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

I can’t stress this enough: when it comes to marketing, if we’re not constantly learning, we’re going to find ourselves left behind faster than ever.

Some people say I’m an expert in B2B lead generation because I wrote a book on it, but you know what? I am astonished by what I didn’t know then compared to what I know today. This past year has been especially illuminating thanks to the brilliance of smart marketers who are expanding and perfecting the lead-generation concepts I wrote about years ago.

This year’s B2B Lead Roundtable webinars are testament to that.

In February, Paul Teshima, SVP of Product Management at Eloqua, set the tone for the webinar year. He defined the tenets of the new world of marketing in Revenue Performance Management. “We’ve seen a problem now where, even though marketing is doing a great job of generating leads, sales still cannot handle the volume and they slip away,” explains Paul. “Some of the leading companies today are really focusing on this idea of managing and bringing marketing sales together, in a more effective way, now that they’ve solved some of the tactical problems.”

Paul explains how here: The Future of Marketing: The Evolution from Demand Generation to Revenue Performance Management

In March, Michelle Mogelson Levy, Associate Vice President of Global Marketing at ECI Telecom, detailed how she executed an ultra-successful content strategy campaign and how that transformed their entire marketing strategy.

“We had to put ourselves in line with our buyers’ journey so we knew how to engage them at the right level,” she points out. “We had to provide value to our prospects, who have never heard of us before, and position ourselves as a company that understands their marketplace and their business issues – a partner as well as an expert.” Learn more here: How ECI Developed an Entire Content Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results

In April, John Johnston, eBusiness Marketing Manager for Volvo North America, outlined how he streamlined, integrated and automated lead generation for a marketing program for 20 different heavy construction segments for dealers in 125 countries.

“We took online marketing activities, leveraged their analytics and optimized – measure, take action and repeat. It’s a continuous loop that makes the database and the lead-generation process better and better.”

Watch the webinar to find out how John’s efforts are providing customers and prospects the precise information they need to make a smart purchasing decision, and dealers a much more detailed, useful picture of who they’re selling to. And much of this is happening in real time. Learn more here: How CRM Revolutionized Marketing and Lead Generation at Volvo North America

In May, Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for MECLABS Leads Group, and I expounded on the powerful combination of excellent data and the human touch to make the best use of sales time and resources.

According to MarketingSherpa, 80% of marketing leads are lost or discarded because even though someone may have provided basic contact information, they may not be ready to talk to a salesperson. Teleprospecting bridges the gap.

Make sure you’re setting a strong foundation for your campaigns with an accurate list. Brandon revealed the outcomes of a breakthrough experiment that tested how higher cost/high quality lead data affected the cost per lead. The results were astounding – the difference between the best- and worst-performing lists was $581 per lead. Learn more here: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads and How One Company Slashed Their Cost Per Lead by More than Half

In June, Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research Group, shared why inbound marketing – a strategy where the prospects find you as opposed to you finding them – is critical, and how integrating social media and SEO drives it.

“Companies with integrated social media and SEO achieve 60% better conversion rates…Search rankings are driven by relevance, relevance enhances an organization’s credibility, and this credibility helps to drive conversion rates,” says Sergio. “It’s an essential ingredient to a B2B marketing program.”

To prove it, Sergio shared five steps that helped an email marketer pull in 70% more leads and doubled revenue in one year. Learn more here: How to Integrate Social Media and SEO to Drive More Leads and Increase Marketing ROI

In July, Dave Elkington, Chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, revealed how companies are leaking significant revenue in their sales and marketing funnels – knowledge gained through analyzing two billion communications with 80 million customer profiles. He outlined astonishing facts like 43% of companies don’t even respond to inbound leads! But for those that know how to respond, the opportunities to make the sale grow exponentially – 78% of sales goes to companies that respond first, not to the company with the best or cheapest product.

It’s no wonder that Dave points out that venture capital firms want companies in their portfolios to have inside sales departments. “They’ll recruit, train and transplant inside sales teams into their portfolio companies,” he says. For more data that will show you how to speed leads into your sales pipeline, go here: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Find out how:

• Clarifying value proposition helped one company decrease cost-per-acquisition by 66% and multiplied monthly profit four times over
• Re-engaging clients helped one company attain grow its business by 64%
• To quickly and easily choose the best lists
• To time lead-generation activities to attain the highest possible return on investment of resources
• Closed-loop feedback makes sales professionals worship their marketing department

Find out much more here: Finish 2011 Strong: Six Funnel Focal Points to Maximize Time, Resources and Revenues Part 1 and Part 2

It all came full circle in October, when Jen Doyle, MarketingSherpa Senior Research Manager and Lead Author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, discussed what more than 1,745 marketing organizations had to say about their lead generation efforts in 2011.

“It’s increasingly challenging for marketers to achieve success, and challenges are growing in pertinence year after year,” she explains. “Perceived effectiveness of tactics is declining severely. It’s getting more difficult to achieve the same results from the same marketing activities.”

She points out, however, that may be due to the fact that marketers still aren’t optimizing their funnels:

• 68% haven’t identified their sales or marketing funnels.
• 61% send leads directly to sales.
• 79% haven’t established lead scoring.
• 65% haven’t nurtured leads.

Learn how to make 2012 a better year here: 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report: How Marketers are Transforming Mounting Pressures, Challenges into Revenues.

We are in the process of planning our 2012 webinar year. What would you like to know more about? What information would help you generate more leads? How can we help you stay on top of lead-generation innovations? Leave a comment below.

B2B Telemarketing, Content Marketing, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership

How many emails have you sent prospects and customers this week? How many opened them? How many acted on them?

If you’re like most marketers, the answer too often is, “Not enough.”

It’s a hard fact: people are being inundated with so many sales pitches via email that it’s harder than ever to get prospects to not delete your email, no less take action. It’s no wonder that when marketers are obsessively focused on what’s in it for their prospects to open an email, remarkable things happen – like several million new subscribers.

That’s precisely what Citrix attained through a campaign to grow their subscriber base. Typically, when organizations want to grow their email lists, they do things like coming up with a gimmick, giveaway or contest to convince people to sign up. Instead, Citrix decided to leverage their lists to attain new subscribers. They emailed content their existing subscribers valued so much that they eagerly shared it with their colleagues and Citrix made it easy for them to do so. The subscribers’ colleagues appreciated the emails so much that they decided to subscribe too.

The result: an overall email list increase of several million contacts (35%), “which has greatly increased our media spend efficiency. We are generating demand without having to directly pay for the usual media channels like banner ads, Adwords, etc.” explains Baxter Denney, Manager, Database Marketing at CitrixOnline.

It also resulted in receiving the 2012 Email Marketing Awards’ B2B Best in Show. To read the details of how the Citrix email campaign conclusively proved the value of sharing vs. selling download the free MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2012 Special Report. It features more than 100 pages of the industry’s smartest, most-effective innovations, as well as campaign descriptions, sample emails, extensive results metrics and judges’ analyses.

And if you want to learn even more about the most innovative and effective ways marketers are using email to drive more opportunity and revenue, consider attending the next Email Marketing Summit, Feb. 7 – 10, at Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. To review an agenda go here: 2012 Email Marketing Summit. Receive an extra $500 off registration by entering promotion code 192-ST-1004.

Email Marketing, Social Media

If you’re struggling with managing social media programs in the B2B marketplace, Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe  (pictured at below) has some news for you: Most of your peers are too.

Why is she so certain? As a research manager for MECLABS Conversion Group, Zuzia spent two full days at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit in San Francisco providing one-on-one coaching to some of the nation’s leading B2B marketers. (Read more about who attended here.)  
Here’s what she has to say about her experience.

After my time in San Francisco, I am further convinced
social media is one of the most
challenging channels for B2B marketers to manage. It’s so unpredictable, yet there’s so much pressure surrounding it – everyone feels like they need to be on every social media channel or else. And there’s so many people claiming to be social media experts,  but don’t just blindly follow their advice. You see, I don’t believe anyone can be a true social media guru because there are constantly new ideas, platforms and  methodologies.

In fact, you could make a full-time job out of monitoring the hundreds of social media blogs and attain hundreds of different opinions on what you should be doing with your social media program. It’s no wonder marketers feel overwhelmed. 

So what’s a B2B marketer to do?

•  Know your audience. Where are they gathering online to learn about your product or services? Do they have favorite publications or platforms they turn to for industry information? For instance, an engineer may have a Facebook profile, but is he really on there to learn about the newest technology?

Fact is, you can never know your audience well enough. This was driven home to me when I had the privilege of spending more than an hour in a coaching session with the head of marketing for a European bank. He revealed to me the details of what should have been a highly successful social media campaign targeting a Scandinavian country. His bank invited fans of a super-popular European sport to submit a video depicting their passion for it to the bank’s Facebook page. Winners received prizes like a week’s stay at a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi, meeting a star athlete, cash awards and free gear. They blasted online and national TV advertising everywhere throughout the country. They even had 150,000 page views. But alas, only a handful of people people submitted a video.

He was flummoxed. “What could I have done to make it a success?” he asked me.

There really was nothing he could have done, except understand that his audience was more private than other cultures. Apparently, no matter how passionate they are about a sport, his audience clearly wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of displaying that passion to their entire nation.

• Know what your competitors are doing. Analyze and monitor their social media. Learn from their mistakes and successes. Watch what’s being said, and where, about your company, product or service.
   
• Begin with a blog. Why be on social media if you don’t have anything to say? A blog is the means to provide meaningful information your audience will care about and a vehicle to distribute it to other social media platforms. You don’t need to write all of your own content. You can repurpose relevant content you’ve already created – this could be whitepapers, articles, and news releases. Use one of your public relations professionals or a freelance journalist to interview experts within your organization and write a blog post on their behalf. Use guest bloggers or provide content from a third-party source that’s respected in your field.  
   
