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

Sales and marketing alignment: tips for getting it right with lead generation

According to the 2008 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, only 37% of respondents agreed that their sales and marketing organizations are aligned in what their customers want and need. I discussed this disconnect with Bill Golder in the February issue of Sales & Marketing Management. You can check out the interview online: Chronicles of a Sales Leader: The Lack of Sales and Marketing Alignment in Organizations Today.

I firmly believe that organizations that perform match readiness of the buyer with expectations of their sales team. The unrealized potential can be likened to the batteries in a flashlight. If the batteries aren't inserted in the right direction, or are otherwise out of proper contact, their power is unusable. My experience confirms that this communication breakdown affects nine out of ten companies. Bill asked me what advice I would give these organizations that are struggling with alignment. Here are the five tips I shared with him:

1. Sales and Marketing must collaborate on defining leads and marketing objectives. You can make a huge impact by focusing first, on creating an Ideal Customer Profile (company-wide, for each product, service or solution). Then, create the Universal Lead Definition of a "sales-ready lead." Finally, connect the marketing/sales process to customer's buying process.
2. What gets measured gets done. Connect sales and marketing metrics together.
3. Create relevant content for each stage of the customer buying cycle.
4. Focus on the data points you REALLY need to measure in your CRM.
5. Clarify your value proposition now! Does your sales team have sales-ready messaging?

In developing a lead generation program, it is incumbent on marketers to view the sales team as the customer. It's no different than directing a consulting firm project where the client is involved in each stage of the project. The sales team should become so integrated that it has program ownership just like everyone else.

There’s a lot more good info discussed in this interview so be sure to read the full article here. Thanks to Bill and SMM for giving the opportunity to share.

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

B2B Marketing Testing to Optimize Lead Generation Results

Discovering and knowing what really works and what doesn’t for lead generation is essential for every marketer. The best way to discover this is through the process of testing.

Personally, I’ve met only a handful of B2B marketers who are consistently testing their offers to optimize them and generate leads more effectively. I think this is due to two things: the first is time (because marketers want to get their campaigns out there), and the second is knowledge of testing methods.

I was glad to see Jon Miller who writes Marketo's blog, Modern B2B Marketing, recently interview Hunter Boyle, Managing Editor for MarketingExperiments on Testing B2b Marketing. In the interview, Hunter shares best practices for increasing conversion via testing , building a universal definition of a lead, and using testing to discover what works.

Read: Testing Your B2B Marketing: Thought Leadership with Hunter Boyle
Related post: MarketingExperiments: Better tests, better results -- here's how

Building a Marketing Funnel and More Lead Management Tips

I was recently interviewed for an article on lead management by Chris Koch who works for ITSMA, the Information Technology Services Marketing Association.

In the article titled, "Building a Marketing Funnel and Other Lead Management Tips," I give the following five tips on how you can make your B2B lead management more effective, which are:

1. Create a marketing funnel.
2. Create a universal definition of a lead.
3. Use the phone.
4. Ask about goals—don’t sell.
5. Define lead nurturing—and the right people to nurture.

Here’s a short excerpt from my interview.

1. Create a marketing funnel.

Most organizations don’t have a marketing funnel; they have a sales funnel that looks more like a bucket with lots of holes in it where leads leak out. Marketing needs to create its own funnel to understand whether leads are sales ready or not.

The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring leads into one spot and qualify them. By qualifying them, I mean that the leads are ready to talk to someone from a sales perspective. Then there is the hand-off process between marketing and sales. I find that connecting the marketing and sales funnel together is really a big challenge. You have to understand your sales process to know at what point the sales team views a lead as an opportunity and begins actively pursuing it.

Lead generation really is about building relationships. It’s how can I help my sales team build relationships with the right people and the right companies. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready.

The bigger and better you make your marketing pipeline, ultimately the bigger and better you make your sales pipeline. In the end, this isn’t about generating more leads; it’s about generating actionable leads.

Continue reading Building a Marketing Funnel and Other Lead Management Tips

Execution is the key to go-to-market success

The biggest obstacle to go-to-market success (and lead generation ROI for that matter) is the lack of good execution.

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council's latest study, “Driving the Bottom Line from the Front Line,” assessed the go-to-market processes and capabilities of global companies. According to the study, "Surprisingly, over 46% of respondents gave themselves failing grades when assessing their own go-to-market effectiveness, with only six percent giving their capabilities the highest marks, and just 29% calling themselves quite effective." 

The study concluded that poor collaboration between sales and marketing is a key reason for go-to-market failure and this is where the leadership from upper management plays a vital role in successful execution. Todd Ebert over at the BAD Marketing Blog gives some additional insights on the CMO study here.

I agree with their findings. With that said, it requires more than just effective upper management involvement. I believe that effective collaboration requires each of us to better managers ourselves. 

Becoming an effective marketer goes far beyond creativity and careful campaign management. Like any other functional role, marketers will execute successfully, more often, if we are first and foremost good managers.   

Collaboration between sales and marketing and go-to-market execution will come more naturally if we each focus on our basic management skills: Leadership, communication, planning, organizing, staffing, and controlling.

I encourage you to check out The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. If you only read one book about how to improve your personal effectiveness I think you will find this book to be a good choice. It was written quite a while ago but it's a wonderful resource.

Related post: Why CEOs Must Be Actively Involved in Lead Generation

Web Analytics for B2B Lead Generation

In the complex sale, the length of the buying cycle makes the connection between on-the-web activity and the off-line decision to purchase much more difficult to trace. So the challenge is connecting our website data (analytics), with marketing data (inquiries and leads) with the sales process and revenue (closing the loop). 

I came across Manoj Jasra post, "B2B Web Analytics: Deeper Dive - Web Analytics World" and thought it was relevant to share.   

Jasra writes, "in order to be successful in a B2B world, marketers require a strong understanding in regards to their potential customers. Things such as lead qualification, targeting in the sales cycle, and testing content/collateral are all areas where analysts can push the envelope in order to provide more insight for their marketing team."

Jasra's post outlines four key analytic areas which include: quality of leads, sales cycle, optimizing your content (for SEO and conversion) and conversion rates and funnels.

Here are some posts that give more suggestions on analytics.

Related posts:

Tracking ROI From Web Generated Leads
Improve your online lead generation measurement

I still think there is a lot of improvement that needs to be made in this area. Are you satisfied with your ability to track your online lead generation ROI? If so, what's been working for you?

Why cost-per-lead budgets fail and fewer leads are better

A reader asked me to explain why fewer leads are better and why “cost-per-lead” budgets fail. These are two great questions that have the same fundamental answer: quality first then quantity.

The truth is that sales people care very little about the cost of the leads we generate. What they really care about is how many of those leads will actually become viable sales opportunities.

For this reason, I think cost-per-lead measurements are irrelevant unless we can answer another fundamental question first, “What is our rate of lead acceptance (a.k.a. sales pursuit) into the sales pipeline” and then “What is the cost per opportunity?”

Sadly, I find that a lot of marketers tend focus on cost-per-lead because they really don’t know what happens to their leads after they hand them off to their sales team. This is why closed loop feedback and lead management are so important.

B2B Lead management is far from an easy task

Companies that adopt effective lead management processes generate more revenue from their lead generation investment and have overall higher close rates on marketing generated leads than those that do not. But I've encountered very few companies that really do lead management.

What is lead management? Lead management is a multistage process that manages the conversion of sales leads to customers. Some people say it's the process of going from "first contact to close."

In Christopher Hosford’s BtoB Magazine article, he highlights some of the reasons why "Lead management far from easy task."

The article mainly highlight’s "lead scoring and automation," but that’s only part of the solution. Lead scoring and automation support a process of lead qualification, but I would argue that there are more fundamental aspects of lead management that often get overlooked.

Take a moment and think about your lead management efforts... do you see it as process?