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"

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

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)

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 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).

Lead Generation Check list – Part 8: Lead nurturing for lead development

To help you start the New Year, I’d like to wrap up my Lead Generation Checklist Series with the secret to successful lead generation – and, for that matter, marketing in today’s B2B space: lead nurturing. 

At it's core, B2B lead generation is about building relationships. In today’s commoditized business climate, the one thing that sets apart companies with a complex sale is how well they build and nurture long-term leads.

Throughout this series, I’ve discussed many aspects of lead generation and emphasized how organizations can optimize the process. I’ve talked about creating the right mindset, and how to repair the rift between sales and marketing; I’ve discussed how to create the ideal customer profile (and the un-ideal customer profile as well) and how a universal lead definition that fits your company’s goals and culture can help organizations zone in on their sweet spot as well as the importance of a well maintained database; I’ve outlined a multi modal approach and emphasized its role in effective lead generation, as well as the aspects of an effective lead management process. Today, I’d like to talk about the part of the process that fundamentally stops viable leads from leaking out of your marketing funnel. Lead nurturing: It’s the one thing that will make all your hard work come together – or the one thing that could make your whole process fall apart….

While lead generation initiates and perpetuates dialogue with the right people in the right companies in the quest for opportunities that are relatively imminent, lead nurturing keeps the conversation going over time, building solid relationships. It allows the creation of interest in products and services while bringing the leads to sales-ready states when the buying opportunity presents itself.

To ensure successful lead nurturing you must:

• Have a lead development process in place to cultivate marketing leads into sales ready leads.
• Employ methods to motivate sales people for consistent contact with prospects who may not yet be ready to buy.
• Have a process for ensuring that your Sales team hands back inactive leads for further nurturing by marketing. That centralized database that I keep emphasizing will come in handy now. Sales can make notes as to why they are not going to use the leads and give feedback to Marketing at this point.
• Capture future opportunities that are being currently missed and nurture them into viable sales. This is where Marketing can take many opportunities that are being ignored and keep them warm for Sales.
• Leverage content to position sales people as trusted advisors. A carefully crafted lead nurturing program anticipates the prospect’s questions and responds with timely answers. This inspires awareness that you are creating value by providing useful information. Relevancy is the key.
• Aid in positioning sales people as trusted advisors. By consistently offering relevant content in the context of lead nurturing, the potential customer’s inner dialogue should be: something like this: “You and I have been talking for quite a while, and I feel that you understand me, my company and my industry. You have given me useful and pertinent ideas on this issue, and you have helped me sell the idea to my colleagues and they understand and accept it. It’s a challenging project, but I think you can do it. Let’s get going.”

Thoughts on how to follow-up on website leads when you use marketing automation

A few months ago, at the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing summit in Boston, I was asked on how best to follow-up on leads generated via the web by Richard Hill. Richard writes over at the Idea Exchange blog on marketing automation related topics.

Marketing automation tools are useful because they can give us a ton of visibility into the visitors to our website, what they looked at, etc., and when visitors fill out form, we can link their contact information to their other offline marketing touch points.

The question is how do we use this information? Should we wait? Should we pounce right away and call them? What's the best way to do this that helps us best identify leads? Here's my thoughts to this question via a short interview I did with Richard Hill on, "To pounce or not to pounce?"

Here's some tips Richard captured on how to better engage web leads:

1. Marketing and sales should jointly develop a website visitor engagement strategy.
2. Develop follow-up materials and content that your sales team can use to bring extra value to enhance their follow-up interactions that extend beyond the content future customers can get via your website. 
3. Create a call guide to help your sales team to be a resource first before they try "qualifying" the sales opportunity. What questions are must have verses nice to have?
4. If you're using marketing automation, coach your team doing follow-up calls not to directly mention your marketing automation tracking capabilities (that can be 'creepy') think instead of how you can tailor a relevant conversation based on the content consumed being the topic your sales team starts with.

Also, I would add if you are generating a good volume of leads online consider creating or outsourcing a specialized lead engagement and qualification team.

Related Posts:
On Lead generation: Insist on lead quality over quantity
Social media's impact on web forms and landing pages
Optimizing webforms to generate more leads through your website
Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads

Steps for creating a true lead nurturing program

Sometimes in an attempt to vamp up lead nurturing efforts, misguided and well-meaning organizations simply start sending out more emails. When email is misused in this manner, companies are really just training prospects to ignore or delete their messages. 

See What IS and ISN'T Lead Nurturing

If your organization lacks a well-defined process for nurturing early-stage leads and building relationships before the buying process, you are missing out on opportunities. True lead nurturing involves creating and maintaining relevant and consistent dialog with viable potential customers - regardless of their timing to buy. Your content should help you become a resource to prospects.

A true lead nurturing program will always include:

• A relationship building mindset
• A multi-modal approach
• The human touch continue a relevant dialog and make appropriate offers based on behavior and engagement.
• Lead nurturing automation tools that will support, personalization, lower volume and ad hoc delivery while tracking all touch points such as phone, email, online efforts and personal contact.

The measurement of nurturing results such as:

• Depths of contacts in sphere of influence
• Contacts that “opt-in” for nurturing
• Contacts that become “sales ready” leads

This can seem like a complicated ordeal. It’s easy to see why organizations get overwhelmed by the time and planning required for developing an effective program, so I’ve broken down the process into eight steps.

1. Define the Ideal Customer Profile: Make sure you are nurturing relationships with the right people and organizations.
2. Define the Universal Lead Definition: Higher standards on qualifying inquiries to actual leads positively impacts conversion with lead to pipeline and lead to sale.
3. Lead qualification: Marketers have a tendency to require too much information from their inquiries at the first touch in an effort to qualify someone right away. The process can be broken down into steps that balance out the process.
4. Understand and Capture Audience: You need to understand who’s involved in the buying process so you can build a database based on your prospect’s role. The goal isn’t to build the biggest database, but to build one that is going to be most relevant.
5. Message Development: Message mapping is a great way for organizations to tie in what they are selling with what the buyer’s key issues are.
6. Build Lead Nurturing Library: Gather content that you can use to set yourself and your company up as thought leaders.
7. Develop Lead Nurturing Tracks: Map out tactics for sharing your content. Remember to start out slow and build your program slowly.
8. Executing Multi-Modal Lead Nurturing: Track all touch points (email, web, phone, social media etc.)