• Consistency is critical. Make social media the responsibility of one or two people in the organization to maintain a uniform voice and image across your platforms. However, be sure to encourage as many people as possible within your organization to engage, post comments, promote your posts and spread your message.
   
• Because social media is so unpredictable, test and test some more. Is your audience paying attention and what are they paying attention to? Social media was created so people could engage and interact online, so it’s easy to ask and respond to questions, post polls, and conduct surveys. Don’t miss out on this unprecedented opportunity to identify what your audiences wants to see, read and receive.  

Again, developing, managing and monitoring social media is the bane of too many B2B marketers’ professional lives. It doesn’t have to be.  Don’t be overwhelmed by the newest advice from a social media guru.  Be strategic and selective.

What challenges have you faced launching B2B social media campaigns? How did you handle them? We’d love to know. And, if you want to learn more about how to make social media drive real opportunity for your organization, I strongly recommend you subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Blog which reports the latest from real-world marketers on what works – and what doesn’t – in social media, email marketing, content strategy and more.

Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Weblogs

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

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

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

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

View and download slides via SlideShare.

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

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

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

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

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

ROI Measurement, Social Media, Webinar Replay

If anyone knows the smartest, most innovative approaches marketers are using right now to drive more ROI, it’s Sergio Balegno. As Director of Research for MarketingSherpa/MECLABS Primary Research, he and his team of analysts regularly survey B2B marketers and compile their findings in publications like the just-released Social Marketing Benchmark Report. It analyzes how 3,342 B2B marketers are strategically leveraging social marketing and proving its value to the C-suite, which is what Sergio will discuss at our next B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar on June 21.

He’ll reveal how:

• B2B marketers are integrating social media and SEO to increase conversion rates by 59 percent.
• One B2B company used this combination to pull 70 percent more leads and double annual revenue per account.
• You can apply these strategies to do the same for your organization. 

This isn’t going to be another social media webinar talking about listening to your customers and being authentic. This will focus on key social media and SEO integration strategies that are driving real business results right now. If that’s what you want from your social marketing strategy, this webinar will definitely be an intelligent investment of your time.  I hope you can make it!

Lead Generation, Social Media, Webcasts/Webinars

I have a confession: you know the cliché about the cobbler’s kids? I’ve been there and done that. And you can see proof of it back in April, 2009, when I blogged about how to best leverage LinkedIn as a lead generation tool.  Step five was “create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.”

The problem was that my company at the time, InTouch, which became a part of MECLABS this year, didn’t have its own LinkedIn Group.  My message to my blog readers should have been, “Do as I say not as I do.”

I knew, having advised my readers to start a LinkedIn group, that I should at least consider doing the same. But I wanted to make absolutely sure that whatever I created would contribute value that couldn’t be found anywhere else. Why add to the noise?

So I began perusing groups in earnest. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any one, at the time, that was completely dedicated to lead generation. Okay, let me qualify that – one that was completely dedicated to lead generation without self-promotion drowning out discussions that addressed real issues. That was the gap that needed to be filled, so three weeks later I launched the B2B Lead Roundtable.

Today, we’re celebrating its second birthday, and I am proud to say we are on the verge of 8,500 members. In fact, I expect that we will reach and exceed that milestone this week.

I am also glad that the B2B Lead Roundtable became what I had hoped: a forum where professionals can share their questions and insights without being inundated with people trying to sell them something. Instead, they’re given legitimate, compelling feedback from professionals who genuinely know what they’re talking about.  That’s probably because the vast majority are seasoned executives.

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, Content Marketing, Current Affairs, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech

This week I was in San Francisco doing a live, streamed presentation, Uncovering Trends and Best Practices in Lead Generation, for Cisco. It’s part of their on-going Partner Velocity Program which provides in-person events, in-depth resources, and online marketing tutorials to their value-added resellers worldwide.

I believe Cisco sets the standard for how to engage channel partners, and am honored that they asked me to share my ideas around where they need to focus their marketing attention and resources. In essence, smart marketers approach their work like a portfolio manager; they’re constantly thinking about and testing the optimal investment strategy.

In the playback below I examine how to make the best investments of marketing time, money and energy, and point out the areas where too many marketers are squandering opportunity and resources. I cover:

• The latest trends in lead generation.
• How to create buyer personas.
• Social media as a lead generation tactic.
• Steps to optimizing the B2B mix.
• Guiding principles to effective B2B telemarketing.

Of course, I only had an hour to speak and each of these topics could be a webinar on their own. In fact, that’s precisely the case next week, considering the topic for the next B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads – How One Company Slashed Their Cost per Lead by More than Half.

What other points would you like me to expand on? Let me know; watch the broadcast replay and review Cisco’s excellent blog post about my presentation. I’d love to hear from you.

B2B Telemarketing, Human Touch, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Webcasts/Webinars, Webinar Replay, Weblogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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