B2B Lead Blog

Last Thursday, I spent a solid half hour explaining the intricacies of how we helped one organization execute a lead-nurturing campaign that generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in eight months. Look for the replay of this MarketingExperiments webclinic later this week.

I delved into setting up lead-nurturing tracks, documenting the lead-nurturing process, measuring lead-to-opportunity conversion rates and the like. (Want clarity on what lead nurturing is?  Watch this two-minute video: http://bit.ly/fvJVL6)

At the webclinic’s conclusion I was asked, “What’s the quickest, cheapest way to implement lead nurturing?”

I get that question all too often.  So I thought I’d use this platform to share my barest-bones lead-nurturing strategy. I’ll do my best to resist the urge to elaborate. Volumes could be written about each bullet point. In fact, they have been.

1. Set up your nurturing database. Include all of the people you could potentially sell to: people you’ve met at trade shows, who have spoken with your sales team, who have responded to your website, etc.
2. Review your database. What do you know about the people in it? What industry are they in? What are their titles? Where did you get their names?
3. Decide what information would be most relevant to them. Begin by asking your sales team, “What questions do your customers ask most often? What do they care about? What issues are they facing?” Find content – articles, blogs, whitepapers, and the like – that addresses these issues. Pass this content by your sales team. Ask them whether their customers would value it.  As much as you can, repurpose content. For instance, whitepapers can be transformed to articles and articles to blogs.
4. Email prospects this relevant content, but whatever you do, don’t pitch. These should be simple emails that are written as if you are speaking to them directly.  Be genuinely helpful. Provide your sales team email templates so that they can follow up and engage in their own conversations.
5. Follow up with a human touch. Make a personal connection and follow up emails with phone calls to directly gauge prospects’ interest. Never rely on email alone.

Lead nurturing can be executed without expensive marketing automation tools; there are plenty of simple, low-cost platforms to start off with. You can create databases in Excel and run mail merges from Microsoft Outlook.

I hope this quick-and-dirty rundown of lead-nurturing execution is helpful. If you want more details, look for the webclinic posting later this week. Check out my  free eBook, too.

Related article: Lead Nurturing is Walking the Buying Path with Your Customers

Finally, let me know if you want me to simplify this explanation even further.  After all, Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Email Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Sales, Sales Leads

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

View webinar replay:

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

View and download slides only here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more…

Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads, Thought Leadership, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay

Have you had some great marketing successes this year? Then you’ll want to let my colleagues at MarketingSherpa know. They’re compiling their ninth annual MarketingSherpa 2011 Wisdom Report. It shares the best thoughts, ideas, anecdotes and takeaways from marketers in 2010. 

In fact, even if you’ve had disappointments, and are willing to share, they’d like to hear from you as well. After all, failure is often the best teacher.

Tell us, what are some of the best lessons you learned this year?   

Great marketers are always working so diligently to put everything and everyone else in the spotlight. That effort deserves attention. That’s why I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to attain some very positive publicity. 

Share your wisdom here, but you’ve got to do it soon because the deadline’s December 21.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Cold Calling, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Referral Marketing, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Trigger Events, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth

If your 2011 marketing budget is tighter than you want it to be, trying giving sales less leads.

According to Marketing Sherpa’s just-released 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, a whopping 80 percent of the 935 respondents said they pass unqualified leads along to sales. That’s a costly mistake. 

Let me explain why: 

For every 100 raw leads, only 4 to 7 are ready to buy. It’s no wonder that the 1,800 companies surveyed as part of CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization Report said their sales teams spend 20 percent of their time generating leads. (And I’ve known of sales departments spending a lot more time than that.)  In essence, they’re sorting through the raw leads that marketing sends them to get to that 4 to 7 percent who might actually buy.

What if marketing did a better job of qualifying leads before sending them to sales? In his webinar, Trends and Challenges of Lead Generation in 2011, Dave Green explained, in graphic detail, the impressive amount of profit that could result.  

Think about it: What if you were able to reclaim 10 or 20 percent of your sales budget by increasing sales productivity? What if a mere percentage of that was diverted to your marketing budget to invest in better lead-qualification tools such as marketing automation, content strategy, lead nurturing, and telequalification? How much revenue could that potentially drive? How can you make a water-tight financial case to your CEO to prove that giving marketing more money will help significantly increase sales productivity and revenue capacity?

Get the answers by listening to the webinar replay.

 Watch the webinar recording

 Download the presentation slides

Read more…

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads

When I asked members of the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable on LinkedIn how companies can improve alignment between sales and marketing, our discussion board was inundated with keen insight and brutal honesty.  Marketers and sales professionals were clearly eager to square off about why we too often miss the mark and what we can do about it. 

This was precisely the frontline reality I was seeking before presenting “Playbook  
for Marketing and Sales Alignment: How to Collaborate to Optimize Lead Generation Programs,” at Frost & Sullivan’s Growth, Innovation and Leadership Conference last month in San Francisco.

Even though, as most of you know, I intensely study this issue, business transforms itself  at light speed; that’s why I appreciate the thousands of professionals who make up the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable. They’re in the thick of it, dealing with the challenges, seizing the opportunities. For them, there’s no time for philosophizing; it’s all about driving revenue. That’s why the roundtable is my favorite sounding board and a powerful source of inspiration.

