B2B Lead Blog

I was was recently interviewed by Dave Stein, CEO and Founder of ES Research Group, and author of How Winners Sell (a great book by the way). During the interview we talk about the following topics:

• What works to get sales and marketing alignment
• How the marketing funnel impacts the sales funnel 
• Reengaging and optimizing past sales leads
• Teleprospecting and nurturing tactics

Listen to podcast now

Also, Check out Dave Stein’s Blog for Sales Leaders. Dave is an internationally recognized thought leader in the area of sales performance, sales effectiveness and especially sales training. Whether you’re in B2B marketing or sales or mangement, you’ll find his commentary on what’s happening in the industry relevant.

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Podcasting, Sales, Sales Leads

The biggest obstacle to go-to-market success (and lead generation ROI for that matter) is the lack of good execution.

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council’s latest study, “Driving the Bottom Line from the Front Line,” assessed the go-to-market processes and capabilities of global companies. According to the study, "Surprisingly, over 46% of respondents gave themselves failing grades when assessing their own go-to-market effectiveness, with only six percent giving their capabilities the highest marks, and just 29% calling themselves quite effective." 

The study concluded that poor collaboration between sales and marketing is a key reason for go-to-market failure and this is where the leadership from upper management plays a vital role in successful execution. Todd Ebert over at the BAD Marketing Blog gives some additional insights on the CMO study here.

I agree with their findings. With that said, it requires more than just effective upper management involvement. I believe that effective collaboration requires each of us to better managers ourselves. 

Becoming an effective marketer goes far beyond creativity and careful campaign management. Like any other functional role, marketers will execute successfully, more often, if we are first and foremost good managers.   

Collaboration between sales and marketing and go-to-market execution will come more naturally if we each focus on our basic management skills: Leadership, communication, planning, organizing, staffing, and controlling.

I encourage you to check out The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. If you only read one book about how to improve your personal effectiveness I think you will find this book to be a good choice. It was written quite a while ago but it’s a wonderful resource.

Related post: Why CEOs Must Be Actively Involved in Lead Generation

Current Affairs, Lead Generation, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement

I just had a great interview with Robin Carey, co-founder of the Customer Collective.

Salespeople have become the second choice for information among buyers who’d rather just go to the Internet. This trend actually creates an opportunity for those who think and act like trusted advisors.

You can listen here

In the interview, I share how I got my start and how the Internet has shifted control away from marketers and salespeople. I also describe how today’s sales people can add value to the buying process by becoming expert content filters for prospects. This is the key to lead nurturing with a human touch.

What’s The Customer Collective? It’s a new business outreach community for sales and marketing executives. It was built in collaboration with established media companies like Business Week, ZDNet and BNET. I see it as a social media site (that doesn’t focus on social media) but rather looks at real meat and potatoes sales and marketing. We need more sites like this.

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, My Podcast, Podcasting, Sales, Thought Leadership

When I started the B2B Lead Generation blog back in 2003, my purpose was to have this blog be a launch pad for practical ideas, not commercials. So that’s why many of you probably don’t know what I do in my day job as CEO of InTouch. But today I’m making an exception. 

After a long partnership with MarketingSherpa as a featured speaker and presenter at their B2B marketing summits, we made the decision to be acquired by MECLABS Group, the parent company of MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments. Read the press release.

With this acquisition, nothing will change for InTouch clients, future clients, partners and employees. We’ll keep our name, our staff, and office in Arden Hills, MN. I along with our executive team will stay intact and we will continue to focus on building the company.

I often talk about the need for a “human touch” in marketing to overcome this age of automation and depersonalization. I fervently believe the only way to drive sales is to feed this need for relationships.

What exactly does InTouch do? We’re a professional B2B contact center that provides clients with the essential human touch required to develop and convert more leads into sales.

At age 24, I started InTouch (then Carroll Communications) back in 1995 out of my apartment living room with a second hand computer and $350 (I’m not kidding). At the time, I hoped to make a living while making a difference with how companies acquire and grow customer relationships through B2B telemarketing.

In 1999, we acquired one of our clients with which we had developed awfully good synergies, iNETech, an IT consulting Services Company specializing in software application development and I gained two great business partners, Pat Lorch and Brandon Stamschror. The new name of the firm, of course, was InTouch.

Since then, our company has been executing lead generation programs designed to profile sales prospects, uncover viable opportunities and create demand. Core services include: teleprospecting, lead qualification, lead nurturing, lead management, and marketing automation tools. Peg Davis over at MarketingExperiments blog wrote a great post that explains more.

That’s why all of us at InTouch are excited about tapping into MarketingSherpa’s practical case studies and know how, and MarketingExperiments’ online laboratory to discover what really works. Together, we can profoundly change the way people think about lead generation for the complex sale.

Plus, now our research for you will be supplemented by the team at MEC Labs Group. They run an actual laboratory facility in Jacksonville Beach, FL, where they conduct live campaign experiments in partnership with folks such as The New York Times and Reuters.

I want to sincerely thank you all of you for reading this blog. I have learned so much from your comments and our conversations. This blog will continue. And I look forward to us learning, doing and sharing together what really works for lead generation for the complex sale. 

Current Affairs, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Public Relations (PR), Sales Leads

Are you too busy to think? Many of us feel that way at times. As simple as it seems, finding time to think effectively is vital to developing a solid sales, marketing and lead generation strategy. Without question, our mindsets ultimately influence our strategic choices.

Which is why I think Michael Webb’s post on the subject of thinking differently and banishing waste from sales and marketing is very compelling.

Michael explains that one of the most valuable questions he asks sales and marketing teams is, “What kinds of things clearly add no value to your sales and marketing operations?” Webb has found that people react strongly to this question. He often hears the same feedback over and over. Such as:

• Time spent on administration, reporting, and menial tasks (leaving little time for customers)
• Trade shows and events that generate boxes of “leads” not worth calling on
• Marketing literature that no one reads
• Wasting time with the wrong prospects

I see these same things too. So, instead of spending time looking at ways we can to create more of the same activity, why not think about how you can focus on what your internal and external customers really care about?

Read more…

Lead Generation, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads

If you are like most B2B marketers, lead generation is at top of your priority list. But as you may already know, generating tons of “leads” doesn’t guarantee sales will follow.

Does the sales team either ignore your hard-won leads or complain about their quality? Do you ever wonder was the lead even contacted? If so, what’s the status?  Could you have helped move it along by going deeper in the sales cycle?

This chronic lack of visibility has a snowball effect of making it challenging for marketers to measure their effectiveness and understand their return on marketing investment (ROMI). So what can be done about it? 

Here’s 7 Tips to Improve Sales Follow-up

1. Get buy in from sales team on your "sales ready" lead definition
2. Provide qualification information for each sales lead
3. Qualify and Distribute sales ready leads immediately
4. Communicate hand off to sales person
5. Measure sales pursuit – If lead not followed up it will be pulled / reassigned
6. Regularly close the loop -what gets measured gets done
7. Sales management must also audit and track rep follow-up

How often do you close the loop? I’ve found the most powerful way to improve sales follow-up on marketing generated leads is doing more frequent sales and marketing huddles.

Read Collaboration Huddles and 35 Other Ways to Improve Sales and Marketing Teamwork

Finally, if you’re using these tips already and still feel that your marketing and sales teams are working against each other instead of being on the same team, you could have some challenges with office politics read on.

Read more…

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Qualification, Leadership, ROI Measurement, Sales, Sales Leads

Fellow blogger Tom Pick, over at the The WebMarketCentral Blog tagged me to write something off topic, interesting, seasonal and non-work related this week. I liked Tom’s off topic post (great pictures) chronicling his kid’s deluxe tree house that began "innocently as a tree deck." I love learning history so I’ll see if I can meet at least a few of the above conditions in my off-topic post.

