B2B Lead Blog

If you’re among the roughly half of B2B companies that have strong alignment between your sales and marketing teams, then congratulations!

Your salespeople are your biggest fans, right? If not, then you’re probably not as aligned as you think.

Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Marketing Programs, ECI Telecom, learned this the hard way.

Looked great on paper

In late 2009, ECI implemented a new marketing automation program.  To use it effectively, Levy and her team convened with sales leaders representing teams from the Philippines to the United Kingdom. They hammered out:

• A glossary to ensure everyone spoke the same sales and marketing language. They agreed on definitions for terms such as “marketing-qualified lead” and “sales-accepted lead.”

• Guidelines on how they would score leads.

• An agreement on a level of service and responsibilities. Everyone signed their names to show they understood their roles, their commitment and how they would interact with leads at each stage.

“At the end of the meetings, we would painstakingly make sure everyone understood what we were talking about. Everyone claimed they did; no one ever had any questions,” recalls Levy.

At the end of this exhaustive process, Levy was confident that Sales and Marketing were fully aligned. But she was mistaken.

Alignment is an attitude, not a signature

Here’s the rub: Several months later, Levy discovered the opposite was true.

Even though her team led industry standards in generating leads and conversions – it had an abundance of marketing-qualified leads. The sales team had accepted none of them.

She thought that Sales simply didn’t understand the software. Her team reached out to the more than 100 members of the sales team to review the system. Then she realized the problem wasn’t the software; it was that no one cared.

“It didn’t matter that we had a written process, it didn’t matter that we had signatures – Sales wasn’t aligned at all,” Levy says.

Back to the drawing board

However, in the course of the one-on-one conversations, one light bulb after another went off across the sales team. The salespeople finally grasped how the new process could make their lives better and their jobs easier.

“Before they thought, ‘Okay here’s more technology we have to deal with,’” says Levy. “They didn’t really pay attention to its value until we worked with them one on one and showed them, ‘Hey, this is your customer and here’s what he’s been doing, with a full screenshot of all of his activity.’”

Once salespeople realized they would receive a full profile of each lead’s activity, including every email clicked and every form submitted, they started showing more interest, Levy says. They started asking for Marketing’s help to support new initiatives.

“In fact, now they don’t do any kind of marketing activity – events or seminars – without coming to us first,” Levy says.

Alignment is a full-time job

Many salespeople in the company admitted they didn’t have a process for responding to leads before this effort.  Now, Marketing gives them a personalized email for every lead.

“The salespeople forwarded that email with a personalized signature, and they were absolutely shocked when they started getting responses,” Levy says.

To address Sales’ increased interest, the marketing team assigned a person to focus solely on alignment. The job of the Centralized Alignment Leader was to maintain the lines of communication that were now completely open between the departments.

Stronger Alignment = Stronger Results

This experience taught Levy that alignment has nothing to do with signatures or verbal agreements; it has everything to do with results, she says. Today, when she looks at her marketing-automation platform, instead of seeing no accepted leads, she sees 80% or more of leads moving forward.

But perhaps the best outcome is that Sales is now Marketing’s biggest fan in the company and doesn’t mind telling the C-suite, she says. It’s a great sign that the departments are aligned.

“In many of the financial reviews that happen on the executive level, Sales [leaders are] using the same language that we are; they’re talking about marketing-sourced leads and marketing-influenced leads. They’re tooting our horn for us!” Levy says.

Do you have stories about your organization’s lead generation successes and lessons learned? I would love to hear about them! You could be featured on this blog. Please email your ideas to andrea.johnson@meclabs.com.

Related Resources:

Email Marketing: Global telecom combines email and content strategy to segment database

Aha! Marketing Leaders Reveal Their Most Powerful Business Insights from 2011

B2B Marketing: Focused top-of-the-funnel campaign fills day-long workshop in target market

How Content Strategy is Transforming an Entire Marketing and Sales Organization

Sales

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 received some news today that leaves me both humbled and honored. OpenView Labs named its top 25 sales influencers for 2012, and I am among them. This is especially meaningful for two reasons.

First, I have tremendous respect for the people who have joined me on this list; I’m in great company. Learn more about them here: Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2012.

Second, OpenView Labs takes a scientific approach to selecting its top influencers. OpenView Labs leverages the Klout True Reach metric to calculate social media influence. They also examined blog activity, and other more traditional content. You can read more about their selection process toward the end of this post here: Marketing Channel Research: How to Design a Prioritization Scheme.

Current Affairs, Inside Sales, Leadership, Sales, 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

SiriusDecisions made a brilliant contribution to B2B marketing several years ago when they created their Demand Waterfall. That “waterfall” is a metaphor for key funnel stages. It seems like everyone I talk to who works in the technology industry, which is an early adopter of marketing innovations, uses the Demand Waterfall framework. The concept is useful for any B2B industry with complex sales.

Part of the beauty of the demand waterfall vernacular is that it added descriptive language to the word “lead.” All too often, sales and marketing have very different definitions of what a “lead” is. With its Demand Waterfall, SiriusDecisions created a common language between sales and marketing by labeling key funnel stages. By benchmarking industry funnel conversion rates, SiriusDecisions provided B2B marketers with a powerful framework for evaluating their own conversion rates from one funnel stage to the next, identifying funnel leakage and best practices, and forecasting results.

The problem with the SiriusDecisions model is one of language. 

 What Does “Marketing-Qualified Lead” Mean to You?

To apply benchmarks to funnel stages, you need an apples-to-apples comparison. The problem is that “marketing-qualified leads” has two distinct meanings. For some marketers, “marketing-qualified” includes telequalification. For others, it doesn’t. In fact, the same marketer might very well route some leads to a telequalification function and other smaller, transactional leads directly to sales. This problem is further compounded because, as revealed in the 2012 B2B Benchmark Report, sometimes sales owns the teleprospecting function and sometimes marketing does.

Obviously, filtering leads through a telequalification process greatly reduces the number of marketing-qualified leads and improves the downstream conversion rates. So what are you really benchmarking? 

That’s why I break “marketing-qualified leads” into two funnel stages: “phone-ready leads” and “sales-ready leads.” 

• Phone-Ready Lead:  Marketing has done whatever it can to suppress duplicates and enhance, score and nurture the lead until the lead is ready for a phone call – that call may come from an inside sales rep or a telequalification professional. 
• Sales-Ready Lead:  The lead has been qualified via a phone conversation. In such cases, the teleprospecting rep has typically confirmed that the person participates in the decision process, has a relevant pain, and wants to talk to a sales person.  In short, the lead is ready for sales engagement.

Lack of clarity around funnel stages will lead to misunderstanding, muddled benchmarks, funnel leakage, and the adoption of sub-optimal practices. Do you think the terms “phone-ready” and “sales-ready lead” are an improvement?  Do you have a suggestion for more precise language? I welcome your feedback and will share additional thoughts in future posts on a new funnel paradigm for the complex sale.

Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Thought Leadership

Your success hinges on what you accomplish in the time you have, and that is never more true than these last few months of the year as we all race to meet projections, quotas and sales goals.

At our next B2B Lead Roundtable webinar, I will once again be joined by an outstanding in-the-trenches marketer, Pamela Markey, MECLABS Director of Marketing & Brand Strategy. Every day, Pamela is driving opportunity to MECLABS and is all too familiar with the challenges marketers are facing, especially at year’s end.

Together, we’ll continue the conversation we began in our last webinar as we reveal what has helped ourselves, our clients and businesses that have submitted their experiences to MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments, the primary research organizations of MECLABS.

(Missed the first webinar? Watch it here: b2bleadblog.com/part1)

In just 45 minutes, you’re going to learn how to effectively seize the next three months to drive the very best outcomes and begin 2012 from a place of power. Find out:

• How to avoid wasting time on the wrong prospects by directing energies to the ones who will be most likely to buy.
• Identify the best timing and methodology for contacting prospects – how long to persevere and when to call it a day.
• Generate timely feedback from sales on every lead you give them – and why that’s absolutely critical to success.

If you’re eager for a solid finish to 2011, I strongly recommend you attend!

Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales

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

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

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

View and download slides via slideshare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

40:54 Q & A begins

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

Longer selling cycles and stalled deals are impeding sales funnels everywhere. Use these three practices to convert more leads into revenue:

Use Funnel-Specific Market Research
If you really want to understand what’s happening with customers at a particular point in your funnel, then you have to ask them while the last interaction with you is relatively fresh in their minds. As such, an interview or survey should happen close enough to the event that the prospect will recall the context of the decision. Be sure to include questions on customer decision dynamics. In many industries, for example, executives are scrutinizing much smaller transactions, so lead generation, lead nurturing and sales enablement tactics must address this shift in buying behavior. Typically, such research reveals a few issues that can be addressed relatively quickly.

