled “The Three Easy Steps to Convince Your CEO to Say ‘Yes,’” it’s just not that simple.  After all, no organization has the same politics and culture.

Attaining executive buy-in and the support that comes with it too often requires intense financial, organizational and behavioral analysis. But I do have some at-a-glance, high-level advice that will point you in the direction to get to that “yes.”

#1. Identify executive priorities – I realize not every marketer can hold court with the CEO, but, at minimum, you need to understand and speak the CEO’s language. They could care less about clicks or responses. They want:

• More leads
• More revenue
• Shorter time to revenue
• Improved marketing-to-sales expense

Show how your ideas can definitively improve the CEO’s top and bottom lines. Identify what’s in it for them, and keenly focus on that.

#2. Analyze your sales organization - Find out how much time the sales team spends on prospecting. A survey for one of our clients revealed that the sales force spent more than 40% of their time trying to generate leads instead of working on closing deals.

How much would 40% of your company’s sales payroll add up to? That would probably more than pay for a generation campaign. Read more about how sales productivity can be turned into a bigger marketing budget:

• How to get funding to improve your lead gen
• Four Steps to Convince CEOs that Lead Generation Should be a Marketing, Not a Sales, Function

#3. Show what others have done - Find case studies that illustrate the success of other companies like yours. They should outline the steps that were taken and financial results. Excellent sources of case studies include:

• MarketingExperiment’s Research Directory
• MarketingSherpa Blog
• MarketingExperiments Blog
• MarketingSherpa’s Newsletters and Handbooks.

#4. Huddle with your sales team – During a huddle, a team looks at their last play – what worked and what didn’t – then uses that information to decide their next move. Do the same with your sales team so you know what you’re doing right and what you can do better, and how your efforts are directly leading to closed deals (or not). In the process, you’ll enhance communication and ultimately, build a broader base of support.

Learn more about the value of huddling in this blog: Closed Loop Feedback: The Missing Lead Generation Huddle, then watch this video where Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate VP of Marketing Programs for ECI Telecom, explains how huddles transformed her marketing organization.

#5. Develop a pilot – In this blog, Lead Generation: 4 critical success factors to designing a pilot, Dave Green, MECLABS Director of Best Practices, advises to clarify your objective, then build a pilot around low-hanging fruit to achieve it.

Your goal is to get the economic space you need to experiment, test, course-correct, test again, and repeat the best-performing process. For a practical, step-by-step outline on designing a pilot, read this blog: Landing Page Optimization: How to start optimization testing and get executive support.  I think its precepts could apply to virtually any marketing project.

What have you done that convinced the C-suite to give you the support to move forward? What are your success stories and lessons learned? Do you have any additional recommendations? Tell me about them in the comments below.  I’d love to hear what you have to say about this very challenging topic.

Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership

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

Mobile marketing for B2B is one of the newest marketing channels yet, according to the 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, it ranks second only to whitepaper downloads for growing B2B email lists – even though only 48% of the B2B companies responding have a mobile version of their website.

“As more businesses target marketing to mobile, I expect even better results,” says Meghan Lockwood, MECLABS research analyst.

She will be moderating a panel discussion, Integrating Mobile Campaigns for the Complex Sale, at the MarketingSherpa B2B Email Summit this Wednesday in Las Vegas.  I caught up with her to preview the discussion and reveal what she expects to be some key takeaways.

“There’s an immediacy to mobile that captures an audience as they move through their day, especially busy executives. However, before investing in mobile marketing it’s critical that you thoroughly know your funnel and your key value proposition, and how mobile can advance that,” she warns. “You must be very strategic because marketing to mobile users isn’t inexpensive or easy; you have to code for viewing content on every platform you are targeting – from Droids to iPads – and codes vary by operating system. You have to know what your audience is using and how they’re using it to make sure the investment pays back.

“However, as you can see from the results of the B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, companies are already using mobile to inform and support other marketing channels, and are getting great results,” points out Lockwood. “Considering less than half of B2B marketers are embracing mobile, there is real opportunity for those who know how to strategically use it. After all, the first to engage a customer through a new channel is often the one who makes the greatest impact.”

She will expand on these thoughts with panelists Nick Fuller, Director of Strategy & Analytics, eDialog; Josh Herman, Vice President of Product Strategy, Acxiom Corporation; Kate Williams, Consultant to T-Mobile, and R.J. Talyor, Director of Product Marketing, ExactTarget. The conversation will include:

Integrating mobile with other channels. “Complex sales have a longer gestation period and some are very content-based; which requires nurturing and repetitive touches with content like newsletters and whitepapers,” says Lockwood. Reading them on a small screen can be next to impossible, so she advises giving prospects the option to forward the content to their tablet or laptop for review later.

Analyzing existing customers’ usage. “For a few companies, creating an app that can make their customers’ jobs easier, such as ordering inventory immediately from a job site, could create powerful brand engagement. These organizations will literally be at their customers’ fingertips all of the time. Of course, I can’t emphasize enough that you must make sure your audience will use an app before taking the time and money to develop it.” Lockwood points out. “However, mobile is a great tactical tool for learning more about your customer – technology can track location, phone type, links clicked, time spent on content, and more.”

Knowing what your audience is seeing. “You must have first-hand understanding of the full user experience,” insists Lockwood. “Test your mobile marketing campaigns on yourself. Know how long they take to load. Know what your email looks like on mobile. After all, according to Return Path, that’s how almost a quarter of your audience is seeing it – they say that 23% of all email is viewed using a mobile device.”

Testing. “Mobile marketing is still in its infancy, so it’s smart to begin with a clear objective and measure its effectiveness in achieving it,” she notes. “For instance, at the Summit, Silverpop is having a contest leveraging its new PlacePunch platform. Attendees who check in via mobile from certain locations and activities can win an American Express gift card. They’ll get an introduction to PlacePunch and Silverpop will build their list.

“Best practices will emerge over time. In the meantime, be strategic about your mobile marketing activities, and test them so you know precisely what works and what doesn’t,” she advises.

Do you think your marketplace is ready for mobile marketing? Why or why not?

Are you using it already? If so, tell us how – what has worked and what hasn’t? We’d love to hear from you.

If you can’t attend the conference and are hungry for more mobile marketing advice, whet your appetite with  MarketingSherpa’s 30-Minute Marketer: How to Use Mobile for Marketing: – 11 Quick Tactics for Taking Your Marketing Strategy Mobile.

Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Marketing Strategy

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

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 always look forward to the announcement of the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award winners; they’re a great source of inspiration. In fact, just couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the B2B Best in Show Winner’s unexpected email approach grew its subscriber base by millions.

But honestly, I think B2B marketers might be more disillusioned with the power of email, if the feedback from 1,745 marketing organizations in the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report is any indication.  Email marketing remains one of the top three lead-generation tactics, just below websites and SEO.  Yet they claim its effectiveness dropped from 40 to 26 percent from 2010 to 2011.

Maybe this year’s Email Marketing Awards can point to one of the reasons why this is happening. If you look at the list of winners, you will note no one won the top award for innovation.

I asked Adam Sutton about it. He’s a senior reporter for MarketingSherpa. He edits and writes for their email and inbound marketing newsletters, has easily interviewed hundreds of marketers about their email marketing initiatives, and he’s one of the event judges.

“We don’t give out an award unless a company deserves it and an entry really ‘wows’ us,” he confesses.

But he also concedes that impressing the judges is getting tougher every year. “Email is a mature tactic as far as digital marketing goes; the low-hanging fruit is gone and you have to be more creative to reach the fruit that’s higher on the tree,” explains Adam. “But there’s still plenty there – especially when it comes to reaching people through newer technologies like smart phones and tablets. Of course, you want to make sure it’s worth targeting that segment of the marketplace, and you want to make sure you can measure the results. But I think there’s opportunity that companies aren’t taking advantage of.”

But what if your audiences aren’t avid users of iPads or smart phones?  

“I think it’s a running joke here at MarketingSherpa: I’m sold on triggered emails, like confirmation emails and thank you emails,” says Adam. “Triggered emails are marketing for you all of the time. When you’re on vacation, when you’re sleeping, when you’re working on another project, they’re still out there driving business without you having to add any resources.

“I would look for every opportunity to create a triggered-email campaign. Frankly, I’m surprised that I’m not seeing more of these.”

While it may be more challenging to innovate within the larger email industry, Adam thinks the B2B space is wide open if you’re willing to learn from your B2C counterparts.

“Analyze how B2C marketers nurture leads with triggered email, follow-up email, or cross-selling opportunities. Think about how to use those ideas to reach your audience,” he advises. “I’ve learned in my years of writing newsletters that there are very few case studies that aren’t universally applicable. If you think your email efforts are stale, we have hundreds of case studies to give you some fresh ideas.”

Adam points out a number of case study resources:

• Download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report.  
• Subscribe to MarketingSherpa’s free inbound and email-marketing newsletters.
• Have a fresh email campaign that you think is worthy of a case study? Email him at adam.sutton@meclabs.com.

“Tell us what you’re doing, and think about entering the Awards next year,” advises Adam. “Whatever you do, I encourage you to set aside time to contemplate your email program. If it’s not something you’re impressed with, if you consider it more of an expense and a hassle than a performance-driver, strategize a fresh approach and consider getting professional support.”

Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership

At the B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content at MECLABS, asked me and a few other attendees to reveal our most important “aha” moments in 2011. Our responses are compiled in the video below; hearing what my colleagues had to say produced even more “aha” moments for me, and I’m sure they will for you, too.

In fact, this will be well worth investing nine minutes to watch if you want a serious dose of inspiration and insight. You can also review the timestamps for a quick summary.

:31 – Jason Striker, Digital Marketing Director of ICM Document Solutions, insists that even if an organization says they don’t have the money to make a purchase, they’ll still manage to find a way to buy something if they really want it. “It’s not the economy that’s stopping you from getting sales, it’s your message.”

1:01 – Jay Baer, President of Convince and Convert and Author of The Now Revolution, believes that the path to an organization’s social media success can never be paved by a single expert, “It’s about distributing social media responsibilities across the whole enterprise.”

1:23 – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS, says marketers are finally realizing that optimization is not about “seizing opportunity” it’s about recovering the millions of dollars lost through leaking sales and marketing funnels. “Marketers need to think like plumbers and find the leaks and plug them.”

2:40 – Karen Hayward, CMO and EVP of CenterBeam, believes it’s time for marketers to be accountable for results and has been working diligently with her team throughout 2011 to demonstrate that. “2011 was about … owning our accountability.”

3:19 – Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate VP of Marketing Programs, ECI Telecom, says 2011 was a watershed for her. “Everything I thought was true wasn’t.” She went on to explain that written processes are meaningless without real relationships with your sales team. “I learned what alignment really was, and how to align the sales and marketing organization to really create a cohesive group.”

3:57 – Milap Shah, CEO of Nexsales, warns marketers that when it comes to data that drives the lead-generation campaigns, you get what you pay for. “Working with a so-called ’inexpensive’  list could cost firms 2 ½ to 3 times more; it pays to pay more and stay targeted.”

4:37 – I explain how marketing is about building relationships, and how marketing must play a leadership role in transforming companies from the inside so they can transform outside relationships.

5:37 – Kristin Zhivago, President, Zhivago Management Partners and author of Roadmap to Revenue, reveals that over the past few months, buyers are changing the way they purchase. “In the intense scrutiny of the B2B environment, they’re talking to peers first…they don’t want to read websites.” Zhivago explains why: sellers aren’t even close to aligning their websites to how buyers want to buy.

6:37 – Ge Moua, Senior Demand Generation Manager, Unify, says her “aha” moment came when she defined her job as being the liaison between sales and marketing. “For a long time sales and marketing were very siloed … today we’re working together to achieve the same goal.”

7:30 – Tracey DeMay, Marketing Manager, CenterBeam, advises making sure you’re always talking “with” not “at” your customers and meeting them where they’re at. “By the time they reach out to us, they’ve made a decision or they narrowed it down. They’re much farther along in the buying process than before.”

8:12 – Tony Doty, Senior Manager, Research & Strategy, MECLABS, was surprised by how marketing teams in big companies are facing the very same challenges as those in small ones, whether that’s terrible data, poorly tracked metrics, or lack of measurement. “There are huge companies that are just as green as the startups,” he confesses.

What were your biggest “aha” moments this year? I’d love to hear about them, share them in the comments below.

Lead Generation, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Thought Leadership, Uncategorized

In my post earlier this week, I outlined the challenge presented by SiriusDecisions’ Demand Waterfall taxonomy, specifically with the phrase “Marketing-Qualified Leads” (MQLs). Another problematic phrase is “sales-accepted leads.”

Often, funnels leak the most during the handoff between sales and marketing. Invariably, marketing blames sales and sales blames marketing. A lack of clarity around the term “sales-accepted lead” is the real culprit.

Marketing doesn’t need sales to “accept” the leads. Marketing needs sales to confirm whether the lead met the Universal Lead Definition that was agreed to between sales and marketing. This is a yes/no answer. Sales people should be able to tell on the first sales call, whether by phone or in person, if the lead met the criteria they set with marketing. If the lead didn’t meet the criteria, then marketing needs to know why. There are usually just a handful of reasons.

Such feedback need not wait until the lead is converted to an opportunity weeks or maybe months later. Instead, marketing can take immediate actions to improve lead-qualification practices. And sales leadership can identify sales people who do not understand the agreed-upon criteria, which can lead to an improvement in the Universal Lead Definition.

That’s why I like the phrase “sales-validated leads.” That’s what sales should be doing: validating whether the lead is really a lead, per the definition agreed to by sales and marketing. For most marketing organizations, this small change in funnel focus can make a huge difference in plugging funnel leaks.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your comments. At MECLABS, we don’t want to “own” the funnel taxonomy. We want to create a new, universal language that is useful for everyone and share our knowledge freely. That objective is best accomplished through a community effort via social media. So please, share this post with other funnel mavens and share your opinion. Together, we can create a new, more useful set of funnel definitions.

Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads, Thought Leadership