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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: AAPEX Shows

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

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

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

The graph at right, published in MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Benchmark Report, provides a snapshot of what marketers care about most. And it’s very telling, especially now. As we approach the fourth quarter, I am acutely aware of why marketers believe generating better leads is a higher priority than generating more leads.

In an economy that’s more precarious than ever, there’s simply no room to waste time, budget or resources.  And there is little that is more wasteful, and frustrating, than chasing down leads that will never be customers. It’s no wonder generating a high volume of leads has dropped in priority as sales cycles have become longer – lots of poorly qualified leads can bring a sales cycle to a screeching halt.

Conversely, I have learned how to accelerate your sales cycle to warp drive: fill it with well-qualified leads.

That’s why, during our next two B2B Lead Roundtable webinars, I’ll examine the smartest strategies you can execute right now to attract the highest-qualified leads to your sales funnel and speed them directly to your bottom line – just in time to meet your end-of-year goals. Finish 2011 Strong: Six Funnel Focal Points to Maximize Time, Resources and Revenues – Part II will be held Tuesday, September 20, at noon EDT, 11 a.m. CDT, and 9 a.m. PDT.

If you’re concerned about how you’re going to meet your sales goals and revenue projections, I strongly encourage you to attend.

Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads, Webcasts/Webinars

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

This is the second part of a series which asks, “Is Teleprospecting Too Complex for Testing?” The first post outlined what could seem to be insurmountable teleprospecting testing challenges. This post looks at how teleprospecting can be successfully tested.

You see, complexity really does tax our ability to think clearly about testing. Still, what are free markets but a giant global laboratory that tests various business models? Every day, someone somewhere invests his life savings in an entrepreneurial dream. That dream is an experiment – a test – to see if the market will want enough of what that person is selling so he can make a profit and grow his business.

These experiments are multivariate and never ending. Think about it: businesses must adjust to competitive threats and market opportunities, and reinvent themselves on the fly with ever more experimentation. You can see which experiments work: those are the companies that make money. Breakthrough experimentation is obvious, too. Those are the companies like Microsoft back in the ‘80s, Google more recently, and now Facebook that exploded from nothing into a giant corporate mushroom.

Granted, some of this experimentation is not all that scientific. In fact, too often it’s random and ill-conceived. But it’s all just a bunch of experiments. So complexity is not a barrier, really.

I believe there are three key considerations:

1. It’s very important to look at experience – and the wisdom gained from that – in the marketplace and use that knowledge as a baseline. The most important part of that baseline is the model:

• What kind of people do you hire?
• What kind of training do they need?
• What does the compensation look like?
• What kind of metrics do you use?
• What is the charter of the team, and what are the mutual obligations of sales and marketing?

There are really many models to choose from. Choosing the right one for your business will simply give you a better jumping-off point and eliminate needless experimentation. And if you review all the models and come up with some new innovation, at least your innovation is coming from an informed point of view. So that’s why case studies are so very critical.

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Sales, Sales Leads

Over the last several years, according to MarketingSherpa, marketing departments are increasingly taking responsibility for tele-prospecting. Why do you suppose that is happening?

Let me be clear: teleprospecting is not selling something over the phone, a function that remains squarely in the sales organization. B2B companies use telesprospecting to follow up on and qualify marketing-generated responders, and identify and generate demand through outbound  calling.

While I explained in a recent MarketingSherpa blog post that teleprospecting should serve as a bridge between sales and marketing, one department has to own the function, and marketing seems to have momentum. For good reasons.

Before I break down why marketing should own this function, let me say that people I respect believe with all their hearts that teleprospecting belongs in sales.  This is their general rationale:

1. It’s a sales activity.
2. The best teleprospecting representatives should have career paths into sales and should have a sales aptitude. (Ex-road warriors are a hot commodity in the recruiting profile of many organizations.)
3. You need a sales culture in a teleprospecting operation – yes, all the braggadicio and rah-rah stuff that the black-turtleneck crowd arches an eyebrow at.
4. The teleprospecting representatives must have a sales-like compensation structure, based upon results.
5. The teleprospecting representatives should be aligned with sales.

While there is always a situation that would be an exception, I generally agree with all of their points.

But so what?

Are any of these reasons valid enough for sales to own teleprospecting?  Sure, there’s the “if it walks like a duck” argument. But lots of us have duck walks and we’re not, in fact, ducks.

Here are more compelling arguments – on behalf of marketing ownership – listed in increasing importance:

1. With the right teleprospecting approach, more inquiries will convert to sales-accepted leads. The teleprospecting team can set up a structured approach to nurturing accounts. They can provide follow-up and network to identify the appropriate buying influence, cross-polinate one interest to another, and execute numerous other tactics that result in a bigger revenue contribution from upstream marketing campaigns.  Obviously, marketing must find the right balance between wringing the last nickel of campaign revenue and obtaining a good return on investment. But with responsibility for the entire function, better yields are entirely possible. Can sales do the same thing? Yes. But marketing has the greatest vested interest in capitalizing on upstream investments.

2. Teleprospecting can improve upstream demand generation yields. Not only does teleprospecting convert leads, it can elicit precise feedback on each one so marketing can better tune media, messaging, and tactics to improve the upstream investment yields. Can sales do this? Yes. But again, marketing has a much greater vested interest in making sure upstream campaigns work well.

3. Teleprospecting overlaps with demand generation. Clearly, when teleprospecting representatives cold call, share a value proposition, and discuss how solutions solve problems, those representatives are generating demand. They are just doing so by phone instead of emails, landing pages, blogs, and other forms of contact. Marketing owns demand generation. Teleprospecting is one really important tool in the demand generation toolkit. You wouldn’t take paid search or email marketing from the toolkit, would you? Giving marketing demand generation more clearly divides sales and marketing responsibilities at each stage of the buying cycle. The bigger the company, the more important it is to delineate responsibility. This divisions by stage of the buying cycle will reduce duplication of effort.

4. Integrating teleprospecting into other forms of outbound marketing can improve its efficiency. Integrated marketing works for a reason. So does integrated lead nurturing. You need one group to design and orchestrate messaging, timing, frequency, and method of contact, and then set up experiments to optimize the contact, messaging and information-exchange strategy. This lead-optimization experimentation must become de rigueur for marketing. That will be challenging if you take the most important tool – teleprospecting – out of the marketing toolkit.

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Cold Calling, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads