B2B Lead Generation Blog

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?

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).

MarketingSherpa's Email Summit

Here's the summary from MarketingSherpa Email Summit event:

Following MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Summit last week, we sat down with copious notes to pick out the most important themes from three days of workshops, panel discussions and presentations.

Read on for our seven major takeaways that can help all email marketers improve their email strategy. Topics include:
o Integrating email and social media
o Focusing on customer retention
o Crafting *valuable* email messages
o Growing lists the right way

Summit Wrap-Up Report: 7 Takeaways to Improve your Email Marketing in 2010

A multi-modal approach to lead nurturing

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

Effective Lead Management: converting more leads into sales

We had a great turn out for our recent B2B Lead Generation Rountable Webinar “Effective Lead Management: Learn How to Convert Marketing Leads into Sales Pipeline.” In case you missed the live presentation, there are still two ways you can review it:

• Watch the Presentation recording (no registration)
• Read the Effective Lead Management Executive Summary

I discussed steps for overcoming one of the biggest challenges organizations face today: converting leads to sales pipeline revenue. For most organizations, these problems stem from perception and communication issues between Marketing and Sales and a lack of process. 

While I emphasize sales and marketing being on the same page is key to a well-optimized lead generation process, the solution involves more than just generating more high quality leads. Marketing and Sales need to use a robust qualification and nurturing process to optimize the leads already in the pipeline.

I taught a ‘playbook’ for effective lead management that helps optimize the lead generation process to produce major ROI gains. The ‘playbook’ included five steps:

1. refine the universal lead definition of “sales ready”
2. qualify leads based on the universal lead definition
3. nurture early leads until they were “sales ready”
4. define a clear process from Marketing to Sales
5. close the loop via Sales and Marketing “huddles”

View recorded webinar and read executive summary

What IS and ISN’T Lead Nurturing

While chatting with a client recently, she told me that she had just met with her third new boss this year to explain the company’s new lead nurturing process. The problem was that her boss felt their current integrated marketing campaigns qualified as lead nurturing. We discussed the challenges of communicating what IS and ISN’T lead nurturing.

A lot of marketers say they are “nurturing” their prospects when in reality all they are doing is sending out nice brochures or marketing copy focused on product releases or company announcements.

Look up the definition of “nurture.” Here’s what a quick search of the web will tell you: foster, help develop, or help grow; the act of nourishing or nursing; tender care; education; training; that which nourishes; food; diet; sustenance; the environmental influences that contribute to the development of an individual.

Starting to get my point? Pretty, well-designed fluff is not going to “feed” your prospects. Creating a nice lay-out and clarifying your value statement isn’t going to contribute to the development of your client or your relationship with them.

Don’t just take my word for it. Recently ClickInsights asked six B2B Marketing experts – including myself - what the biggest mistakes in B2B content marketing were. All of our answers differed, but each of us agreed that content focusing more on the consumer and less on the company is far more effective.

Let me break it down even further by giving a few examples of What IS and What ISN’T Leading Nurturing:

Is NOT Lead Nurturing: Sending the same tired company case study over and over again to your list.
What IS Lead Nurturing: Sending a very targeted email that includes content based on the recipient’s role in the company. Sending content based on timing or interest or industry. Sending content based on a previous conversation. Answering a question or offering more information. Sending information that is relevant to their problem.

Is NOT Lead Nurturing: Calling leads that are in the early stages of the buying process every month just to “touch base.”  Calling to basically ask if they are ready to buy yet.
What IS Lead Nurturing: Making calls based on touch point data that adds value to the interaction. Having a valid business reason and goal in mind for each call.

Is NOT Lead Nurturing: Offering brochures and white papers that in essence just pitch your product or service.
What IS Lead Nurturing: Sharing content that's relevant and valuable even if they never buy from you. Giving them information that sticks with them. Giving them information that helps them grow as an individual or company.

Your audience is more savvy than ever. They are also more hungry than ever for some real sustenance. Take advantage of that. Content that IS lead nurturing, will render more qualified leads and more sales opportunities. Content that IS lead nurturing will create a sales pipeline that is more viable and predictable and, ultimately, more profitable.

Think about: when’s the last time you received a marketing email that you actually benefited from? Feel free to share it with me. I think most of us are “hungry” for some real lead nurturing.

5 Lead nurturing tips to create relevant and engaging emails

A recent MarketingSherpa survey of email recipients found that 58% of those who stop reading, disengage, or unsubscribe after cite "lack of relevance" as a key factor. This is hugely important because most marketers rely on email as their main lead nurturing tactic.

As B2B marketers, we should have it drilled into our brains that relevance must be an essential part of our lead nurturing touches. But be honest: How well are you really connecting with your audience?

I encourage you to look beyond your unsubscribes and find a true measure. Start by considering all those prospects that are simply ignoring your emails. I read a blog post on by Steve Woods on "Emotional Unsubscribes" that's definitely worth checking on this topic. 

It’s a common phenomenon. I receive emails often from companies that “know” me, but their emails certainly don’t show it. Their creative and graphics-laden emails don’t speak to my concerns at all. And each irrelevant message I receive is basically programming me to ignore or delete future messages from them. I don’t even bother to unsubscribe. I'm sure that's not their intent but they are missing the key idea of relevance.

So, how do we align better align our email and nurturing messages with what is relevant to our audience? 

Consider the following 5 ways to build more relevance into your emails: 

Tip 1. Stage in the buying process: Be sure to provide different kinds of information to your prospect based on what point they are in the buying process. If you have a complex sale, the best way to I know how to do this is to combine a human touch to build relationships with your lead nurturing message. If they are an early stage lead and they are just starting to get familiar with the business issues you solve, don’t send them the same copy that you would send someone who is on the verge of making a decision.

Tip 2. Industry vertical: Industry information will more than likely tell you what pains your prospects are experiencing, while company size will give you a hint as to the resources they have available to tackle these challenges. Be sure to add this information to your marketing data often so that you can easily define your target segments based on these indicators.

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