B2B Lead Blog

Siemens Industry, Inc., is proving that engineers just wanna have fun. And it’s filling the sales pipeline in the process.

In March of 2011, the Siemens team launched Plantville. This online game simulates the experience of being a plant manager. Players are challenged to maintain operation of their plant while improving productivity, efficiency and facility health.

Since that time, 23,000 engineering professionals have spent approximately 14 minutes with the game every time they visit the site. That means at almost any time of the day someone somewhere is playing Plantville. These players include:

• Prospects and customers from more than 11,500 companies
• Engineering recruits from more than 600 universities and colleges nationwide
• Several government associations
• More than 3,500 employees

Plantville was inspired by need and opportunity. Back in 2010, Siemens Industry’s communications team was challenged to do the following:

• Build brand awareness
• Engage customers and prospects
• Help employees better understand the scope of the organization
• Recruit future engineers (there is a dearth in the manufacturing industry)
• Showcase thought leadership in sustainability and productivity, as well as the breadth and depth of products and services

“To achieve these diverse goals, we needed to go where our audiences spend most of their time – online. But we wanted to do so in a different, trendsetting way before any of our competitors,” explains Catherine Derkosh, Director of Marketing Communications for Siemens. The team took these steps to make it happen:

1. Review research

   Derkosh describes Siemens as a company with a strong engineering heritage. Leadership needed to see developing an online game as a wise investment. The team mined data, tracked trends and “put as many statistics as we could into showing the power of gamification,” she says.

2. Select resources to help

   Gaming was completely uncharted territory for Siemens, so they turned to external creative agencies to help bring the project together.Derkosh describes working with game designers as a world apart from traditional B2B agencies.“They’re not corporate, they’re small, and they’re very creative,” Derkosh says.

   For two months, these creative types were immersed in the Siemens culture. They visited several plants and manufacturing sites, and had dozens of conference calls and meetings with subject-matter experts.

   “We wanted them to understand the end points of our products, and the product-level application and imagery so they could create a user experience that was very realistic,” explains Derkosh.

3. Develop the scope of work

   The team developed a scope-of-work document, outlining what the end deliverable would look like and the path required to get there, including:

   • How it would work
   • What platforms would be required
   • What the interaction would feel like for the end user

   Its development required seamless collaboration between agencies, subject-matter experts, IT and Marketing, and face-to-face meetings were critical to making this happen.

   “Our culture is so different, and our terminology is so different that we were speaking different languages,” explains Derkosh. “Face-to-face meetings make it easier to say, ‘Pardon me, I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.’ Plus, it’s easier to get to know the personalities involved.”

4. Execute the scope of work

   The creative agencies took what they learned to create a game built around Pete the Plant Manager, whose plant just won the “Plant of the Year” award. Pete shares his best practices throughout the game to help players achieve outstanding results in plant performance. The game challenges players to improve the health of the plant by learning about, and applying, industrial and infrastructure products and solutions from Siemens. They compete with each other on key performance indicators like safety, on-time delivery, quality, energy management and employee satisfaction.

   Pete’s Puzzlers are interspersed throughout to test problem-solving abilities and gain new insights on enhancing plant performance.

   Plantville Café also allows an opportunity to chat with experts on topics like process control, energy efficiency and industrial networking, and sessions are kept in a library as a player’s resource.

5. Test extensively

   “Test early and often,” Derkosh advises.

   More than 60 non-disclosure agreements were signed for the testing process, which included dozens of subject-matter experts and potential end users. The goal was to ensure product usage and plant operations were accurate and realistic, and that the game was easy to understand.

   “The most important aspect is the user experience. You can design an amazing game, but if people can’t figure out how to play it or get frustrated with it, they’re never going to come back,” Derkosh says. “You want to deliver meaningful content in a meaningful way and make it a very, very easy user experience. You can’t know if you have it right without testing.”

6. Launch the game

   The team launched the game on March 24, 2011. In the morning, it was introduced to more than 60,000 employees at Siemens via their managers, who underwent communication training about the program and provided a toolkit, including a review of social media policies. That afternoon, there was a paperless launch to the media, which leveraged Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Stories about Plantville were featured in more than 235 outlets, reaching more than a million people.

Within seven months, in addition to having more than 23,000 regular gamers, Plantville had:

• 2,700 friends on Facebook.
• 30,000 video views on YouTube
• 117 connections on LinkedIn (Pete the Plantville Manager has his own LinkedIn page)

“When we embarked on something completely new like this, we had no idea what to expect, but the results so far have been positive,” says Derkosh.

