B2B Lead Generation Blog

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?

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

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 via Search: Comparing Quantity and Quality

Have you wondered about where you should put your online lead generation budget into search engine optimization or paid search?  Check out this new chart by MarketingSherpa, "Comparing the Quantity and Quality of B2B Search-Generated Leads":

(click chart to expand) According to Sherpa, "While paid search gives marketers more control, natural search page rankings driven higher by search engine optimization tactics generate as many high-quality leads as all paid search sources combined."

What do you think? Do these findings match up with your experience with using search for lead generation?

Related Posts:

Tracking ROI From Web Generated Leads
Website Landing Pages impact Lead Generation results
Optimizing webforms to generate more leads through your website
Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads

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.