If you review the pages of responses – they’re a lively read, trust me – they all point to what Doug Kessler, Creative Director of Velocity Partners, UK, summed up in his statement, “This feels like the next big frontier in B2B.”

Doug nailed it: where there’s room for improvement there’s room for opportunity and the revenues that come with it.

If the discussion is any indication, savvy marketers and sales professionals are well on their way to making the most of that opportunity: they know when they’ve gone off track, but they definitely know how to get to where they need to go. Here is a small sampling of some juicier tidbits:

If you don’t have strong leadership, you won’t stay on track. “It starts at the top,” explains Andrea Courtin, Marketing Consultant for TrusteSolutions in Houston, TX. “For sales and marketing teams to truly align, they need a mandate from the executive team.”

Read more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone’s getting squeezed for ROI. This is nothing new but the pressure is even higher for marketers who are looking at proving their revenue contribution. We’ve all heard the stories about the accolade-winning marketing campaigns that didn’t move the sales needle. CEOs want far more than just awards and pretty brochures. They want proven results. 

They’re demanding marketers demonstrate – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that they’re driving revenue. So, ideally, marketers set before them spread sheets proclaiming high lead-conversion and even better expense-to-revenue ratios; the CEO smiles with satisfaction and pads the next year’s marketing budget.

But should they?

That’s the essential question of Dave Green’s whitepaper, Measuring Lead Generation Effectiveness: a Case for a New Approach. He challenges marketers to be painfully honest: do they really deserve the credit they’re taking? Are their fabulous campaigns the primary reason deals are closing, or are the wins a reflection of the blood, sweat
and tears of tenacious sales professionals?

Read more…

Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, ROI Measurement, Sales Leads

Improving marketing performance is not just about implementing the right technology (i.e. marketing automation, lead scoring, nurturing etc.); it’s also about creating a strategic process to involve people in the process of lead nurturing and qualification.

You may have the best content in the world, but there are just some things that must be discovered through a human, two-way conversation. To put some perspective on how the human touch impacts marketing performance, I was interviewed by Christopher Doran VP, Marketing for Manticore Technology to focus on the importance of leveraging personalized outreach along with marketing automation to improve your success.

In the interview I answer the following questions from Chris:

• How can strategic phone outreach impact lead scoring?
• What do you think it’s critical for marketing to learn on the phone that they cannot learn through online behavior?
• What are the top 3 relationship-building impacts teleprospecting can help marketing achieve?
• Can you share an example of something learned in a call that enabled a company to improve their online marketing programs?
• What do you think is the biggest benefit for marketing from Marketing Automation systems?

I’d love your input… Where else do you see the human touch making a big impact marketing performance?

Read the interview: “How the Human Touch Impacts Marketing Performance”

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads

Lead generation remains the top reason most companies exhibit at events and tradeshows. And B2B marketers are constantly looking for ideas they can use to drive more ROI from their events budget.

I came across this helpful post by Mike Thimmesch on 100 Trade Show Lead Generation Ideas that’s worth checking out. The following is a sampling of Thimmesch’s tips that I though were useful:

4. Go to fewer trade shows, but put more effort into booth staff preparation and promotions for each remaining show.
6. Track leads to determine and expand in the shows with the best ROI
9. Get a booth space closer to the hub of traffic, or by a bigger competitor
28. Have your sales people invite their prospects to visit your booth and set up meetings in advance
29. Send an email invitation to the show’s pre-registered attendee list for this year, and the registered attendee list from last year
30. Use social media to reach more attendees
32. Post your trade show schedule on your website with a link to sign up for appointments
45. Giveaway something useful to your target audience
46. Have a contest for attendees in your booth

After reading the list of 100, here’s a few more tips I would add:

1. Follow-up quickly after the event. Think about your follow-up process before the event happens not afterwards.
2. Create event follow-up content pieces, talking points and email templates for your sales team to use to add value and continue the conversation in a relevant way rather than “pitching” everybody.
3. Develop a nurturing track that for event attendees connects with the theme or the content of the event. Try to do this at least for a few months at minimum.
4. See the event as a conversation (or conversation starter) not a acampaign. Don’t stop the dialog. Brainstorm ways you can keep the dialog going.

What other tips would you add to this list?

Related posts:
Lead Generation tips for Tradeshows Conferences

Direct Marketing, Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Sales Leads

The single biggest issue for B2B marketers is effective lead generation. I wrote an eight part series on building an effective lead generation program a while back. To help readers who missed the series, I pulled all the posts together in order.

In this series, you’ll read the following posts:

1: The Right Mindset: Conversations, not campaigns
2: Sales and Marketing – One Team
3: Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile 
4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition
5: Treat your marketing database as a valued asset
6: A Multi-modal lead generation portfolio approach
7: Effective lead management
8: Lead nurturing for lead development

You may also find this ebook that connects with the series relevant.

Can you think of other critical success factors I’m missing?

B2B Telemarketing, Books, CRM, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech