B2B Lead Generation Blog

B2B Marketing: Playbook for sales and marketing alignment

Be honest. How does Sales perceive the leads Marketing produces?

1. They love them – couldn’t be happier!
2. They complain about lead quality.
3. They complain about lead volume.
4. The say leads, what leads? Marketing gives us leads?

If you chose answer number #1, the first thing I would say is, “Well done.” The second thing I would say is, “When is the last time you’ve talked with your sales team?” 

The lack of synergy between Sales and Marketing on lead generation is so common as to risk cliché. To help sales and marketing teams address this issue, on September 15th in San Jose, CA I’ll be presenting “Playbook for Marketing and Sales Alignment: How to Collaborate to Optimize Lead Generation Programs” at Frost & Sullivan’s GIL (Growth, Innovation, Leadership) 2010: Silicon Valley.

Frost & Sullivan refers to GIL as “The Global Community of Growth, Innovation and Leadership.” I’m looking forward to attending to share new ideas about BtoB marketing with CMOs and VPs and Directors of Marketing.

I’m presenting during the GIL 2010 University interactive workshop on the last day of GIL which focuses on BtoB marketing, but GIL is an interdisciplinary event that covers innovations in everything from industry-specific supplier partnerships to global CEO’s perspectives on developing an opportunity pipeline.

So if you chose answer #2, #3 or #4 to the above question, I’d love to see you in San Jose to hear about your challenges and help you learn how to address this proverbial “black hole” between your company's sales and marketing efforts. You'll learn from you peers during this session. 

As a speaker, I’m able to pass along this special registration offer:
Register for the GIL and the BtoB Marketing Workshop and save $400 (discount code MecLabs 400)
Register for the BtoB Marketing Workshop only (WS2) and save $150 (discount code MecLabs 150)
*Note: enter PARTICIPANT for the registration code

5 Steps To Creating A Lead Gen Machine & The Predictable Revenue That CEOs Love

In a recent post I talked about the most important B2B marketing metrics to CEO’s or what I believe CEO’s should be measuring. All too often Marketing is measuring one thing while the CEO’s are asking a question those measurements don’t answer. 

The biggest challenge for marketers is the quality vs. quantity tug-of-war. I think most realize quality leads are what sales wants (and the ones that will close) but the quantity of leads always seems to be top of mind with CEO’s which force marketers switch focus and bring in lots of leads instead of quality leads. What happens next? The CEO doesn’t see revenue (lots of leads don’t equal good leads) and then gets frustrated that marketing isn’t providing any ROI.

So, how do you build a lead generation program that generates quality leads, creates revenue, and meets your CEO's goals? To answer this question I’ve invited Aaron Ross, CEO of PebbleStorm and the author of "PREDICTABLE REVENUE: Lessons Learned From Growing Salesforce.com’s $1 Billion Sales Machine."

During the webinar you’ll learn: 

• How to build a lead generation machine that will predictably generate leads month-after-month
• How to ensure sales follows up on every lead
• The two things CEOs care MOST about that you must understand
• A simple 6-step call agenda to help salespeople convert new leads into qualified opportunities

Get the slides (no registration required)

Lead Generation 2.0 Critical Success Factor #9 Effectiveness

I recently wrote about the 8 critical success factors for lead generation 2.0. Then #9 came to mind – effectiveness. Simply put, make the most of what you have. Its too easy to fall into the trap of selling everything to everybody, or deluding yourself that the reason for more leads isn’t access to endless resources.

Check out the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal. It's a 112-page publication is full great ideas to help you boost your lead generation, website, email, social media and make your overall marketing more effective. I contributed some research in the report on lead nurturing too.

Also, I think you'll find this post, "On Effectiveness: Think more, and do less" relevant too. It gives tips on how to become a "strategic quitter" so can focus you energy where you'll make the biggest difference with your marketing and lead generation and marketing.

Related Resources
2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour - boost your online marketing effectiveness

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

Most important B2B Marketing Metrics For CEOs

Today CEOs expect marketers to provide metrics and to be accountable to meeting their numbers just like sales people. They do have a bunch of activity metrics and some squishy metrics like brand recognition.

At the same time, most CEOs agree that they aren’t getting enough activity at the top of the sales funnel. Thus their marketers are constantly reminded that more leads are needed...now! When the revenue doesn't immediately materialize, CEOs will lament, why can't I see ROI from marketing?

This is what CEOs should be asking?

1. What effect are our marketing investments having on sales productivity?
2. What can marketing do to lower the combined expense to revenue ratio of sales and marketing?

As marketers, I believe the key is to look at why are we measuring our marketing in the first place?

I'd love to get your input on what you believe are the most important B2B marketing metrics for CEOs?

Targeting for better Lead Generation results and ROI

Effective lead generation really depends on how much you know about your target audience and how well you use that information to tailor a relevant messages and conversations.

I thought this post by Carolyn Goodman for Target Marketing Magazine was a good reminder of how we can improve our lead-gen results by being more targeted with our messages.

I know this is a basic idea and many of you do this this already but knowing something and actually doing it are two different things. This article prompted me to make really make sure I'm doing this consistently. Hopefully, it will prompt you too.

Here's a quick summary of Goodman's 6 steps: 

1. Do Your Homework.
2. Find Prospects That Look Like Your Target.
3. Determine Your Target's Pain Points.
4. Gather Sales Support Assets.
5. Create a Destination of Information.

Read Target Your B-to-B Lead-Gen Efforts by Vertical and Job Title

I wouldn't stop at targeting by vertical and job title. There's many additional ways you can can segment and target messages including; Stage in the buying process, Company size, job function, trigger events, role in buying process and more. 

Related Posts:
5 Lead nurturing tips to create relevant and engaging emails
Develop and intensify your Ideal Customer Profile

Lead Generation tips for Tradeshows Conferences

Tradeshows and events are still being used consistently by B2B marketers for lead generation. With that in mind, Roger Lewis has some useful tips on how to improve your lead management strategy with from tradeshows. Lewis emphasizes how vital lead capture is to the lead management process.

He writes:

Without the continuity of using one lead management solution across all your yearly events, your company is often left with:

• Inconsistent data fields that are difficult to import into CRM systems;
• Unnecessary or missing data;
• Different formats that need to be painstakingly modified;
• No ability to capture lead qualification survey data; and most importantly,
• Missed sales opportunities because the sales group is forced to cull through a list of unqualified contacts.

I agree. I believe a key aspect is developing a process that emphasizes lead quality over lead quantity. Well meaning marketers can ruin their lead generation results by rushing an unqualified list of tradeshow attendees to their sales team.  Early stage leads - those who are not ready to speak to a sales person yet - are great candidates for an effective lead nurturing program.

After doing numerous lead qualification programs at InTouch, we have found only 5% to 10% of trade show inquiries are truly sales ready leads; so don't pass marketing driven inquiries to your sales people until they're more rigorously qualified as sales ready leads. 

We must realize that the extreme time pressure salespeople face—especially those with a complex sale—requires them to ignore what is not immediately relevant and highly likely to produce revenue. Why? They are not paid to do anything else. And that makes quality more important than quantity to them. 

Related posts:

Clear and Universal Lead Definition
Podcast on Tradeshow and Event Marketing with Ruth Stevens

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).