B2B Lead Blog

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 you’re a follower of marketing and sales blogs beyond just this one, you’ve probably noticed all kinds of blogs and tweets sprouting up today around The Blog Tree, just released by Eloqua and JESS3.

And I think the attention is well deserved.

Every blogger has some kind of blog roll, but without guessing from the names or clicking through each and every one listed, it’s challenging to know what you can learn from them and what value they provide. And if you wanted to know what blogs influence them, how they’re connected to other blogs, or how they contrast and compare to the rest, you were out of luck unless you had hours upon hours of time to invest in research.

Until The Blog Tree.

At a glance, you can see the scope of the best content in the marketing and sales blogosphere and how it all works together. Joe Chernov, Director of Content at Eloqua, puts it this way:

“Anyone can cobble together a list of Twitter tips or ‘must-read’ blogs and crown themselves ‘content marketers,’” he explains. “But when you produce content that surprises, informs and delights, you don’t have to market it. It blooms naturally.”

I am humbled and proud that the InTouch B2B Lead Generation Blog has a leaf on The Blog Tree, as do the blogs of our sister companies, Marketing Sherpa and MarketingExperiments.

I look forward to watching The Blog Tree continue to flourish as more thought leaders share their insights and fresh blogs emerge.

Read more…

Social Media, Thought Leadership, Weblogs

In just a couple of days, I’ll be in Barcelona speaking at the Cisco Partner Velocity Conference. 

To say I’m looking forward to this opportunity is an understatement. I’m honored to be asked to share my insights with their channel partners from around the world. And I can’t wait to hear firsthand the challenges and opportunities these marketers are dealing with.

The timing of this event couldn’t be better. Marketing is undergoing a remarkable evolution at this moment. The multitude of mediums we can use to speak to our marketplace is revolutionizing how we work. I believe the days of campaigns – where we start-stop-measure-tweak and start all over again – are over. Today, for marketing to effectively drive revenue, it must be a continuous, meaningful conversation. 

The most successful marketers will know how to lead that conversation both internally and externally so they can communicate to their customer the right things in the right way at the right time. Here’s a snapshot of what I mean and some of what I plan on sharing in Barcelona: 

You speak through channels: make sure what you’re saying makes sense 

If you’re going to say something to customers, make it meaningful to them. Here’s the acid test: anything you tweet, email, or blog should be valuable to them even if they never buy from you. And if you lure them in with that tweet, email or post, make sure that conversation stays on track throughout the sales process. Consider an experiment that the MECLABS Conversion Group conducted with NetSuite: 

• They optimized a pay-per-click (PPC) ad to specifically outline what makes them stand apart: the world’s #1 on-demand software with 6,459 customers worldwide.
• They changed the landing page that customers were directed to from the PPC ad. The page’s messaging and images continued the conversation by directly connecting to key messages on the PPC ad. There was no question that customers knew they were in the right place doing the right thing.
• They changed the order form, a place where many clients experience anxiety about whether they should proceed, to reiterate what motivated them to start the transaction in the first place. 
• The result: a 272% increase in responses to their lead generation form, 268% more projected revenue and a 302% increase in monthly profit.  

You use channels – in this case, the PPC to landing page to order form – to converse with the customer. Make sure the entire channel is optimized, not just an ad, not just a web page.  When you conduct marketing in a vacuum, you start a different conversation in a different way over and over again with the same audience.  If someone did that to you in real-life, real-time, you’d get annoyed and walk away. 

Pinpoint the best time to bring sales into the conversation

Read more…

Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech

Join me for a complimentary live webinar with MarketingSherpa’s Todd Lebo and Jen Doyle on “How to Generate Leads Using Search and Social Media” 

Here’s a chart of how Marketers are currently using Social Media. 

We’re hearing the words “inbound marketing” more and more these days. The idea is simple – your sales team’s pipeline magically fills as prospects seek your company out. Of course, it’s easier said than done. To help generate revenue using search engines and social media sites you’ll learn the following: 

• How to effectively deploy a search and social media campaign 
• Top 5 practices for integrating search and social for lead generation 
• How to optimize for search innovations 
• And much more… 

View the slides “How to Generate Leads Using Search and Social Media”

Lead Generation, Social Media, Webcasts/Webinars

Last year, I launched the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. It started with a simple goal: to create a group to discuss and share ideas that focus on the many  aspects of B2B lead generation such as lead nurturing, lead management, teleprospecting, social media and more.

We didn’t start the group to become the biggest; we just wanted it to be the best.

Amazingly, in less than a year, the group has grown to over 5,062 members with hundreds of discussions and thousands of helpful comments. With a such big community, It takes time to manage the spam and to keep the group focused but Brooke Bower (our fearless group manager at InTouch) is doing a great job. In fact, Brooke was written about in this post Go for Brooke by Michael Benidt and Sheryl Kay.

