B2B Lead Blog

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

If you want leads to convert into sales faster, be sure to check out the webinar replay below. Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research Group, explains how the strategic integration of SEO and social marketing is helping B2B marketers remarkably accelerate lead capture and conversion.

Through feedback from thousands of in-the-trenches B2B marketers, including hundreds of CMOs, Sergio reveals:

• Why social media is critical to improving your search rankings, engaging prospects and making them eager to buy.
• What inbound marketing is and isn’t, and why social media and SEO integration is key to a successful inbound-marketing strategy.
• What to do – and what not to do – when developing a social marketing strategy.
• How to measure the value of your social media investment in a way that impresses skeptics in the C-suite.
• A step-by-step explanation of how one B2B company’s inbound marketing strategy drove 70 percent more leads and doubled revenue per account in merely one year.

View the replay below, and if you want more details about how marketers are successfully leveraging and measuring social marketing, be sure to check out MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report.

View and download slides via SlideShare.

Here’s a summary with timestamps to help you pinpoint key takeaways:

4:41 – Companies with integrated search media and SEO achieve 60 percent better conversion rates. Sergio explains that when prospects find information that’s relevant to them during a search they feel more engaged with the organization presenting it, which drives conversion.

5:52 – Social media and SEO integration is a B2B-marketing essential. Prospects aren’t only searching the web for information; they’re searching for videos, blogs and real-time discussion. Search engine algorithms are tied to this younger, more relevant content.

7:33 – Sergio defines inbound marketing for the 11 percent of organizations who don’t know what it is. Inbound marketing is a strategy where prospects find you; they come knocking on your door, as opposed to you looking for them. This is executed through earned media like Google searches and content sharing, as opposed to paid advertising on social sites like LinkedIn.

8:45 – Case study of how Delivra, an email-marketing services provide, developed an inbound strategy that pulled in 70 percent more leads and doubled revenue in one year. Sergio outlines the five steps that helped Delivra overcome the problem of a limited outbound marketing budget combined with “list fatigue” that happens when lists are used over and over again.
Read more…

ROI Measurement, Social Media, Webinar Replay

We’re almost halfway through the year, and before you know it, marketing management will be putting forth arguments for increased budgets for FY12.  Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of suspect revenue projections from marketing for the purpose of budget justification.  The problem gets acute during budgeting cycles. Suddenly, all revenue is “incremental.”

Quite often it’s difficult to know if a particular marketing investment actually increased revenue. Yes, marketers have an array of useful operational metrics. Even if the company consistently closes the loop on leads, which is often rare, the evidence for incremental revenue contribution is often inconclusive. Naysayers make an obvious counter argument: we would have gotten most of that revenue anyway. And it’s hard to argue with that point of view.

Key Factors in Driving Incremental Revenue Growth

But I wonder if revenue contribution is the best way to think about investments in lead generation. I’m not saying that lead generation doesn’t make a contribution in this area. But product strategy and customer loyalty are probably much bigger factors in growth. So is the company sales model.

To be sure, the rare, ingenious advertising campaign lights a bright fire that truly sparks demand. (The old “Red X” advertising campaign comes to mind when Intel, back in the late ‘80s, first marketed their computer processor directly to end-users, which led eventually to the Intel Inside concept. Ditto for the first iPad commercials last year. Brilliant examples of demand generation at its finest.)

Still, I wonder if the financial focus of demand generation shouldn’t be on cost savings.

A Better Financial Yardstick for
Demand-Generation Investments

I’m not talking about the tired old cost-per-lead metric.  Cost per lead can be terribly misleading as conversion of leads to sales often falls as the cost per lead falls.  This kind of measurement is too self-referencing. The real economics of demand generation connect to sales costs.

This article, Measuring Lead Generation Effectiveness: A Case for a New Approach, details the expense. While measuring the hard-dollar investment in that activity can be a little bit fuzzy, the cost is real. It’s also often a very large number. For that reason alone, it’s worth measuring. If nothing else, the size of that investment will bring a lot of clarity to the executive suite on the potential benefit of making demand generation a real factor in the revenue and profit growth, instead of the side show that it is in most companies.

The Ultimate Metric for the CFO

From this perspective, the key metric is this: can the company more cost effectively drive revenue through a particular sales team by scaling lead generation efforts sufficiently to free real sales capacity and therefore revenue production? Let’s state it as two equations, one for each scenario:

X = (sales expense + greater investment in scalable lead generation)/revenue contribution

X = (the sales and marketing expense for the current approach)/revenue contribution

“X” stands for combined sales and marketing expense-to-revenue ratios for each scenario.

Which scenario yields the better expense-to-revenue ratio? 

That’s the million-dollar question. Or the billion-dollar question for many companies.

Speaking of measurement, I encourage you to fill out MarketingSherpa’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey, just click here, and you’ll get a report detailing CMOs’ perspectives on the complex sale, a $97 value.

Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Sales

Last week, I attended the first-ever MarketingSherpa/MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit in Atlanta. It was an
evidence-based marketer’s dream, three days chock full of real-world case studies and analyses that drilled down to the intricacies of what makes some online marketing campaigns convert better than others.

What surprised me, however, was how little this has to do with website or landing page design and how much it has to do with a prospect’s mindset. These marketers definitely weren’t learning where to place button “A” to get the most conversions, in fact, they learned that no matter how successful a landing page, chances are, copying the treatment simply won’t yield the same results.

That’s because no matter how brilliant the landing page, you’re not going to be having the same conversation with your customers as the brilliant designer is having with theirs. Which brings me back to the points of this article, “Integrate Online and Offline Marketing Efforts to Continue the Conversation.” Even though we use different mediums, lead generation is all about having a conversation that engages our customers and guides them along the buying cycle.

And these days, that buying cycle typically brings them to a landing page that will further speak to them in a way that will ultimately drive them closer to a sale. That’s definitely not about where to place a button; it’s about thoroughly understanding what motivates the customer to “click here.”

As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS, put it: “You don’t optimize landing pages, you optimize thought processes.”

Online marketing optimization leverages testing to make sure you’re speaking as clearly as possible and really getting through to prospects. As Adam Lapp, Associate Director, Optimization and Strategy for MECLABS Conversion Group, explains in this post, “Landing Page Optimization: Is it actually possible to optimize a landing page?,” that’s a never-ending journey.

While it certainly would be simpler to copy what someone else is doing successfully and apply their ideas wholesale to your online marketing campaigns, you must understand where your own customers are coming from and what’s driving them forward.

If you’re interested in more takeaways from the summit, I encourage you to check out these links:

Optimization Summit Wrap-up: 6 takeaways to improve your tests and results

Test with Poor Results Can Improve Marketing

Why Landing Page Optimization is So Important

Live from the Optimization Summit: Landing Page Optimization with Boris Grinkot

Live Experiment (Part 1): How many marketers does it take to optimize a web page?

Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Web/Tech

If you attended our most recent B2B Lead Roundtable webinar, you found out why Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, is passionate about investing in the very best data possible: it may cost more upfront, but the return is more than worth it.

During the presentation, Brandon details an experiment with a $3.6 billion Cisco partner where the difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was almost $600 per lead. They lowered their cost-per-lead by 60% by testing and improving the quality of their marketing lists.

Brandon expanded on this topic even further during an interview with David Kirkpatrick, a MarketingSherpa reporter. Brandon reveals why:

• Your database is probably not what you think it is.
• You should only collect the data you need.
• You’re never done cleaning lists.

For some insight on how to maximize the top of your marketing funnel and why that makes revenue flow faster, be sure to check out Brandon’s interview:

MarketingSherpa: B2B Marketing: Building a quality list

Let us know what else you would like to learn about attaining and maintaining data to drive more leads; we’ll be happy to address your questions here or in future webinars.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Direct Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Sales, Web/Tech

Funnels are like the central nervous system of the best sales organizations. Few marketing departments depend on funnels to run their business the way sales leaders do. Yes, messaging, segmentation, branding, and numerous other considerations are extremely important. But no tool can impact financial performance for marketing as much as a funnel. It’s a topic I’ll be speaking about this coming Wednesday, May 25, at an American Marketing Association webinar.

There are four reasons marketing funnels should be the central nervous system of B2B companies:

1. Simplifying complexity. The great challenge in B2B is complexity. There are lots of moving parts that are growing and changing everyday. Social media, lead nurturing, lead scoring, webinars, data-as-a-service, web-crawling technologies, and many other advancements can be overwhelming. With all of these ever-expanding moving parts, finding revenue leakage is extremely challenging and often very subjective. The beauty of the marketing funnel is that you can break down complexity into very discrete components. In fact, the more discrete the funnel and sub-funnel stages, the easier it is to deal with complexity. The key is tying all the funnels and subfunnels together into a unifying framework.

2. Isolating the leakage. Once you have a comprehensive funnel framework, you can measure the conversion of prospects from one stage to the next. You can gather benchmark data from companies like MarketingSherpa and see how you compare to other organizations. Over time, you can aggregate data from your own corporate-wide efforts and develop internal baseline conversion ratios; that way, every variance from the benchmark or the baseline should prompt you to examine why.

3. Improving financial performance. Instead of having endless debates, marketing can simply set up tests and discover what really works by measuring conversions and looking at the impact on downsteam efforts. Having conducted thousands of experiments, we’ve seen that quite often the best answer is often counter-intuitive and defies “best practices.”

4. Forecasting results. With benchmarks and especially your own baseline data, you can start to make increasingly accurate predictions on the results you will have from a given marketing initiative. And, as a general rule, the more granular your funnel stages, the more accurate the projection. Of course, accurate projections are key to getting and keeping funding.

