Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Too Much Information

By Jason Stewart  - July 30th, 2007

This blog has had a few entries about the hazards of asking for too much information from your prospects, but what about sharing too much information about yourself?

Have you ever looked at a website and thought to yourself “Wow. I have no idea what they do.”

How about the opposite? Have you ever looked at a vendor’s site, understood exactly what they do, and then disqualified them from consideration because of information you found there?

It’s a very fine line, and a few of the sales aspects of it are covered nicely in a piece called “The TMI Trap” at B2Blog. There are “Too Much Information” (TMI) hazards to watch out for in your B2B marketing efforts as well, however.

Telesales – I’ve worked with a number of telesales outsourcing firms over the years, charging them with appointment setting for our outside sales reps and account managers. I found myself, more often than not, having to stop myself from “overtraining.” In my quest to prepare them to answer any question or objection, I would lose sight of the fact that it’s not their job to do that. If they answer every question put before them, why would a prospect need to meet with your salesperson? They already got everything they needed from the telesales rep. The best telesales reps understand this, and can work the fact that they don’t know everything as the opening to introduce the senior salesperson and to set up that follow-up meeting.

Website – Talk to your spouse, significant other, brother or sister. Even better, show your parents. Show your website to someone who has absolutely nothing to do with your company, and then ask them to describe what it is you do. Prepare to be shocked. Then fix it. Once you have that squared away, have a discussion with your sales team to find out what the most common objections are this month. Ask them, point blank, if they would like to have those points addressed on the site, or if they would rather have control over objection handling case by case, and just concentrate on getting people in the door first. They’ll probably want to find out more about what is driving a concern or objection before answering it, but on occasion they may ask you for the next item on the list -- a new piece of collateral.

Collateral – How long is your collateral wish list? How often has your sales team requested a high-priority piece of collateral that gets used once (maybe twice) before it is completely outdated? Consider how long it takes to write that first draft, share it, revise it, share it again, update it, design the layout, share it again, etc. In spite of the temptation to have a prepared piece of collateral handy for any question or objection that might cross your path, you need to carefully select where to direct your (limited) resources. The trick is to create collateral that is informative and interesting, selling the value and benefits of your goods or services without making the prospect feel as if they are sitting in a classroom lecture. Too much information might bore them to tears, or might lead them to disqualify you from consideration before a live person can learn more about the issues driving their concerns. Specifications in an RFI (Request for Information) or RFP (Request for Proposal) have been known to change after projects have been scoped out, but typically that does not happen based solely upon an outstanding piece of collateral. You need to get a salesperson in there to ferret out the real drivers and needs behind the project.

Your objective is create the marketing pieces that drive leads to your sales team, not eliminate the need for a salesperson.

Why Can't Sales and Marketing Just Get Along?

By Kirk Crenshaw  - July 24, 2007

Make sure that sales and marketing work as a team.

How many times have you encountered this situation?

Sales:  "Marketing does not generate enough leads..and the leads they generate are bad anyways..."

Marketing:  "Sales is lazy.  They never follow-up on the leads we create."

I've seen this situation all too many times, and the one thing that I've always seen at the root of the issue: Lack of Communication.

How can you make a difference?

Let's start with a few key things that sales and marketing should come to a mutual understanding on:

1. The definition of a lead.  What are the characteristics that make up a desirable prospect?  This is core to making things runs smoothly.  Once sales and marketing can agree on this, they can then work towards a common goal.
2. A standard lead process.  When does an inquiry become a lead - and when does that lead convert to an opportunity.  By maintaining a consistent point of conversion, marketing can then better measure the quality of their lead output. 

Here are some additional things that marketing can do:

1. Marketing must educate sales on their own lead creation/nurturing process.  What should sales expect to see from marketing?  What campaigns will they be running?  What frequency? 
2. Tell sales when you have launched a campaign.  I'm amazed at the number of times marketing keeps their campaigns a "secret" until the very last moment.  Highly productive marketing teams also give their sales team access to their marketing calendar.
3. Marketing must set expectations by campaign type.  Should sales expect leads from a particular campaign to be early in the purchase process?  What should the follow-up priority be for leads generated by specific programs?
4. Marketing must educate the sales team in respect to campaign details.  What was offered?  What was the messaging?
5. Listen to sales...No, really listen.  This will allow you to close the loop on your own process and improve lead quality.

