B2B Lead Blog

As I’ve written before, when dealing with the complex sale, most people aren’t coming to your website to buy; they’re coming to your site for information. And people are hesitant about giving up too much info on forms before you’ve earned their trust.

Have you thought about your web forms? How much information are you asking for before you’ve earned their trust?

I’ve invited Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director of MECLABS Group (parent company of MarketingExperiments, InTouch and MarketingSherpa), to show us how to optimize our web forms to increase conversion of that traffic. 

During this complimentary webinar, Dr. McGlaughlin will be performing live optimizations and providing specific advice on improving your online lead generation efforts. You can check out this short video of Dr. McGlaughlin speaking on optimizing email responses.

Watch Online Lead Generation Webinar: How to optimize forms to convert “window shoppers” into leads

View recorded webinar on demand (no registration required)

Event Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Sales Leads, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars

Have you wondered about where you should put your online lead generation budget into search engine optimization or paid search?  Check out this new chart by MarketingSherpa, “Comparing the Quantity and Quality of B2B Search-Generated Leads“:

(click chart to expand) According to Sherpa, “While paid search gives marketers more control, natural search page rankings driven higher by search engine optimization tactics generate as many high-quality leads as all paid search sources combined.”

What do you think? Do these findings match up with your experience with using search for lead generation?

Related Posts:

Tracking ROI From Web Generated Leads
Website Landing Pages impact Lead Generation results
Optimizing webforms to generate more leads through your website
Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads

Lead Generation, Web/Tech

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

I’ve heard more B2B marketers citing LinkedIn as a key social network they want to add into their lead generation and marketing strategy. I often get asked questions like “how do you generate leads via LinkedIn (without alienating your network)? How are you doing it? What works, and what doesn’t etc.” 

In this post, “5 steps for using LinkedIn as lead generation tool,” I share what I’ve learned so far. I’m still experimenting and I’d love to get your input on this.

My colleagues over at MarketingSherpa just posted a terrific case study on Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation. In the case study, they profile a marketing team and their lessons on “joining LinkedIn groups, sharing relevant marketing collateral, and qualifying the leads that come through the channel.”

Here’s a quick look at the 6 lessons they learned:

Lesson #1. Target groups by activity level (relevance), not just by size
Lesson #2. Join groups under your own name, not a company
Lesson #3. Place collateral in the context of a conversation
Lesson #4. Response rate is highly variable
Lesson #5. Create social media-specific landing pages
Lesson #6. Quality can be an issue with leads from LinkedIn

Read MarketingSherpa: Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation: 6 Lessons

Resource: 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR: Benchmarks and Best Practices

Related posts:

Read 5 steps for using LinkedIn as lead generation tool
Savvy B2B Marketing: Using LinkedIn to Gather Industry Intelligence

You may also want to check the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. This group is all about sharing ideas that focus on the many aspects of B2B lead generation such as lead nurturing, lead management, teleprospecting and more. The group has grown to 2500 members in just 8 week but I’m even more excited about the quality discussions. I’m learning a ton from members. Check it out

Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy, Referral Marketing, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Web/Tech, Word-of-Mouth

More marketers are embracing social media and inbound marketing practices for lead generation. That’s a good thing.

I’ve written about how you can leverage social media tools like blogs, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to drive interested visitors to your website or landing pages to register for educational content and other assets. It works.

But remember most people coming to your website aren’t coming to your website to buy. They are coming to your site for information. People start to question the value of giving up too much info on forms before you’ve earned their trust.

Have you thought about your web forms? Are you asking for far too much information before you’ve earned their trust?  I wrote about this in my post, Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads. I would add that you need to leverage a robust lead qualification process too.

Earlier this week, I came across a relevant post by Chis Koch (@Ckochster) on “how old-school data capture is poisoning marketing and what to do about it.”

In his post, Chris dares us to rethink how and if we should gather information from prospects. He writes, “As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects.” Check out his post. I agree.

You’ll do better by thinking of lead generation as a process of micro-conversions that build an opportunity profile over time, such as requesting an email address, then asking for first and last name, later requesting a phone number, and so on.

I read of one company that trimmed down the registration to include an extremely simple, two-field form. Conversion rate more than tripled with this simplification. At the same time, the company expanded their email follow-up process and was able to increase the total amount of personal data collected over time.

Related posts:

7 Tips on how B2B marketers can leverage social media
How to use social media for lead generation

CRM, Lead Generation, Lead Qualification, Marketing Strategy, Podcasting, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech, Weblogs

Each month ClickDocuments asks industry experts a specific question on content marketing. This months question is, “What’s the biggest mistake to avoid in b2b content marketing.”

I’m in good company again this month with Patsi Krakoff, Maria Pergolino, Ardath Albee, Rebel Brown and Mac McIntosh.

If you want to improve your inbound marketing, social media and lead generation results, I encourage you to check out this post.

Lead Generation, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web/Tech, Word-of-Mouth

A common lead generation practice using B2B inbound marketing includes offering white papers, demos, trial software, or other content assets in exchange for registration information. The problem is that many marketers immediately turn these form registrations (aka web inquiries) over to the sales team as “leads.”

If your sales team perceives the majority of “leads” passed to them are no good, they’re unlikely to spend time tracking prospects down.

I’ve already written about why lead quality should be emphasized over quantity. But, how do you weed through all those web inquiries to get to those that are truly ready for the sales team to engage so you can nurture the rest?

Here’s a lead qualification process that may help you turn your web inquiries into viable sales leads: 

Step 1 – Create a marketing funnel
The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring inquiries (aka leads) into one spot (your marketing database) and qualify them. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready. Lead qualification must first classify leads according to their “sales readiness” and business fit; and second, to manage all the incoming leads effectively.

Step 2 – Create the universal lead definition, and apply it to the remaining inquiries.

There are must-have questions your sales team must know in order to feel that an inquiry is worthy of being called a lead. Ask yourself:

• What’s the company’s size, industry, and geography. At this point, you may want to remove inquiries based on specific marketing requirements or limitations. For example, you may remove foreign email address, student email addresses or contacts residing in locations or industries that you don’t serve. This step could reduce 5 – 10% of entries.

• Ask business situation questions such as number of users, current systems platform, etc.
• What is registrant’s role in the organization, or what is their authority in the buying process?
• Based on their business need, how can you help?
• What stage of investigation are they in the buying process? Many registrants are actually still early in the buying process and are conducting general market research. These contacts are very valuable and should be nurtured and managed over time—but these folks clearly aren’t people who are ready to buy. Be honest about what the search marketing effort is designed to achieve and is capable of accomplishing.

Purge those inquiries containing bogus information. It’s amazing how creative people can get. Remove duplicates and invalid names and email addresses. Keep in mind that simple forms tend to generate less invalid info rather than lengthy, time-consuming forms. People start to question the value of giving up too much info. Trim the form by about 20% to avoid this.

I read of one company that trimmed down the registration to include an extremely simple, two-field form. Conversion rate more than tripled with this simplification. At the same time, the company expanded their email follow-up process and was able to increase the total amount of personal data collected over time.

Step 3 – Create a behavior model to prioritize leads based on activity and data.

Apply lead scoring to prioritize your leads on order to follow-up in step 4. What lead scoring does is assign a point value to who prospects are, how they interact with your company and what their need is for your product. Most marketers give higher scores to those further along in the buying process based on their engagement. Lead scoring works best if you have 200+ inquiries per month. Otherwise it might be overkill.

Use your CRM or marketing automation suite to prioritize based on:

• Level or engagement through touch points such as repeat web visits, downloads, or clicks.
• Size of organization
• Fit

You can measure all these touch points, but in the end if you want to know something you’ll need to talk to someone and engage them in conversation.

Step 4 – Use the phone (or email) to qualify high priority leads based on the scoring.

The phone is the gold standard for qualifying most leads. There’s no better way to engage. We have also found email to be a great way to create a one-to-one dialogue by asking questions. (Test this first with your audiences.). You can also leverage lead qualification service providers to do this for you. 

Using these channels to nurture web registrants, learn more about each one, and then provide personalized and relevant information over time. You should be spoon-feeding prospects, provide truly valuable information, while moving them through the buying process.

Related Posts:

Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads
Lead Nurturing is about Relationships, not e-mails
Using Kaizen to improve your lead generation results in 90 days or less

Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Sales, Sales Leads, Web/Tech

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called 5 steps for using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool and step number five was ‘create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.’

Well, last Thursday I launched the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. I wanted 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 and more.
 
I’m jazzed at how fast the group is growing and even more excited about the discussions that are already taking place.

My first question to the group was if lead distribution should be fair or optimized? What do you do? Do you invest your hard won leads on your top performers or do you try to help your weaker sales people? In this economy should we take a Darwinian view of lead generation and focus on helping the strong sales people get stronger?

What’s your take on lead distribution? I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Join the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable group and let me know your thoughts.

B2B Telemarketing, CRM, Cold Calling, Current Affairs, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Event Marketing, Human Touch, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Leadership, Marketing Strategy, Podcasting, Public Relations (PR), ROI Measurement, Referral Marketing, Sales, Sales Leads, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Trigger Events, Web/Tech, Webcasts/Webinars, Weblogs, Word-of-Mouth