There’s a reason sales executives absolutely run sales organizations based upon the funnel while their best sales people use it to manage their pipeline. If marketers want to drive the highest ROI possible, it’s time for them to do the same.

What are your thoughts? I welcome your feedback and if you want to learn more, be sure to attend the AMA webinar on May 25 that I’m presenting with Steve Woods, Chief Technology Officer of Eloqua, and Mike McKinnon, Senior Demand Manager of ReadyTalk.

Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Uncategorized, Webcasts/Webinars

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

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

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

View and download slides via SlideShare

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

This is the first of a two posts that will examine whether teleprospecting is too complex for testing. I was compelled to develop this series after observing interaction on our LinkedIn B2B Lead Roundtable (which has rapidly grown past 8,000 members).

Members ask very interesting questions about teleprospecting that evoke thought-provoking responses. In fact, some questions will spark furious debate that might go on for weeks or even months:

• Should teleprospecting reps leave voice mails?
• How many dials should someone make per day?
• What is the right level of compensation for a rep?
• How much of that compensation should be variable?
• What are the pros and cons of pay for performance from outsourced teleprospecting vendors?
• Is it better to outsource teleprospecting or bring it in-house?
• Should teleprospecting be a sales or marketing function?

As you can see, the questions can range from tactical to highly strategic. If the question is a topic I don’t know anything about, I can find myself changing my mind as I read one good argument versus another, back and forth, like a tennis match.

Some questions are not at all new. Like the voicemail question, the outsourcing question, the pay-for-performance question, or the dials-per-day question. People have been having these debates long before LinkedIn existed.

Many times, the more sage members will answer with caveats. “It depends” is a phrase that gets used a lot. For example, the optimal amount of dials per day per rep will depend on the solution’s complexity, the size of the potential opportunity, the rep’s familiarity the accounts he is calling, and so on.

What is the best answer to a particular teleprospecting question?

Still, doesn’t it seem like there is probably an optimal answer for each situation for your business? Couldn’t we set up experiments to find out what works best, instead of just debating the question endlessly?

Also, since there are so many questions, what’s best to test first? For complex questions, how do you structure tests that yield valid answers? After all, for B2B lead generation, the quantities are often very small and the buying cycle is very long.

The complexity of teleprospecting compared with other marketing functions

With email you can create two different subject lines, randomly split your list, and figure out which subject line worked best. Email, landing pages and direct mail really lend themselves to this kind of experimentation. The universe is often large enough to yield statistically valid outcomes. Important questions can be isolated and measured.

Teleprospecting could undergo this kind of experimentation, right? But experiments that use the scientific process require isolating variables that you intend to test. Everything must be identical between the treatment and control except the question you’re trying to answer.

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, ROI Measurement

If you’ve been following the B2B Lead Blog for a while, you might recall this post, inspired by a spirited LinkedIn B2B Lead Roundtable Group discussion about whether social media truly delivered ROI.

The official verdict from MarketingSherpa has just arrived, in the form of their third annual B2B Social Marketing Benchmark Report. A compelling aspect of this report is that it compiles the survey responses of thousands of marketers – 3,342 to be exact – in more than 150 charts and analyses. One of those charts, at right, looks at the ROI they’re getting from their social media efforts. It certainly is a study in contrast:  more than 1,000 responded that they are achieving at least a 150 percent return on investment.  Yet, at the other end of the spectrum are another 635 or so who aren’t seeing any return at all.

Nonetheless, I am still impressed by social media’s rapid monetization. As Sergio Balegno, Director of Research for MECLABS, the parent company of MarketingSherpa,  MarketingExperiments and InTouch,  stated in January’s post, “In just a couple of years, social media has rocketed to a place that took the internet a good decade to arrive at.”

While the 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark report looks at real-world case studies and campaigns, it also dives deep into how organizations are calculating ROI – what costs they calculate as an investment, and how they measure their return.  If you’re curious about what others are doing in the marketplace to drive and measure social media success, you’ll want to learn more: http://www.sherpastore.com/SocialMarketingBMR.html

Finally, is it surprising to you that there are so many marketers reporting a high ROI on social media? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments below.

Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Social Media

In the free B2B Lead Roundtable webinar replay below, Paul Teshima, Senior Vice President of Customer Strategy and success for Eloqua, explains what revenue performance management is, and how the fastest-growing companies are using it to optimize return on marketing investment and achieve unprecedented competitive differentiation. Hope Frank, Chief Marketing Officer of Webtrends, and her marketing team detail how their company is executing RPM and their outcomes so far.

Watch the webinar replay here:

The Evolution from Demand Generation to Revenue Performance Management from B2B Lead Roundtable.

View and download slides on slideshare

Lead Generation, ROI Measurement, Thought Leadership, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay