B2B Lead Blog

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

Marketing professionals, have you ever had to deal with sales teams that rarely moved forward on the leads you provided?

Sales professionals, have marketers ever bombarded you with leads that just weren’t going to result in a sale?

If you have experienced either situation, then you need to watch this two-and-a-half-minute video to find out how to respond.

This is the third in a series of five two-minute videos I developed for a leading IT organization to teach their channel partners about lead nurturing. My purpose was to make the concept easier to understand and accessible. Here are the first two clips:

What is the Difference Between Lead Nurturing and Lead Generation?

What Are the Ingredients of Lead Nurturing?

If you have any recommendations for this video series, let me know in the comments below. I welcome your insights and ideas.

Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Sales

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

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

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

Over the holidays, I had some time to really dive into the LinkedIn B2B LeadGen Roundtable discussions. One started by Ann Thornley-Brown, President & CEO, Executive Oasis International, Toronto, caught my attention. She started the discussion in August, yet members continue to provide feedback.

Ann wanted to know how happy the group was with the lead generation results of their social media campaigns.  “Are your efforts on LinkedIn and Twitter paying off?” she queried. “How many leads have you generated? How many specific pieces of business have you picked up? I know a lot of bright people who are really active on these sites and very few are seeing results. How about you?”

Her question, and too many of her 30-plus responses, illustrated the disconnection between the expectations of marketers who are out on the frontlines every day and marketing gurus proclaiming the wonders of social media.  After all, if you Google  ”Top 10 B2B Trends in 2011” you’ll see social media listed on every one of them.

Then why, if Ann’s discussion is any indication, are so many marketers dissatisfied with the results they’re getting from it?

I took this question to Sergio Balegno, Director of Research for MECLABS, the parent company of InTouch. He authors MarketingSherpa’s Social Media & PR Benchmark Guides, is considered a foremost authority on social media strategy, is quoted by the media extensively and presents at institutions like Harvard.

He’s also been in marketing for more than three decades, well before the internet was even on the scene. This gives him some not-so-typical long-term perspective in a world that demands instant gratification.

If anyone could provide insight to why this is going on, it’s Sergio. Here’s his take:

Read more…

Books, Lead Generation, Sales, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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

Companies that adopt a closed-loop process connecting marketing and sales report a higher return on marketing investment (ROMI) than those that don’t.

But ROMI just isn’t going to happen if your closed loop is a black hole. And that’s certainly the case at too many organizations judging from the feedback I received at my presentation this week at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Marketing Summit. (If you want more details, Andrew Spoeth with Marketo wrote a good summary of what I had to say over Modern B2B Marketing blog.)

When I asked my audience, all of them marketers, “How many of you have a problem with sales not updating your CRM?” Nearly everyone raised their hands and laughter erupted.

Which perfectly proves my point: depending on a software to close the loop is like a football team using infrequent text messages to communicate plays. You’re not going to communicate quickly enough what you really need to know to get to where you want to go.

That’s why I’m a huge proponent of huddling: face-to-face or voice-to-voice meetings where the marketing and sales teams gather to gauge progress, deal with challenges and opportunities, and celebrate successes. 

With effective communication, huddling and CRM tools, the loop will close, you’ll optimize your sales funnel and achieve sales and marketing’s highest objective: increased revenue performance.

Without it, you’re going to be running in circles.

Related posts:

Modern B2B Marketing: Optimizing the Entire Sales Funnel 
Huddles and 35 other way to improve sales and marketing teamwork 
Sales and Marketing – One Team

Do you see value in huddling and do you think it’s feasible in your organizations?  Why do you suppose, despite our best efforts, many sales people seemingly avoid or skip updating marketing generated leads, contacts and notes in CRM data bases?

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Sales