Here's are some things sales can do:

1. Follow-up on the leads marketing brings in, and provide "constructive" feedback.  The "lead is bad" does not suffice.  Tell the marketer what is inconsistent in respect to the agreed upon lead definition.
2. No "one and done."  Follow-up on the lead with more than one phone call or email.  Just because they didn't respond to you the first time does not mean they were not interested.  Many sales groups target seven touches as the minimum (email, phone call, message).
3. Coordinate your calls with marketing programs.  I've seen pipeline output grow exponentially when sales follows-up on marketing created leads in a timely manner. 
4. Don't rely on marketing for everything.  In an ideal world you would only be responding to leads "warmed-up" by marketing programs.  But things don't always work that way due to budget constraints, scheduling, etc.  Set aside a few hours a week to call up older leads in your database...in the end it's money in your pocket.
5. Listen to marketing...No, really listen.  Marketing has your best interest at heart.

All of this seems like common sense - but, as my grandmother always said, "Common sense isn't all that common."

Is there anything that you do as a sales person or marketer that helps promote a co-operative and productive environment?

80 Percent? Wow.

By Jason Stewart  - July 16, 2007

A recent statistic from a Marketing Sherpa survey has been noted by many blogs already, but it struck me as so powerful I had to share my two cents.

1,038 B2B Marketers involved in software, hardware and technology were surveyed by Marketing Sherpa about what works and what doesn’t in the world of lead generation. When asked about the purchases or vendors they have hired over the past 12 months, 80% claimed that they found their vendors on their own. They think they found you.

Google was the number one discovery tool mentioned, with 83% of those surveyed claiming they always use Google in their search efforts. A variety of other sources were also cited, including vendor websites and analysts, but the other leading paid search vendors (Yahoo and MSN,  at 14% and 5% respectively) brought up the rear on the list.

How about this, though -- I say they only think they found you.

The obvious correlation is to paid search advertising through Google Adwords. They may think they found you after doing a search on Google and clicking on one of your ads, but we all know that they wouldn’t have even seen the ad if you hadn’t put it there in the first place. You have the cost per click to prove it. And if you’re smart, you are tracking the ad groups and keywords they clicked on all the way through the sales cycle so you can adjust your spend in favor of the areas driving the most revenue – because it is not always going to be the same as the ones that are driving the most clicks.

It gets more tricky when you think about natural search and public relations. Have you ever done a search on your own company name and been shocked by what comes up? Sure, your website is there, but sometimes it isn’t even the first listing. Press releases are big, both your own as well as anyone you have ever done business with. If anyone from your company has ever been interviewed or contributed articles to an online publication those listings are probably there. Blog entries are becoming a huge source of online content that the search engines are indexing. Resumes of past employees. Mentions of your company on message boards (hopefully lauding your great customer service rather than complaining about you). The list goes on. 

PR or online marketing spend is easy to cut because so much of the return on investment cannot be easily quantified. Certainly, with tools like Salesforce.com it gets a bit easier to credit the appropriate marketing campaigns with the leads they bring in, and then track those leads from the nurturing process all the way through the sale. It’s much harder to quantify the value of that blog entry or press release, however, so they become easy prey for the budgetary knife. And yet, with more and more people subscribing to things like Google Alerts on topics of interest as well as blogs or RSS feeds the impact of content like this is getting bigger than ever. Just look at the numbers! 80%!

So, my advice is this. Blog with a tool like this one (Typepad). Publicize the blog with a tool like Feedburner. Post to other peoples blogs. Optimize your website for natural search (get some great tips from an excellent podcast called The SEO Advisor which can also be found on iTunes). Investigate paid search. Digg it. Do regular press releases, and optimize your posting with text-rich links to content on your website and by doing it someplace like newsforce. Do everything you possibly can to get your company name out there, even if you are hesitant to spend marketing budget on areas where ROI is harder to measure. Your prospects are out there looking for you, so let them think they found you.

Just make sure that you are hiding in plain sight.

Google Releases Impression Share Reporting

By Kirk Crenshaw  - July 9, 2007

Find Out How Your Ad Impressions Stack Up Against the Competition

Google has released Impression Share Reporting, a new metric available in your AdWords Report center. 

"Share of voice is a metric often used in the advertising industry to represent the relative portion of ad inventory available to a single advertiser within a defined market over a specified time period.  Impression Share, a new AdWords metric, is similar to share of voice -- it represents the percentage of times your ads were actually shown in relation to the total number of chances your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings."

With this information you can now gain better understanding of how your ad rank and budget impact your overall performance against your competition, and make adjustments as you see fit.

Read more about it here:
Discover your share of voice with Impression Share reporting

Oh, and I would recommend this upcoming webinar from the Google AdWords Editor Team.  They will be sharing their favorite AdWords Editor tips:  Register here.

 

Where do you get your leads and lists from?

By Jason Stewart  - July 3, 2007

Buying marketing lists and purchasing leads is painful.