Thanks to all of the members whose contributions make this group a success. I can’t wait to see what another year will bring.

Join the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable on LinkedIn

Lead Generation, Social Media

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

It takes time and commitment, but LinkedIn has become ideal venue to nurture relationships and generate new leads, especially for sales people involved in a complex sale.

On that topic, I wrote an guest article for MarketingProfs, titled “10 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Generate Leads.” MarketingProfs decided to make it a “premium article” so it’s available only to paid subscribers.

You can read some of the ideas I shared in this summary article published by MarketingProfs.

Here’s just a few of the ideas I share:

1. Create a polished and personally branded profile on LinkedIn.
2. Join LinkedIn groups where your clients/customers gather and participate.
3. Target groups by activity level (relevance), not just by size
4. Post relevant content on groups.
5. Answer questions posted on LinkedIn.
6. Create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.

Read Are You the Missing Link?

Related Posts:

Lessons on Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation 
5 steps for using LinkedIn as lead generation tool

Also, if you’re interested in connecting on lead generation topics and use LinkedIn, consider joining me and  the 4,200 members of the LinkedIn B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group.

Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Referral Marketing, Sales, Social Media

A few months ago, at the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing summit in Boston, I was asked on how best to follow-up on leads generated via the web by Richard Hill. Richard writes over at the Idea Exchange blog on marketing automation related topics.

Marketing automation tools are useful because they can give us a ton of visibility into the visitors to our website, what they looked at, etc., and when visitors fill out form, we can link their contact information to their other offline marketing touch points.

The question is how do we use this information? Should we wait? Should we pounce right away and call them? What’s the best way to do this that helps us best identify leads? Here’s my thoughts to this question via a short interview I did with Richard Hill on, “To pounce or not to pounce?”

Here’s some tips Richard captured on how to better engage web leads:

1. Marketing and sales should jointly develop a website visitor engagement strategy.
2. Develop follow-up materials and content that your sales team can use to bring extra value to enhance their follow-up interactions that extend beyond the content future customers can get via your website. 
3. Create a call guide to help your sales team to be a resource first before they try “qualifying” the sales opportunity. What questions are must have verses nice to have?
4. If you’re using marketing automation, coach your team doing follow-up calls not to directly mention your marketing automation tracking capabilities (that can be ‘creepy’) think instead of how you can tailor a relevant conversation based on the content consumed being the topic your sales team starts with.

Also, I would add if you are generating a good volume of leads online consider creating or outsourcing a specialized lead engagement and qualification team.

Related Posts:
On Lead generation: Insist on lead quality over quantity
Social media’s impact on web forms and landing pages
Optimizing webforms to generate more leads through your website
Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads

Lead Qualification, Sales Leads, Social Media, Web/Tech

Don’t forget to secure your Twitter name! I signed up for twitter a year an half ago but that wasn’t soon enough to get my hands on my company’s Twitter name of choice of @intouch.

So if you were late to the party (like me) I’m happy to say there still might be hope. I found this blog post How to Snap Up that Twitter Username You’ve Always Wanted posted by @zee

I followed Zee’s process and I’m pleased to say it worked for us! Maybe it will work for you too. 

Here’s what we did

1. Emailed username@twitter.com with the following information:
   
   

   • The username you want
   • Your existing username, if you have one
   • Whether you want to change your username, or start a new account with the username you’re requesting

2. I received confirmation the email had been received a few minutes later, then another email asking me to reply with the above information (if I hadn’t already provided it).
3. Literally, 3 weeks later, I had my account switched from @intouch5 (BTW intouch1-4 were already taken!) to @intouch.

Why did it work?

The person who took my company’s name was inactive. Twitter has a policy that if a profile has been “inactive” for a period of time they release the name. In my case @intouch was never updated by the previous user so we were lucky. I hope this helps and I wish you success!

Current Affairs, Social Media, Web/Tech

To be successful at lead nurturing marketers can’t rely on one specific channel but rather they need to leverage a multi-modal portfolio of channels especially when you have a complex sale.

Why? The goal of lead nurturing is to maintain a relevant and consistent dialog with viable future customers – regardless of their timing to buy. In short, it’s about relationships.

To help illustrate, I created a mind map of what multi-modal lead nurturing looks like (click image to enlarge).

Are there any lead nurturing channels/modalities that I’m missing?

Download Multi-Modal_Lead_Nurturing

If you keep the idea about that nurturing is about building relationships top of mind, the way you nurture leads will naturally go beyond a single channel like e-mail. You’ll start thinking about how you and your sales people can be a relevant resource. When you do that, you don’t have to sell to people. They will come to you first when they are ready.

Related posts:
What IS and ISN’T Lead Nurturing
How lead nurturing improves lead generation ROI
5 Lead nurturing tips to create relevant and engaging emails

Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs