B2B Lead Generation Blog

Thoughts on how the human touch impacts marketing performance

Improving marketing performance is not just about implementing the right technology (i.e. marketing automation, lead scoring, nurturing etc.); it’s also about creating a strategic process to involve people in the process of lead nurturing and qualification.

You may have the best content in the world, but there are just some things that must be discovered through a human, two-way conversation. To put some perspective on how the human touch impacts marketing performance, I was interviewed by Christopher Doran VP, Marketing for Manticore Technology to focus on the importance of leveraging personalized outreach along with marketing automation to improve your success.

In the interview I answer the following questions from Chris:

• How can strategic phone outreach impact lead scoring?
• What do you think it’s critical for marketing to learn on the phone that they cannot learn through online behavior?
• What are the top 3 relationship-building impacts teleprospecting can help marketing achieve?
• Can you share an example of something learned in a call that enabled a company to improve their online marketing programs?
• What do you think is the biggest benefit for marketing from Marketing Automation systems?

I'd love your input... Where else do you see the human touch making a big impact marketing performance?

Read the interview: "How the Human Touch Impacts Marketing Performance"

8 Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation 2.0

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.

Ebook: Start With a Lead: Eight CRITICAL Success Factors for Lead Generation

View more presentations from Brian Carroll.

Can you think of other critical success factors I’m missing?

5 dials to tune in your lead generation process

It's important to think of lead generation as a process, rather than an isolated event, or a series of campaigns. A process can be continually improved through ongoing testing and refinement and will generate higher quality results more cost effectively (i.e. reduce expense-to-revenue ratio) and improve overall ROI.

Think about your lead generation process as being controlled on a mixing board. Let’s start with 5 of the biggest dials on the board so that we can start to tune in and turn up our lead generation ROI:

Dial 1 - "Turn up" lead quantity. Increase your program response rates across multiple lead generation channels to drive more inquires. Get more of the right people in the right companies to respond across multiple tactics through testing.

Dial 2 – “Turn up” lead quality. Improve your lead qualification process to increase “sales ready” lead conversion rates. Delivering leads that your sales team really wants based on your universal lead definition.

Dial 3 - “Turn up” sales team pursuit and feedback. Create joint service level agreement between sales and marketing to reduce time-to-sales follow-up. Ensure that "sales ready" leads are being fully engaged by sales.

Dial 4 – “Turn up” the number of certified opportunities in pipeline. Focus on improving your lead management and lead nurturing process. Build your marketing pipeline to increase your sales pipeline.

Dial 5 – “Turn up” closed sales. Focus on developing pipeline acceleration programs to shorten your time-to-revenue. This requires marketing to go beyond demand generation to help sales reduce friction in order to close more sales.

The mixing board analogy seems even more appropriate as you think about continuous process improvement. As the process develops you will need to consistently make adjustments to the dials as you respond to feedback and spikes in the flow. This is not a "set it and forget it" endeavor.

I hope this gets you thinking about making beautiful music.

Related Posts:
Lead generation optimization: Finding the right amount of friction

Lead scoring thoughts to share

Recently, I've been having more conversations with marketers about lead scoring and how they can use it as a part of the overall lead qualification and nurturing process.

The question "what is lead scoring?" also came up during the "Broad Reach + Intelligent Lead Nurturing = Increased Revenue" webinar I participated in yesterday with Scott Mersy of Genius.com, Andrew Gaffney of DemandGen Report, Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions.

So, what is lead scoring anyway?
Here's how I see it. Lead scoring helps quantify the value of a lead based on: the profile of the prospect, behavior (online and/offline), demographics and the likelihood to buy within a defined time frame. Often there is explicit User-Supplied Data (e.g., Registration Forms) and Implicit User-Tracked Behavior (e.g., what content have they engaged?) included in the scoring as well.

Lead scoring can be helpful, but when you have a complex sale, it's just only part of what's needed to qualify sales ready leads. It’s the human touch of conversation that provides the certainty that a lead is sales ready and that comes from the many nuances gleaned from a personal interaction.

I've noticed a lot of marketers with a complex sale are using lead scoring as the only means of lead qualification before they route leads to their sales team.

Lead scoring is not a substitute for human touch. Rather, it prioritizes where you need invest the human touch.

Still, the recipe for implementing a lead scoring program remains largely a mystery for most marketers. This subject deserves more attention than I am giving it in this post, but I will explore this in more detail in future posts.

To start, here are the main elements of lead scoring:

1. Targeting/Messaging/Calls-to-Action (right people, right companies?)
2. Explicit User-Supplied Data (e.g., Registration Forms)
3. Implicit User-Tracked Behavior (e.g., what content have they engaged? online and offline)
4. Phone Qualification & Discovery
5. Sales Qualification & Discovery

Points 4 and 5 are areas that often get overlooked and may lead to the expectation that leads are sales ready, when they may not be. Lead scoring and automation support a process of lead qualification, but there are more fundamental aspects of lead management that often get overlooked.

Share your thoughts or questions on lead scoring in the comments.

Related post:
B2B Lead management is far from an easy task

Lead re-engagement is lead nurturing to rejuvenate old leads

The January sales push well on it's way and most B2B marketers I know are looking more ways to generate leads faster. But here's a question to ponder...

Do you have a process have a process for handing leads (from sales) back to marketing when they are not sales ready? If not, I recommend you consider at re-engaging the leads you already have in your database and pay special attention to the leads your sales team didn't convert last year.

I'd like to share what we learned from a lead re-engagement test we just completed for a large communications company. We tested a lead nurturing program to re-engage the following types of "old" leads:

1. Leads that were "open" but not touched by a sales person in 90+ days
2. Leads worked by sales but marked as "closed - lost" meaning they didn't buy

We started with a simple multi-touch lead nurturing program that included: a 3 touch email track, the emails connected to educational articles, and our teleprospecting team made follow-up calls (based on email engagement replies, clicks and opens).

Seven prospecting rules that produce leads

The phone is still a powerful and effective lead generation tool. It is inarguably the human touch of a lead nurturing program.  

That’s why every opportunity - including cold calling -  should be treated with great respect. Each time you pick up the phone, whether it’s the first or third call, it's important you create value in that touch. Your goal with each call should be to give your prospects something useful in a digestible, bite-size chunk.

That being said, the phone must be used as a part of a holistic lead generation strategy. Whether you create a specialized sales development team within the Sales or Marketing groups or hire a firm that specializes in teleprospecting, your cold calling plan must be aligned with all your other ongoing marketing and reputation-building activities.

A while back, I was asked to write a guest blog post for the ZoomInfo Sales and Marketing Blog that I titled "7 prospecting rules that produce leads." That little post was so popular that the ZoomInfo folks asked if I would consider teaching a webinar. I did and in case you missed it there are two convenient ways you can review it on demand:

Watch the Presentation

Read the Executive Summary here

Lead Generation Check list – Part 4: Clear and Universal Lead Definition

This is the fourth installment in an eight-part series I’m calling the ‘Lead Generation Checklist.’ With each post, I’m addressing a step that in my experience helps improve lead generation efforts. For the first post, I focused changing your mindset to focus on conversations not campaigns. In Step Two, I discussed how to align sales and marketing as one team. In Step Three, I discussed how to develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile - which is all too necessary when determining how to reach your target market. 

Step Four: Create your very own version of the universal lead definition, apply it to every lead, and leave room for the definition to go through rapid iterations as you close the loop with your sales team.

Inquiries are not leads. In fact, I’ve found that as little as 5 to 15 percent of all inquiries are truly sales-ready. It’s no wonder a lot of salespeople struggle with the issue of inconsistency. Some opportunities are given too much focus while others are simply ignored.

One of the best things I can do for my clients is to guide them through the creation of a universal lead definition. This definition acts as the standard for rating leads. Believe me, nothing fancy is required. A good definition is basic and intuitive. And, it should be something that goes beyond marketing so that everyone agrees on the same definition.

A truly useful definition will be applied to all leads regardless of source – whether it’s teleprospecting, inbound calls, direct mail, webinars, etc. Combine it with the ideal customer profile and you’ll get a consistency that always yields higher-qualified leads.

Lead Generation Check list – Part 3: Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile

I’ve started an eight-part series I’m calling the ‘Lead Generation Checklist.’ Each post in the series addresses a step that in my experience helps improve lead generation efforts. The first installment discussed changing your mindset to focus on conversations not campaigns. In Step Two, I discussed how to align sales and marketing as one team. I’ve received a lot of great comments from these posts, and I hope you will refer back to them so you can benefit from the nuggets of wisdom by your fellow readers.

Now, for step three... Develop and intensify your ideal customer profile now.

When it comes to customers, it's essential to understand that there may be a wide range of people you could potentially appeal to. But the customer group your business will profit and benefit the most from is the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). And, by prescreening potential customers based on the unique attributes of your prime customers you can determine the set of criteria that will serve as the basis of your conversations.

Here’s the best ways to develop and intensify your ideal customer profile: 

1. Get to know your Current Customers.
Your ideal customers are right in front your nose: your current customers.

Separate your good customers from your bad. Make a list of your top ten - the ones in your sweet spot. What are their attributes and demographics? Make notes about the characteristics they have in common.

Get on the phone to find out what these top customers viewed as the trigger points for choosing you. Ask how you have helped them. Use this information to refine your message to gain more leads just like them.
Review the trigger events or attributes that led them to working with you.
Once you understand your clients and why they have picked you, you can tailor your message around that.

7 prospecting rules that produce leads

Need to improve your teleprospecting efforts? Check out my guest post for ZoomInfo, a blog that offers advice on all aspects of sales and marketing.  The site features industry news, analysis, and surveys. And, from time to time they let folks like me put in my two cents worth. I was happy to contribute with “7 prospecting rules that produce leads.”

I agreed to contribute to ZoomInfo with this topic because I believe very strongly in the power of the phone. The phone is the human touch of a lead nurturing program. Here are a few pointers to think about as you read the article:

• Every opportunity – including cold calling or lead follow-up – should be treated with great respect. Whether it’s the first or third call, it’s important to create value by giving your prospects useful info in bite-size chunks.
• It’s imperative that cold calling become part of a holistic multi-channel lead generation strategy. Create a specialized sales development team within the sales or marketing group or hire a firm that specializes in teleprospecting. Your cold calling plan must be aligned with other outbound and inbound marketing and reputation-building activities.
• Your teleprospectors must be smart, articulate, engaging and organized. Their training should focus on making them productive and sustainable extension of the selling effort.

Here’s the link to “7 prospecting rules that produce leads.” I look forward to reading your comments.

Lead Generation Checklist - Part 2: Sales and Marketing – One Team

I’ve started an eight-part series I’m calling the ‘Lead Generation Checklist.’ Each post in the series addresses a step that will help to make your lead generation campaigns work like a well-oiled machine.

In the first installment, I discussed tackling your organization’s lead generation mindset. Your touches should be conversations not just campaigns. Your “marketing” approach should be more consultative. The post received a lot of great comments. Ardath Ablee was fascinated by one and wrote about it in her blog. I think you’ll find “How to Use Existing Content in B2B Demand Generation Programs” helpful. Thanks Ardath.

Now for Step Two. I want to focus on dissolving the discord that inevitably exists between your sales and marketing teams. 

How long has it been since your marketing and sales teams got together for a really productive meeting? In reality, the best mindset, strategy and tactics – and the most astute sales and marketing individuals – are for naught without the collaboration of everyone involved. It can be tough to meld inherently diverse viewpoints, but it is a critical and often overlooked step in the lead generation process.

There is a direct correlation between lead generation ROI and the frequency that sales and marketing productively meet to collaborate.

Here are a few guidelines that in my experience really help to ensure that marketing and sales connect together as one team: 

1. The departments should document the sales process as a team from first contact to close. Your organization’s way of selling and marketing must confirm to the customer’s buying process, driven by a clear understanding of both the needs and the impact of those needs on both the company and your customers. Keep in mind that each customer will have a slightly different buying process.
2. The activities of both groups should be measured and coordinated with shared goals. Be sure to create value for the customer throughout the process. Ensure that marketing is giving sales something to work with. Sales should be privy to invaluable information that will help them in their selling process. Map tools, skills, and performance metrics along with the process.
3. If you haven’t already, get marketing and sales together to create a formal, concise summation of the value proposition via message map. If you already have a statement, make sure both teams are working off the same version. Wish-washy and unfounded statements about the benefits customers get from working with your organization can be the cause of lead generation problems. For prospective customers, a value proposition essentially answers the questions of how you can help their business, what difference you can make and why your solution is the one they should count on. Your value proposition should be specific, right down to numbers or percentages.
4. Marketing and sales should have regular huddles. Marketing should solicit, study, and act upon feedback from sales. Sales should never ignore a lead and must send it back if it is not sales-ready. Communicate what works and what doesn’t. On-going close-loop huddles will keep you on the same page and offer ways for continuous improvement in your new process. If you do communicate are you doing if often enough? I would suggest meeting once a week. Are your meetings as efficient as possible? Are you really communicating or just pointing fingers?

If you’ve found success in getting your marketing and sales team on the same page drop me a note. I’d love to pass along your advice. Next in the series, I’ll discuss how to clearly define your target market.

Related articles and posts:

Huddles and 35 other way to improve sales and marketing teamwork
Why CEOs Must Be Actively Involved in Lead Generation
Ebook: What sales really needs from marketing
Sales and marketing alignment: tips to getting it right with lead generation