B2B Lead Generation Blog

LinkedIn B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group Turns One

Last year, I launched the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. It started with a simple goal: 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, social media and more.

We didn’t start the group to become the biggest; we just wanted it to be the best.

Amazingly, in less than a year, the group has grown to over 5,062 members with hundreds of discussions and thousands of helpful comments. With a such big community, It takes time to manage the spam and to keep the group focused but Brooke Bower (our fearless group manager at InTouch) is doing a great job. In fact, Brooke was written about in this post Go for Brooke by Michael Benidt and Sheryl Kay.

Thanks to all of the members whose contributions make this group a success. I can’t wait to see what another year will bring.

Join the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable on LinkedIn

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?

LinkedIn for lead generation - Are You the Missing Link?

It takes time and commitment, but LinkedIn has become ideal venue to nurture relationships and generate new leads, especially for sales people involved in a complex sale.

On that topic, I wrote an guest article for MarketingProfs, titled "10 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Generate Leads." MarketingProfs decided to make it a "premium article" so it's available only to paid subscribers.

You can read some of the ideas I shared in this summary article published by MarketingProfs.

Here's just a few of the ideas I share:

1. Create a polished and personally branded profile on LinkedIn.
2. Join LinkedIn groups where your clients/customers gather and participate.
3. Target groups by activity level (relevance), not just by size
4. Post relevant content on groups.
5. Answer questions posted on LinkedIn.
6. Create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.

Read Are You the Missing Link?

Related Posts:

Lessons on Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation 
5 steps for using LinkedIn as lead generation tool

Also, if you're interested in connecting on lead generation topics and use LinkedIn, consider joining me and  the 4,200 members of the LinkedIn B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group.

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

How to Get the Twitter Username You've Always Wanted (even if it's taken)

Don't forget to secure your Twitter name! I signed up for twitter a year an half ago but that wasn’t soon enough to get my hands on my company's Twitter name of choice of @intouch.

So if you were late to the party (like me) I'm happy to say there still might be hope. I found this blog post How to Snap Up that Twitter Username You’ve Always Wanted posted by @zee

I followed Zee's process and I'm pleased to say it worked for us! Maybe it will work for you too. 

Here's what we did

1. Emailed username@twitter.com with the following information:
   

   • The username you want
   • Your existing username, if you have one
   • Whether you want to change your username, or start a new account with the username you’re requesting

2. I received confirmation the email had been received a few minutes later, then another email asking me to reply with the above information (if I hadn’t already provided it).
3. Literally, 3 weeks later, I had my account switched from @intouch5 (BTW intouch1-4 were already taken!) to @intouch.

Why did it work?

The person who took my company's name was inactive. Twitter has a policy that if a profile has been "inactive" for a period of time they release the name. In my case @intouch was never updated by the previous user so we were lucky. I hope this helps and I wish you success!

A multi-modal approach to lead nurturing

To be successful at lead nurturing marketers can't rely on one specific channel but rather they need to leverage a multi-modal portfolio of channels especially when you have a complex sale. 

Why? The goal of lead nurturing is to maintain a relevant and consistent dialog with viable future customers - regardless of their timing to buy. In short, it’s about relationships.

To help illustrate, I created a mind map of what multi-modal lead nurturing looks like (click image to enlarge).

Are there any lead nurturing channels/modalities that I'm missing?

Download Multi-Modal_Lead_Nurturing

If you keep the idea about that nurturing is about building relationships top of mind, the way you nurture leads will naturally go beyond a single channel like e-mail. You’ll start thinking about how you and your sales people can be a relevant resource. When you do that, you don’t have to sell to people. They will come to you first when they are ready.

Related posts:
What IS and ISN’T Lead Nurturing
How lead nurturing improves lead generation ROI
5 Lead nurturing tips to create relevant and engaging emails

Lessons on Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation

I've heard more B2B marketers citing LinkedIn as a key social network they want to add into their lead generation and marketing strategy. I often get asked questions like "how do you generate leads via LinkedIn (without alienating your network)? How are you doing it? What works, and what doesn't etc." 

In this post, "5 steps for using LinkedIn as lead generation tool," I share what I've learned so far. I'm still experimenting and I'd love to get your input on this.

My colleagues over at MarketingSherpa just posted a terrific case study on Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation. In the case study, they profile a marketing team and their lessons on "joining LinkedIn groups, sharing relevant marketing collateral, and qualifying the leads that come through the channel."

Here’s a quick look at the 6 lessons they learned:

Lesson #1. Target groups by activity level (relevance), not just by size
Lesson #2. Join groups under your own name, not a company
Lesson #3. Place collateral in the context of a conversation
Lesson #4. Response rate is highly variable
Lesson #5. Create social media-specific landing pages
Lesson #6. Quality can be an issue with leads from LinkedIn

Read MarketingSherpa: Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation: 6 Lessons

Resource: 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR: Benchmarks and Best Practices

Related posts:

Read 5 steps for using LinkedIn as lead generation tool
Savvy B2B Marketing: Using LinkedIn to Gather Industry Intelligence

You may also want to check the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. This group is all about sharing ideas that focus on the many aspects of B2B lead generation such as lead nurturing, lead management, teleprospecting and more. The group has grown to 2500 members in just 8 week but I'm even more excited about the quality discussions. I'm learning a ton from members. Check it out

Social media's impact on web forms and landing pages

More marketers are embracing social media and inbound marketing practices for lead generation. That's a good thing.

I’ve written about how you can leverage social media tools like blogs, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to drive interested visitors to your website or landing pages to register for educational content and other assets. It works.

But remember most people coming to your website aren't coming to your website to buy. They are coming to your site for information. People start to question the value of giving up too much info on forms before you've earned their trust.

Have you thought about your web forms? Are you asking for far too much information before you've earned their trust?  I wrote about this in my post, Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads. I would add that you need to leverage a robust lead qualification process too.

Earlier this week, I came across a relevant post by Chis Koch (@Ckochster) on “how old-school data capture is poisoning marketing and what to do about it.”

In his post, Chris dares us to rethink how and if we should gather information from prospects. He writes, “As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects.” Check out his post. I agree.

You'll do better by thinking of lead generation as a process of micro-conversions that build an opportunity profile over time, such as requesting an email address, then asking for first and last name, later requesting a phone number, and so on.

I read of one company that trimmed down the registration to include an extremely simple, two-field form. Conversion rate more than tripled with this simplification. At the same time, the company expanded their email follow-up process and was able to increase the total amount of personal data collected over time.

Related posts:

7 Tips on how B2B marketers can leverage social media
How to use social media for lead generation

Tips on 6 biggest mistakes to avoid in B2B content marketing

Each month ClickDocuments asks industry experts a specific question on content marketing. This months question is, “What’s the biggest mistake to avoid in b2b content marketing."

I'm in good company again this month with Patsi Krakoff, Maria Pergolino, Ardath Albee, Rebel Brown and Mac McIntosh.

If you want to improve your inbound marketing, social media and lead generation results, I encourage you to check out this post.

B2B Marketing Zone launched

A new B2B marketing community that I am participating in was just launched. The B2B Marketing Zone is a marketing community site that was launched as collaborative effort between Tom Pick and Tony Karrer.

The community features content from other B2B marketing bloggers I enjoy such as Ardath Albee (Marketing Interactions), Paul Dunay (Buzz Marketing for Technology) and Jon Miller (Modern B2B Marketing) as well many others. If you’re looking for insights from other experts in B2B marketing I recommend you check it out.