In the past, I’ve written about giving away ideas. But lately I’ve been wondering about selling ideas. So yesterday – somewhere between family, food and fireworks – I had a chance to think a bit about the Fourth of July and how it came to be. I believe history provides us a valuable lesson on how to sell an idea.

While historians may debate about the controversies and motives behind the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they all agree that it represented two fundamental ideas; freedom and liberty.

But before the declaration letter was drafted and signed those two revolutionary ideas had to be sold. Here’s a story you may not know… I’ll give you a hint: before there was “voice of the customer” there was “voice of the people.” 

Read more…

Leadership, Personal Messages, Sales

Would you like some inspiration or some fresh ideas for your marketing and lead generation strategy?

If so, MarketingSherpa just released their “Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-08” and I had the privilege to interview Anne Holland about this year’s findings. Very useful stuff. Download the Executive Summary

During our in-depth interview, Anne shares some terrific insights and helpful data on numerous marketing and lead generation tactics.

Three data points that I found particularity interesting:

1. Teleprospecting works. As we all know, tech buyers are a notoriously tough crowd to cold call. Sherpa’s findings contradict the "calling doesn’t work" line we’ve heard for years. Their data shows that over 50% of tech buyers admitted to short listing a vendor after receiving a well timed and relevant phone call.

2. Sherpa’s data shows that more decision makers (not just influencers) are attending webinars and watching archived events. This indicates the importance of relevant educational events and online content for lead generation.

3. Companies who provided fewer but higher quality "sales ready" leads to their sale people have better sales conversion rates than those that send lots of early stage leads and that creating a "cost per lead" culture just does not work.

Listen to podcast now (31 min MP3)

Read more…

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, My Podcast, Podcasting, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Referral Marketing, Sales, Sales Leads, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth

As someone in B2B, do you feel left out of the social media buzz? I read a good article on "What’s Wrong With Social Media For B2B Marketing" by John Miller who also writes the Modern B2B Marketing blog.

John’s article highlights something most of us in B2B marketing have come to accept. B2C marketing gets the vast majority of links and clicks while B2B hears the quiet sound of crickets chirping.

I remember when I started blogging in 2003 and there was only 11 true B2B marketing related blogs. Now there’s are over a hundred. John lists about 80 of them on his blog.

John concludes, "The result is that there are fewer pundits and thought leaders writing about B2B marketing, resulting in fewer links to those early adopters who do write about business marketing techniques. And since links mean leadership on the web, the result is that the less-trendy subjects in B2B marketing—like marketing accountability and lead management—get left behind."

Personally, I think the reason B2B marketing receives less attention comes down to time and momentum.

Read more…

Current Affairs, Lead Generation, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Podcasting, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth

I just got back from speaking at the New Marketing Summit and it was great. But it seems that I can’t attend a marketing conference with out hearing marketers swap complaints about their sales teams.

I don’t know about you but I’m fed up with the same old story.  Companies continue to waste millions of dollars because of poor teamwork and collaboration between marketing and sales.

Even the very best lead generation program cannot compensate for poor teamwork and collaboration, but unfortunately we continue hear about it time and again.

Sales and marketing often believe they are working together but collaboration takes more than annual or even quarterly planning meetings. Teamwork is something that must exist in a very real way each day.

I’ve found the most powerful way to foster teamwork and collaboration is to do more frequent and effective meetings. At InTouch we call them “huddles." We have short huddles daily and weekly between the marketing and sales team. 

In our huddles we do three things: Talk. Understand. Execute. (Repeat again) Talk. Understand. Execute. (Repeat again) Talk. Understand. Execute. Okay got it? (Repeat again).

In addition to huddles, there are other ways that sales and marketing can and should collaborate together.  This is just one list of 35 possibilities that we’ve tackled in our huddles and I hope you’ll add your own too.

Read more…

Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Referral Marketing, Sales Leads