B2B Lead Generation Blog

Five steps to help create your universal lead definition

I’m amazed that 90% of the companies I’ve talked with over the last six months lack a clear definition of a sales lead really is – that is their sales and marketing departments don’t agree on a universal lead definition. By not asking and answering a few critical questions, these teams are working inefficiently, wasting time and money, and in effect, crippling the bottom line. Teamwork is the only way organizations can achieve maximum ROI.

To get your lead generation program on track, I recommend that your organization start by creating a universal lead definition. By following these five steps, you’ll create a definition that not only works but that gets better over time.

Steps for defining a universal lead definition:

1. Meet - Get those who are marketing and those who are selling together in a room or on a conference call. You need a leader/facilitator with "street credibility." The premise of the meeting is that we're all in this together.

2. Ask this question to sales team: “For us to be 100% certain that when we send you a lead that you will act on it and provide feedback on 100% of the time, what do you need to know? At what point do you consider a lead qualified?  Now shut up and listen. Dig. Dig. Dig. Everybody must play.

3. Don't stop with just one meeting. Summarize the notes from your meeting and have another meeting to clarify and make sure everyone is satisfied with the definition. You need to have a strong consensus.

4. Publish the Universal Lead Definition everywhere so people who are involved in new customer acquisition are reminded often about their target and objective.

5. Close-the-loop via huddles before leveraging software. Sales/Marketing should meet bi-weekly to review if the lead definition is still accurate. Ask questions like: Was X a lead? Did they enter the sales process? Why or why not? What else would you like to have known about this lead? How can we improve? What should we stop doing? What should we start doing?

It won’t take long to reap the benefits.  And, I guarantee you that improved ROI won’t be the only one.

Related Posts:

Closed Loop Feedback: The Missing Lead Generation Huddle

On Lead Qualification: Steps to Convert Inquiries into Viable Sales Leads

A common lead generation practice using B2B inbound marketing includes offering white papers, demos, trial software, or other content assets in exchange for registration information. The problem is that many marketers immediately turn these form registrations (aka web inquiries) over to the sales team as "leads."

If your sales team perceives the majority of "leads" passed to them are no good, they're unlikely to spend time tracking prospects down.

I’ve already written about why lead quality should be emphasized over quantity. But, how do you weed through all those web inquiries to get to those that are truly ready for the sales team to engage so you can nurture the rest?

Here's a lead qualification process that may help you turn your web inquiries into viable sales leads: 

Step 1 - Create a marketing funnel.

The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring inquiries (aka leads) into one spot and qualify them. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready. Lead qualification must first classify leads according to their "sales readiness" and business fit; and second, to manage all the incoming leads effectively.

On Lead generation: Insist on lead quality over quantity

Under increased pressure to help drive revenue in this challenging market, many of us are tempted throw as many leads as we can to our sales team.

We can tell ourselves that more leads is better because it lowers the cost-per-lead and gives the sales team more activity. But don’t be one of those lulled by this false sense of security. If you really want to make a difference in your company’s sales, dig deeper. Focus on metrics that go beyond cost-per-lead, and more importantly, focus on quality first then quantity.

Do you know how many of your leads are actually impacting the sales pipeline? I've done numerous lead qualification programs have shown that as little as 5 to 15 percent of all inquiries turn out to be truly sales-ready opportunities. And while there are other influences such as sales training and refining the lead handoff process, lead quality stands out as the single largest factor driving the real ROI of our lead generation programs.  

Free inbound marketing training program to help you get ahead

If you are a marketing professional looking to gain new skills in this competitive workforce or a marketer between jobs check out the Inbound Marketing University’s marketing retraining program. All classes will be taught by industry experts with years of hands-on experience in the topics they will be discussing.

I will discuss Inbound Lead Nurturing. This class will be based on my 14 years of experience creating and executing lead nurturing programs for InTouch. Other classes focus on effective blogging, SEO tactics, uses for Facebook and LinkedIn, and landing page best practices.

You can check out all the classes at: http://www.inboundmarketing.com/university

Other professors leading courses include: Chris Brogan from New Marketing Labs, Mack Collier and Ann Handley both from MarketingProfs, Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz, Eric Groves  from Constant Contact, Jeanne Hopkins  from MarketingExperiments, Lee Odden  from Top Rank Online Marketing, David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing & PR and Marshall Sponder from Monster.com.

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

MarketingExperiments B2B Landing Page Web Clinic Contest

I will be hosting a MarketingExperiments Web Clinic along with MECLABS Sciences Group Director, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, this Wednesday, February 25 at 4 pm EST. This clinic is special because it will feature an interactive contest. Ten B2B landing pages will be selected to vie for a grand prize: a free landing page assessment (worth $5,000). Attendees of the clinic will be voting for who they think most deserves the makeover.

You don’t have to submit something in order to participate in the clinic. And, get this: you can win prizes by just making contributions to the discussion.

Visit the MarketingExperiments Blog to see 5 recent B2B Landing Pages that were submitted and analyzed by the MEx Sciences Team.

Watch the clinic on demand now

Read the summary

Seven tips for improving cold calling for lead generation

In spite of the fact that in the past pushy salespeople and poorly trained marketers have tarnished the image of the phone, I still believe that reaching out via phone is a very effective lead generation tool.

Studies by leading marketing research firms like MarketingSherpa show that 92% of B2B buyers are open to cold calls if the sales person is relevant. However, to ensure success, cold-calling needs to be part of a holistic lead generation strategy.

How to Get Started:
To truly use phone calls as an effective lead generation strategy, I recommend you create a specialized sales development team within the sales or marketing group or hire a firm that specializes in teleprospecting. Make certain that your cold-calling is aligned with other ongoing marketing and reputation-building activities.Teleprospectors must be smart, articulate, engaging and organized. Their training should focus on making them a consistently productive and sustainable extension of the selling effort.

The phone is the human touch of your lead nurturing program and thus every opportunity including cold calling to a potential customer should be treated with great respect. Each time you pick up the phone, whether it be the first call or subsequent calls, it’s important to create value by giving your prospects useful information in digestible, bite-size chunks.

Steps for Improving “Teleprospecting” Performance:

Step 1: Sustain the calling – be in it for the long haul. Teleprospecting works best if it’s long term and consistent. Don’t pressure your prospects to make a decision on the first call. Take your time and follow-up with more information. Listen to what they’re asking and if you don’t know the answer, let them know that and follow up again with them to provide them the answer

Step 2: Make every call count - Teleprospectors should never terminate a call upon hearing the targeted individual is not available. Imagine taking time to be helpful to the assistant or updating and verifying your database by working to share information for this source. Always ask if there is an alternative decision maker available as well.

Step 3: Throw away the scripts: Telemarketers use scripts. Teleprospectors use call guides. Scripts leave little room for conversation. Call guides are strong outlines to perpetuate conversation with areas to be discussed and questions to be asked. They must be built with flexibility and assume variable outcomes while still staying on message and promoting key relevancies to the customer.

Webinar on Putting the Human Touch into Lead Generation

There are numerous tactics for generating leads these days — everything from the traditional email or phone call to the explosively popular social media craze. However, the real challenge is not necessarily in generating leads, but more in truly connecting with them. It doesn’t matter how many leads you generate if they aren’t willing to listen to what you have to say next.

You need to develop and then engage in memorable and relevant conversations with prospects. You need to position your company as a thought leader and solution provider that understands your prospect’s needs. You need that “human touch.”

During this one-hour, live webinar you will learn how to:

• Engage your prospects with memorable and relevant conversations
• Build and maintain quality relationships with potential clients
• Develop a lead-nurturing process that really works
• Recapture lost leads and opportunities

I’m teaming up with Citrix Online to bring this webinar to marketers of all levels. Whether you are a VP of Marketing, a VP or Director of Sales, or a Sales or Marketing Consultant, you’ll learn how to connect by sharing your expertise.

Watch the archived webinar on demand

When is a “free download” no longer free?

What do you wish companies would stop doing when you download a free white paper?

I bet I already know. I had a conversation recently with my business development executive who has become highly suspicious of "free" white paper downloads. There are some sites that he refuses to download from because not only was the prior information unhelpful, but he knows he will receive a call from a telemarketer - even after he's made it clear he's not interested. Why do we continue to force people into being "leads"?

People download content often to answer questions. Don't assume that because they downloaded something that they are ready to talk to a sales person. You need to first connect with your potential lead.

I've found that calling people is the best way to qualify leads, and if that phone call is conducted correctly it can be the start of a really good relationship. If there is an initiative invariably people will tell more about their project and what they are trying to do. The nuance matters and it helps you sound less like a pusher and more like a relevant resource.

A good example of a follow up comes from Endeca. When my colleague downloaded a white paper from their site, Endeca's follow-up was very professional. The call opened with questions about what led him to take a look at their paper. They asked what he found particularly interesting about the download.

When InTouch handles inquiry/lead qualification for our clients, we typically start off with something like, "A lot of people download our white papers to get their questions answered. I was wondering if you got a chance to read (insert title of the download), and if your question got answered. Or, is there some other way that I can help?" 

Also, rather than asking, "Are you the decision maker for the company?" ask something like, "Were you trying to answer this question for yourself or another member of your team so I can help you get the needed information."

There has to be a balance between collecting information and providing value. If you'll think of Lead Generation as a process of micro-conversions that build opportunity profiles over time, you'll be successful. With that in mind, here are some things to think about when offering 'free' information:

• Downloads that are thinly-veiled product brochures and technical documents of the offered product are not only unprofessional, they're ineffective.
• Be careful about requiring registration to receive anything worthwhile.  Request an email address first, then later on a first and last name. Requesting a phone number should be later on in the process.
• Sales teams should never receive Web inquiries directly and unqualified (truth be told - sales people only want to talk to people who actually WANT to talk to them)
• Contacts should be established with potential customers to prime them into the lead-nurturing program
• Web site forms should be to the point for maximum response
• All inquiries should be responded to with a prompt note of thanks (how good is your "thank you" auto reply?)
• A supplementary email thank you should be used to share value added relevant data

Related Posts:

On Lead Nurturing: Looking for a "hot" date?

Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads

So what do you wish companies/sales people would stop doing when you download a free white paper or other "free" content?