Integrate this research into your demand-generation and lead-nurturing framework by making such surveys or interviews automated trigger events. For example, let’s say you’d like to gain a customer perspective of your teleprospecting operation. Here’s how you can go about it:

1. Create an automated rule - on the first teleprospecting conversation send an email to the prospect moments after the call.
2. Reference the conversation and the name of the representative, then ask for confidential feedback.
3. Provide a link within the email to a simple survey that asks about the knowledge and professionalism of the representative. The web form might also allow for free-text feedback.

Use this type of feedback to improve training for the individual or team. Similar context-sensitive surveys could occur when customers download a white paper or a case study, attend a webinar or visit a tradeshow booth. Use this kind of information to improve white papers, case studies, webinars, or other specific marketing outputs.

Use Teleprospecting to Re-Engage Your Stalled Prospects
Professional teleprospecting representatives should consistently approach “dead” leads as an informal market-research project. The message can be straight and true. The representative is trying to find out what went wrong to better serve customers in the future. The rep should ask the customer to be as candid as possible, then listen and thank the customer for his candor. Open-ended questions should be used at the outset, with probing and clarifying questions thereafter. In many states, B2B calls can be digitally recorded so key stakeholders can actually hear what customers are saying.

Obviously, for this approach to work, the teleprospecting team must be listened to as a voice of the customer. The company can then use this intelligence to develop incentives that address the problems of delay. For example, if prospects lack capital budgets, perhaps a “buy-now-pay-later” program will get the sale back on track. Commonly, nothing has happened because the project was never a priority. In such cases, lead nurturing and campaigns targeting more senior executives can be of value.

Make this type of effort a two-part campaign. In the first phase, the team does the research. In the second, after huddling with product marketing and sharing the answers, the team reaches back out selectively to offer solutions that respond to the prospect’s reason for stalling. Of course, the solutions can then be applied moving forward to all stalled prospects.

Update Your Ideal Customer Profile
Sometimes, less is more. If your research reveals that your product or services is not a particularly good fit, you might want to revisit the ideal customer profile for each product or service, and adjust your targeting and qualification tactics accordingly. Better targeting won’t salvage stalled leads, but it will allow you to allocate more sales and marketing resources where you can win more frequently. That strategy, in turn, may buy your company more time to change the product or service to make it more competitive.

While no one can change the economy, you can increase the yield from demand-generation investments by using these three practices. They’ll help you attain a better understanding of the buying behavior and obstacles that prevent customers from moving forward. This approach will help you identify the best tools to move them down the sales funnel or reallocate resources that will yield a better return on investment.

B2B Telemarketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Sales, Sales Leads

For most of us, the phrase “demand generation” conjures up things like campaigns, trade shows, and the corporate website.

But what about sales prospecting? Despite all the newfangled marketing automation tools, most CEOs increase the funding for demand generation by authorizing the expansion of the sales organization.

Surprised?

You shouldn’t be. Books like SNAP Selling, Sales 2.0, SPIN Selling and Solution Selling for years have been teaching sales people to generate demand, one conversation at a time. Most companies don’t call what sales people do “demand creation” or “demand generation.” No, we’ve given it more pedestrian names, like “pipeline development,” “sales prospecting” or “cold calling.” But, really, what’s the difference between what sales people are trying to do and what demand-generation does?

The Percent of the Sales Budget Spent on Demand Generation

Efficient sales people don’t spend much of their time prospecting. They network. They get referrals. They leverage LinkedIn and Twitter, and monitor news feeds about key accounts. When done properly, these activities are very effective and do not take a great deal of time. The rest of their pipeline will come from sales-ready leads.

But many sales teams spend 20 percent or more of their time prospecting. A recent technology software client of mine, for example, had their six-figure field sales people spending more than 40 percent of their time prospecting.

Multiply those percentages of time spent prospecting by the total sales budget for the team in question and, in most companies, money indirectly (and maybe inadvertently) allocated by sales for demand generation is at least as large as the entire marketing budget. In fact, it could be a multiple of the marketing budget.

Think about that.

It’s not like sales people like to cold call, cold calling is time consuming and often demoralizing. Sales professionals would prefer to talk to people who have a problem they could solve. So why do sales people do it?

There’s one simple reason: they have no choice. Marketing rarely generates a sufficient volume of truly qualified leads. It’s not because marketing can’t or won’t. It’s because marketing doesn’t get the funding necessary. So sales people have to pick up the slack.

The Case for a Larger Sales Force

Against this backdrop, how hard is it for sales leadership to make the case that the way to increase revenue is to hire more sales people? New sales people generate demand. Sales management has years of evidence of the correlation between more sales people and more revenue. It’s not always true. Obviously, the product and services have to warrant demand generation efforts, but if they do, adding more sales people will generally grow revenue.