Related Resources:

B2B Social Media: Gamification effort increases Web traffic 100%, employee collaboration 57%

Gamification: 6 tactics for B2B marketers

B2B Gamification: Bold strategy in conservative industry increased website visits 108.5%

Web/Tech

If you attended our most recent B2B Lead Roundtable Webinar, Six Funnel Focal Points to Finish 2011 Strong – Part I, you found out that even though the end of the year is less than 125 days away, there’s plenty of time to drive more opportunity through your sales funnel and to the bottom line.

That’s because Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research at MECLABS, and Pamela Markey, Director of Marketing for MECLABS, revealed some of the most valuable takeaways you can execute right now to drive leads fast. They drew upon MECLABS’ experience – specifically, more than 10 years of research, one billion emails, 1,300 major experiments, 10,000 tested sales paths, 5 million phone calls and 500,000 conversations, as well as hundreds of publications and conferences.

So, if you’re wondering how on earth you’re going to meet your end-of-year sales goals or quotas, don’t worry – there is still plenty of time. Just watch the webinar replay below and be sure to attend Six Funnel Focal Points to Finish Strong – Part II, Tuesday, September 20, 11 a.m. CDT, noon EDT.

View and download slides via slideshare

Want to jump ahead to key points fast? Review these timestamps.

2:55 – Find out the length of the sales cycle for most webinar attendees; it happens to be aligned with how 935 marketers responded to Marketing Sherpa’s 2010 Benchmark Survey.

3:47 – What three top-of-the-funnel approaches will maximize your resources and help you achieve your year-end goals within budget and time constraints?

4:45 – An overview of the source of ideas and insight revealed in this webinar.

7:12 - Clarify and test your value proposition, and then consistently communicate that message across all channels.

9:04 – Experiment 1: A case study of a B2B software organization reveals how clarifying value proposition increased the number of clickthroughs by 21 percent. (But it gets even better…)

11:09 – Value propositioned is defined: “If I am your ideal customer, why should I buy from you vs. my competitors?”

13:01 – Experiment 1 continues. That 21 percent increase in leads from the PPC ad escalated to a 272 percent increase in overall conversion. This led to 268 percent more projected revenue. Combined with the corresponding 66 percent reduction in cost-per-acquisition, this effort produced more than four times the monthly profit – a 302 percent increase.

15:23 – Download a worksheet that easily walks you through the steps of creating a better value proposition: MarketingExperiments.com/ValueProp.

17:25 – Optimize your list approach by testing them, and choose the list source that ensures you get the most leads in the least amount of time. Experiment 2 reveals how a “cheap” list ultimately cost $188,000 more than the most expensive per record list.

20.50 – Learn why the most expensive per record list drove campaign costs down by more than 60 percent.

21:38 - Find out how to run a test yourself to determine list efficiency.

24:47 – Re-engage your base. You can significantly shorten your sales cycle by selling to those who know and like you. Offer upgrades, bundles, new product lines.

25:50 – This case study reveals how a company with a month-long sales cycle gains 37 percent of its business from clients who initially engaged with them three months ago, and 27 percent from those who initially engaged more than a year ago.

31:47 – 70 to 80 percent of marketing-generated leads are discarded because they’re not ready to buy right now. Just because sales ignores a lead, however, doesn’t mean they won’t eventually buy. In fact, only 5 to 10 percent of prospects are ready to buy right now.

34:08 – Quick review of takeaways begins: complete the value proposition worksheet; make sure channel communication is clear and align conversion paths to that.

34:57 – Optimize your list approach. Test to find out how efficiently your sales team can turn those lists into sales-ready leads.

36:53 – Mine your base of existing prospects. What was your last touch and how can you re-engage them?  Complete the conversations you started back in Q1 and Q2.

40:54 Q & A begins

Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads, Web/Tech, Webinar Replay

Last week, I attended the first-ever MarketingSherpa/MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit in Atlanta. It was an
evidence-based marketer’s dream, three days chock full of real-world case studies and analyses that drilled down to the intricacies of what makes some online marketing campaigns convert better than others.

What surprised me, however, was how little this has to do with website or landing page design and how much it has to do with a prospect’s mindset. These marketers definitely weren’t learning where to place button “A” to get the most conversions, in fact, they learned that no matter how successful a landing page, chances are, copying the treatment simply won’t yield the same results.

That’s because no matter how brilliant the landing page, you’re not going to be having the same conversation with your customers as the brilliant designer is having with theirs. Which brings me back to the points of this article, “Integrate Online and Offline Marketing Efforts to Continue the Conversation.” Even though we use different mediums, lead generation is all about having a conversation that engages our customers and guides them along the buying cycle.