Chief Marketer recently published an article by Ozgur Dogan called “Integrating New Data Sources to Grow Your Universe.” The line from the article that sticks in my head is “The plain and simple truth is that it is becoming harder to identify – and market to – only the best prospects.”

It goes on to discuss how marketers should expand the number of sources they use to compile lists or purchase leads from. Take a cue from the manufacturer who relies on a variety of sources for their raw materials, putting some diversification into their supply chain. If supplier X is temporarily out of something you can go to supplier Y – which may be a little bit pricier but at least production does not stop.

Let’s say you do subscribe to a data source or that you have one particular vendor for lists – after all, budgetary and time constraints may limit a marketer to rely on one data source. Is that one service going to fit all your needs? For example…does it have email addresses? Are they opt-in? What about specialized information, like ERP System or subscriptions to similar publications? How often do they refresh their data? If it is not a subscription, do they have minimum purchases? Are you going to be buying names you’ve already paid for? Or worse yet, are you going to buy names that are really not a fit for you just to fill that “minimum order?” When you email to those folks, that’s when you risk being labeled as a spammer.

Ultimately, B2B marketers should have a number of data sources they pull from, just as that manufacturer has numerous sources for raw materials. After all, these names and lists are the materials you start with while generating demand for your company’s goods or services, and it would be a mistake to be locked into one vendor after you have exhausted your options with them.

Back to that point about marketing to only the best prospects, though… list vendors that allow you to easily sift through their search parameters and play with filters more specific than SIC code or general department are very hard to find. As a result, your marketing campaigns are less effective because you are relying too much on “…emotions and gut feel…” rather than “…fact-based, systematic approaches that can be tested prior to implementation to yield the best results.”

You are buying names that don’t always fit your needs because you either have to (minimum purchase requirements lead you to purchase names just so you can "get your money's worth") or because you can’t avoid it (due to shoddy filters and poor database segmentation).

If you have the ability to filter through the raw data, the millions of names from reputable sources, and then break it down by the components that are truly interesting to you (department, title, level, industry and specific industry categories within a general “vertical market” and so on) to get that content you really and truly need in the quantities that fit your requirements – that is what is going to help your marketing become much more targeted and effective. Demandbase is working on a lead search engine like this, with data compiled from reputable sources that will give you better visibility into the leads you buy before you buy them.

Capturing That Shy Prospect

By Jason Stewart  - July 2, 2007

More on web forms, landing pages and lead scoring.

I came across a few articles and blog posts recently that tie in to my commentary about lead scoring and your online forms. One was by Marketing Sherpa’s Anne Holland and appeared in Chief Marketer, about streamlining your online forms for improved conversion rates. She says to  “face it, when a site asks for your telephone number, it's akin to saying, ‘a sales rep will call.’ Many folks figure they would rather not be pestered, so they lie about their phone number.”

A few different strategies are suggested, including leaving it off the form altogether, making it an optional field  instead of a required one, or introducing the request further down the pipe. For example -- ask for the number when a prospect is signing in to your webinar instead of simply being invited to it. Isn’t that person who attended your webinar more interesting to you than the one who simply registered and didn’t show anyway?

Case in point -- when I was at Maxager Technology we streamlined the web forms on our PPC landing pages, including the removal of any requests for phone numbers or even address information. All Maxager asks for now in exchange for a white paper is name, company name, email, industry, department and title (see example). To make things even easier, the industry, department and title fields are pre-populated with choices in a drop down box (that coincidentally match up with items in Maxager’s lead scoring profile). Also, consider emailing your collateral to the prospect rather than offering it online as it can improve the number of valid email addresses captured from online forms.

Removing the request for things that people feel protective of is going to reduce the number of people who either abandon the form or purposefully mislead you with an incorrect phone number. When Maxager stopped asking for phone numbers, landing page conversions doubled and the cost per conversion dropped 40%.

Marketo also had an interesting piece on their blog recently called “Lead Nurturing: Triggered Emails, Newsletters and Webinars” which leads with this question: “…your demand generation programs are running, bringing lead information into your SFA system or other database. What do you do next? Send the raw leads directly to your sales team to qualify?”

Of course not! I would suggest using that lead score again to determine next steps…either pass to the sales rep or put it back into the nurturing pool. As the Marketo blog suggests, every time you come across this prospect you get more information about them -- be it through webinar attendance, email campaign responses or plain old-fashioned cultivation by an inside sales or telesales rep. If they come in to your pipeline scoring a 90 right off the bat, then those are the ones that go straight to sales. If it is a 70, but a soft 70 – i.e. the main reason they didn’t score higher is because you don’t know enough about them? That’s when you nurture them.

As you gather more information about where they are, their lead score will either climb or you can disqualify them and move on to a better prospect.