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"

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)

100 Tips for Trade Show Lead Generation

Lead generation remains the top reason most companies exhibit at events and tradeshows. And B2B marketers are constantly looking for ideas they can use to drive more ROI from their events budget.

I came across this helpful post by Mike Thimmesch on 100 Trade Show Lead Generation Ideas that's worth checking out. The following is a sampling of Thimmesch's tips that I though were useful:

4. Go to fewer trade shows, but put more effort into booth staff preparation and promotions for each remaining show.
6. Track leads to determine and expand in the shows with the best ROI
9. Get a booth space closer to the hub of traffic, or by a bigger competitor
28. Have your sales people invite their prospects to visit your booth and set up meetings in advance
29. Send an email invitation to the show’s pre-registered attendee list for this year, and the registered attendee list from last year
30. Use social media to reach more attendees
32. Post your trade show schedule on your website with a link to sign up for appointments
45. Giveaway something useful to your target audience
46. Have a contest for attendees in your booth

After reading the list of 100, here’s a few more tips I would add:

1. Follow-up quickly after the event. Think about your follow-up process before the event happens not afterwards.
2. Create event follow-up content pieces, talking points and email templates for your sales team to use to add value and continue the conversation in a relevant way rather than "pitching" everybody.
3. Develop a nurturing track that for event attendees connects with the theme or the content of the event. Try to do this at least for a few months at minimum.
4. See the event as a conversation (or conversation starter) not a acampaign. Don't stop the dialog. Brainstorm ways you can keep the dialog going.

What other tips would you add to this list?

Related posts:
Lead Generation tips for Tradeshows Conferences

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

Webinar: Beyond Lead Generation - Helping Sales Drive Revenue with Jeff Thull

The purpose of B2B marketing and lead generation is to help the sales team sell; however marketers can often get so wrapped up in driving campaign activity they seem to forget it's about driving sales conversion and helping the sales team achieve better results.

Join me and Jeff Thull, author of Mastering the Complex Sale, Second Edition and President/CEO of Prime Resource Group, for a complimentary webinar where you'll learn how to help sales:

• Establish relevancy, credibility and trust
• Receive executive sponsorship and privileged access to the organization
• Build and prove the financial case for your solution
• Ensure the solution is prominently on the executive's dashboard
• Win more predictable and profitable sales

Watch recorded webinar on demand (no registration required)

Related post:
Going beyond the sales lead

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?

Online Lead Generation: How to optimize forms to convert “window shoppers” into leads webinar by Flint McGlaughlin

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)

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