B2B Lead Generation Blog

B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group on LinkedIn

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.

Losing Leads and Sales With Bad Search Marketing Decisions

There are so many tools that help marketers with their search marketing but marketers have to know how to use the analytics in order to focus on the right things to generate leads and sales.

So often I find that marketers are only looking at conversion rates of how specific phrases or banners perform and are ignoring other valuable information. While conversion rate is one way to measure the effectiveness a search phrase, it can be extremely misleading.

I came across an interesting article by B2B Internet marketing consultant Todd Miechiels, and I liked what he had to say about those B2B marketers that make bad decisions based on “solid analytics data.”

Marketers need to look at more than the quantity of conversions. Quality is just as important. If you look solely at what phrases convert a higher percentage of whitepaper downloads, for example, you could be missing the fact that another phrase brought in 2 or 3 of your top prospects, which in the long run, could be better for your company.

Todd goes on to say: “If you are spending thousands of dollars per month on search marketing and not capturing visiting organizations (both those that convert and the many more that don't), you are shutting down phrases and scaling back campaigns by using only half the truth. Equally as dangerous, you are likely routing dollars toward phrases and ad creative that appear to perform better but in reality are merely clogging the marketing database and sales pipeline.”

According to Todd, there are three things you should remember:

• Make sure you're capturing and reporting on visiting organizations referred by specific search phrases.
• Factor in the number of legitimate organizations you've captured when assessing the effectiveness of your search terms and campaigns.
• Don't fall into the trap of optimizing campaigns based solely on quantitative conversion data.

 Don’t clog the pipeline. Take Todd's advice and take the broader view.

Here's some related posts:

Web analytics for b2b lead gen
Tracking ROI for web generated leads

Looking for a little marketing wisdom?

Well, I’ve got, oh about a hundred suggestions for you all courtesy of MarketingSherpa’s latest Wisdom Report.

Sherpa’s free report is filled with mini-stories from our colleagues in the marketing world who have learned through trial and error. The topics of this year’s report touched on just about every aspect of marketing out there – from tradtional tactics to Web 2.0 and mobile marketing.

According to the editors at Sherpa, there were three main trends represented in this year’s edition:
1.    Email  - It’s clear from this book that email isn’t dead. In fact, it’s far from it. Sherpa editors noticed that marketers are looking for ways to tweak their email correspondence. Marketers are personalizing messages more than ever, segmenting their lists to create the most focused targets possible, and are testing to the hilt. You could learn a lot from the stories included in the email section.

2. Build Social Networks - Marketers are starting to see the value of building relationships using LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs. There are some interesting “Case Studies” that will hit home for marketers investigating ways to integrate social media marketing into their 2009 plan.

 3. Search Engine Optimization - It seems that more and more marketers are focusing on making their websites search-engine friendly.  Marketers give advice on everything from making PPC more affordable to concentrating on niche keywords. One marketer shares how 2008 was the turning point that made him realize that after 25 years in the business he had to get with the program.

Download a copy here today

Lead Nurturing Best Practices Research and Data

MarketingSherpa just published data on lead nurturing best practices based on a survey of 1,000 marketers. Sherpa's research focuses on the following nurturing best practices:

• Using multiple tactics rather than relying on email only.
• Timing of teleprospecting response to web inquiries – the velocity of follow-up dramtically impacts lead conversion.
• Measurement of lead quality and the impact of lead nurturing.

I encourage you check out their advice. Read MarketingSherpa: Lead Nurturing Best Practices: New Data, Charts, Tips to Put More Punch in Your Cultivation Tactics

When it comes to lead nurturing, I find that marketers lose their momentum because they lack enough edu-focused content. My advice is to start building your lead nurturing library now. Here's a post where I share content ideas for lead nurturing and the best tactics to use. I hope you find it useful.

Related posts:
Lead Nurturing is about Relationships, not e-mails
Lead Nurturing as trusted advisors with the Human Touch

How to make B2B marketing messages more memorable

In B2B marketing, when you have many potential buyers who are involved in the buying process, how do you connect with these people in a memorable way?

If you look at most lead generation messages, they often contain industry jargon and abstract ideas. Interestingly, that’s part of the reason many of them don’t work.

Our future customers are weary of messages, pitches, hype, buzzwords, and corporate speak, that they quickly forget them. So how do you create marketing and lead generation messages worth remembering?

Podcast: Interview with MarketingSherpa's Anne Holland

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)

How Lead Nurturing Improves Lead Generation ROI

I know there's a lot of emphasis on lead generation (that's a good thing) but, getting a ton of leads doesn't guarantee that increased sales will follow. In a complex sale, my experience is, most of the selling actually happens when the sales person isn't there.

Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from ten years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 80% of potential sales. You can increase your odds success by adding a lead nurturing program.

What’s lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution) regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following-up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet?” Lead nurturing about building trusted relationships with the right people.

Continue Reading at the INSPIRE SmartMarketers.com Blog (a new blog I'm contributing to monthly) presented by Netline.

On June 6th, I’m doing a webcast on a multimodal approach to lead nurturing as part of ON24's Wednesday Webcast with Experts Series. I hope you can make it. Register here.

On building the Lists for B2B Lead Generation Programs

Would you buy this business card? When you buy a list of names, you are basically buying business cards on a list. But there is no such thing as buying the perfect list, especially if you have a complex sale.

A study by John Coe and the Sales & Marketing Institute showed, “70.8% of business people changed one or more elements on their business cards each year.” My experience has been been around 45%. But in either case it's a big number.

Let's say you want to invite, via e-mail, a specific group of individuals in your database to a webinar or webcast. Or perhaps you’d like to do a targeted, direct-mail campaign to a select group of people on behalf of their salesperson. Could you do it with confidence? Most of the time, I’ve found the answer is "no.”

The goal is not to try to buy the biggest list possible, but instead build the most relevant list possible based your ideal customer profile.  The best list is one that you have diligently created and rigorously maintained over time with excellence. So where should you start?

Podcast: Marketing and Sales for Big Complex Selling (pt 3)

I wanted to share the final installment from the podcast series I did with 800-CEO-READ.  In this podcast, Todd interviewed me and Jill Konrath on the critical interface between marketing and sales. 

Here's what Todd says about it:
"Here is the final installment to our podcast series on marketing and selling to big companies. We again have Jill Konrath and Brian Carroll talking about the topic. What we try to spend time on in this call is "space" shared between marketing and sales. Brian leads the call with the stat - "80% of leads sent from marketing to the sales organization are lost, ignored, or discarded." You can see why this is a good topic to explore."

Listen to podcast now (MP3 35:56 min 24.68 MB)

Visit 800-CEO-Read Podcasts to hear the complete three part series

Podcast: Marketing and Sales for Big Complex Selling (Pt 1)

I had a great time chatting with Todd at 800-CEO-READ on lead generation. This is the first of three podcasts 800-CEO-Read is doing on B2B sales and marketing.

Here's what Todd says about it:
"In this podcast, I talk with Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. Next week, I interview Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies. In week three, I bring Jill and Brian together to talk about the interface between marketing and sales."

Like many of Todd's podcasts; this one is a high-level discussion geared for business leaders and those who support sales people. While you're there, I encourage you to take some time to visit 800-CEO-READ's other websites. They are a super resource for anyone who reads business books.

Listen to podcast now (MP3 43:47 min 30.1 MB)