And these days, that buying cycle typically brings them to a landing page that will further speak to them in a way that will ultimately drive them closer to a sale. That’s definitely not about where to place a button; it’s about thoroughly understanding what motivates the customer to “click here.”

As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS, put it: “You don’t optimize landing pages, you optimize thought processes.”

Online marketing optimization leverages testing to make sure you’re speaking as clearly as possible and really getting through to prospects. As Adam Lapp, Associate Director, Optimization and Strategy for MECLABS Conversion Group, explains in this post, “Landing Page Optimization: Is it actually possible to optimize a landing page?,” that’s a never-ending journey.

While it certainly would be simpler to copy what someone else is doing successfully and apply their ideas wholesale to your online marketing campaigns, you must understand where your own customers are coming from and what’s driving them forward.

If you’re interested in more takeaways from the summit, I encourage you to check out these links:

Optimization Summit Wrap-up: 6 takeaways to improve your tests and results

Test with Poor Results Can Improve Marketing

Why Landing Page Optimization is So Important

Live from the Optimization Summit: Landing Page Optimization with Boris Grinkot

Live Experiment (Part 1): How many marketers does it take to optimize a web page?

Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy, ROI Measurement, Web/Tech

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

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

As you can see, my blog has a new look.

That’s because it isn’t just my blog anymore. There are a multitude of thought-leading voices that deserve a platform, and I look forward to making sure this blog provides that opportunity. This will truly be a roundtable to discuss and explore the best ideas. Click here to see our regular contributors; I look forward to adding more in the coming months.

There’s a new name, too. That’s because, when I began this blog in 2003, lead generation had a far narrower scope than what it encompasses today. The internet and the applications that have evolved with it have created a new marketing and sales world. Today, we’re leveraging concepts that were nonexistent eight years ago. Whole companies and careers have been built up around them – as they should.

We now have within our reach the ability to engage more customers in a much more meaningful way than ever before.

This, at heart, is what lead generation is all about – but I don’t believe the term “lead generation” is adequate enough to encompass  all that driving leads entails – the process is so much more involved than it was a decade ago. Whoever heard of lead nurturing or marketing automation or revenue performance management in 2003? The platforms weren’t available to execute them.

However, regardless of innovation, our work is still about creating the conversations that drive leads and, ultimately, revenue. We hope this blog continues to be the inspiration for them.

I hope you like our new look, and our new name, and I would love to hear what you have to say about it. Feel free to comment here or on the B2B Lead Roundtable LinkedIn Group.

Finally, if you have subscribed to our RSS feed, be sure to update your subscription to the new feed at the top right of the page as the previous RSS feed will end soon.

I look forward to keeping up with the accelerating evolution of the business environment, and helping you do the same. 

Lead Generation, Personal Messages, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech, Weblogs

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

I’m back from presenting at the Cisco Partner Velocity Conference in Barcelona; the experience was every bit as meaningful and memorable as I thought it would be. 

You see, I turned 40 there and brought my family along to celebrate. It was a great experience for all of us. Barcelona is a beautiful city.

It was thought-provoking to observe a different culture, one where making money appears to rank an easy second to family and friends.

I especially noticed this when we went out to dinner (at 10pm which is quite typical in Spain). People who had arrived before us were still there when we paid our bill.

The restaurant wasn’t trying to push them out to attract more customers. Instead they allowed their guests to enjoy the experience of being out together, lingering over a meal, and sharing conversation – something they clearly were doing long after their dinner was done. It was a scene that was replayed throughout our trip.

It drove home to me, once again, how conversation is absolutely critical to relationships, no matter who you are, no matter where you’re from.

When I was starting out in marketing, doing teleprospecting and lead generation, 16 years ago, email was just emerging. My tools of the trade were mostly phone and fax back then. But marketing was still about having a  conversation with the customer; it was still all about building relationships. And, some of the marketers I met at the conference – who, like me, traveled across the globe to be there – are doing what I was doing years ago because the human touch matters.  

But, interestingly, they all face the same struggles as the rest of us: 

• How do we give our sales team more effective selling time?
• How can we build better alignment between marketing and sales?
• How can we make sure sales follows-up on marketing-generated leads?
• How do we measure ROI of marketing programs?
• How do we convince our sales people to update the database?

No matter where you are in the world or in your career, no matter how many marketing tools and you have to available, marketing all boils down to the challenge of having relevant conversations with the right people in the right companies and building the kind of relationships that ultimately result in sales.

So much has changed in the marketing world since I entered it at age 24, and yet, in so many ways, it is essentially the same. 

Here’s a good recap about the Cisco Velocity event by Peter O’Neill at Forrester, “Cisco Continues To Accelerate Its Partners’ Marketing“ 

Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy, Personal Messages, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech

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

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