The Case for a Larger Marketing Budget

There’s a flip side to this argument, one that has been getting more and more compelling. What about increasing the investment in lead generation to drive more revenue through the current sales organization? If a sales force is using 20 percent or more of its available time to find sales opportunities, there are two key questions:

1. Can marketing be a little bit more efficient generating lead pipeline than field sales people are with cold calling?
2. To what degree?

With each advancement in marketing automation and database marketing, the answer has to be a resounding “yes!” There is a revolution going on in content marketing because of these advancements and our expanding knowledge of buying behavior. Social networks have further accelerated the possibilities.

The old budget allocation benchmarks should be challenged. Marketing leaders should be showing the CEO and the CFO and the other key stakeholders in the C-suite that marketing needs more funding in order to really move the revenue needle.

A Four-Step Plan for Making a Bigger Different with Lead Generation

If that sounds like your situation, let me share these ideas for driving change:

1. Measure how much money your sales organization really spends on demand generation.
2. Determine the revenue capacity that would be available if your sales team spent more time working opportunities instead of looking for them.
3. Share these findings with the executive leadership team and propose an experiment in collaboration with sales, finance and your CEO to improve sales’ financial performance: supply a sales team with a sufficient volume of sales-ready leads so that their time spent prospecting is cut in half.
4. Compare the revenue performance of the pilot team with that of their peers.

Set up the experiment to give key stakeholders the proof points that will convince them that it would be a no-brainer to reallocate budgets to scale the effort. Make sure the pilot sales team is reasonably representative to eliminate key variables like the solution being sold, the talent selling the solution, and the market you’re selling to. That way, you can attribute any increases in pipeline and revenue to the lead-generation investment.

Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads

In an engaging conversation with Phil Dobbie, BNET
Australia, Brian Carroll reveals how to execute the kind of engaging lead-nurturing conversations that result in more and better selling opportunities.

Listen here, or review key points by following these timestamps:

-21:20 How can sales people strike perfect balance between nurturing existing leads and getting more sales
in the pipeline? Brian explains that this involves both marketing and sales; they can easily duplicate each other’s functions, which is why alignment is critical. Inside sales is bridging the gap between them, Brian points out, and that’s more important than ever as companies are using the internet to research buying options and talking to sales reps later in the buying process.

(Want more information about the power of inside sales? Be sure to attend our next B2B Roundtable webinar this Tuesday, July 19: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions, presented by Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com.)

- 18:14 Stop thinking that your goal is to attain a sales meeting. Lead nurturing is about engaging the right people in the right companies in a memorable conversation. The goal is to offer information that’s relevant. After all, 90 to 95 percent of your marketplace does not recognize they have a need for what you sell, but they will in the future. Lead nurturing engages them in your solution so that when they’re ready to buy, it’s top of mind.

- 16:48 You’re not selling to one or two decision makers anymore. Significantly more people are involved in the buying process, according to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Brian advises looking at recent sales and existing customers to identify which roles typically championed your solution to the rest of their team. Target similar roles in prospect companies. “These days, most of the selling happens when you’re not there,” he points out.

- 14:00 Research matters. Before you begin cold calling, make sure you have the best data possible. Brian relates how better data reduced the cost per lead by 67 percent for one MECLABS client. (Learn the details by going to timestamp 10:03 in this webinar replay.)

- 11:23 Optimize your teleprospecting funnel. Brian explains how to invest less energy making phone calls and more energy having conversations that matter.

- 10:24 According to MarketingSherpa, 92 percent of B2B buyers are open to receiving cold calls if they’re relevant, points out Brian. Relevancy means understanding their industry, their challenges, and their hot-button issues.

- 9:08 Listen to Brian demonstrate how to use relevant content to gain email opt-in.

- 6:07 Brian explains the power of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). He notes that CRM is critical if you’re going to manage multiple interactions along the buying cycle. Fortunately, it’s accessible to everyone, with free and inexpensive on-demand packages.

- 2:50 Develop a lead generation calendar to avoid the “teeter-totter effect.” That is, when prospecting is up, sales are low and vice versa. Be sure, when you’re involved in closing deals, that time is blocked out every week to do prospecting, and you’re “developing your plan and executing it,” advises Brian.

While Brian only had about 20 minutes to explain the value of lead nurturing in the complex sale, we’d love to know: What would you have added if you were being interviewed? Is there anything else you would have asked if you were the interviewer?

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Sales, Sales Leads