MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

Last month’s webinars on leveraging the human touch to drive leads, presented for the B2B Lead Roundtable and Marketo, prompted a great question: “What should I look for in a teleprospector?”

Unfortunately, that can’t be answered with a fast, convenient sound bite. That’s why I’m going to do my best to respond here in my inaugural blog post.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve been involved in hiring hundreds of teleprospectors. Along with Brian Carroll, I was one of the co-founders of InTouch, now MECLABS Leads Group. Fortune 100 companies from a broad base of industries hire us to do teleprospecting for them; they know the value of the human touch to optimize their lead generation efforts. It seems like we’re always on the lookout for powerful teleprospectors to support these accounts, and over the years, we’ve pinpointed some of the critical traits that are inherent in every top performer:

An abiding desire to serve. Teleprospectors must sincerely want to help others, because that’s what they’re going to be doing all day, every day. When they conclude a conversation with a prospect, we want that prospect to feel like the call added value to his day — regardless of his timing to buy. To make that happen, teleprospectors must have an attitude of service, a sincere eagerness to help others. Furthermore, not only must teleprospectors serve the people they call, they must gain real satisfaction from serving their colleagues as well. There’s no room to be territorial, because they’re going to be passing leads to someone else who will take them to the next level in the sales process.

The focus to follow process. A full-time teleprospector can expect to make 80 to 100 calls a day. This entails far more than simply smiling, dialing and spouting a script. After all, we use call guides, not scripts; read this or watch our most recent webinar to find out why. Our team must be fully engaged in each and every call to successfully execute proven, tested tactics that drive opportunity. It doesn’t matter how clever or charming a candidate is; if he’s unwilling to follow process, you don’t want him calling.

Tenacity and patience. We’re not bell-ringers here; people aren’t getting leads every three minutes. It can typically take 8 to 19 calls to reach a prospect. Teleprospecting is not for someone who thrives on instant gratification.

Empathy and strong listening skills. They must be able to put themselves in their prospects’ shoes and anticipate their needs. That means listening intently to pick up on the subtle signals that indicate where a prospect is on the buying process. You would be impressed at the engagement we get from prospects who can sense that our teleprospectors are paying close attention. People know when they’re genuinely being listened to.

Curiosity coupled with a love of learning. People with this combination like to be informed; they’re well-read and take pride in keeping up with what’s happening in the business world. This is a key trait for our teleprospectors because they can ultimately work with a variety of clients. While we train and coach them extensively, they must be ready to intelligently discuss any number of topics ranging from manufacturing devices to educational programs.

A clear, measured, confident speaking voice. This is lower on the list because, more than any of the other qualities, it can be taught.

Obviously, you’re not going to be able to scan a resume and identify these skills, and you can’t take someone from outside sales, plop them down with a headset and a script, and expect success. Road warriors are accustomed to closing; hunting for opportunity requires a completely different skillset and very few people have both.

To find great teleprospectors, we have candidates undergo multiple interviews and tests, including role-playing and psychological analyses, to identify strengths and opportunities for growth. You just never know where you’re going to find out a stand-out employee. Case in point is Mark Wicka, our Senior Business Development Representative. He came to our company as a temp and had never worked in any kind of lead-generation role. Eleven years later, he’s still here. (And talk about work ethic — he’s never called in sick during those entire 11 years!)

He began his career here generating leads for our clients. But these days, we’re using his skills to generate leads for MECLABS while mentoring and supervising a team that is doing the same. He thrives on learning; when he worked for our clients, he dove into educating himself about their industries and products. Now that he drives business for MECLABS, he has become expert in all aspects of lead generation. Yet, he’s the most humble guy you’d ever meet; he never comes across as a know-it-all, just very informed and authentic. His spirit of service shines through in everything he does. Consider what he has to say about what motivated him to come to MECLABS:

“I feel like fate brought me here. I worked in print advertising, but it didn’t resonate. I didn’t think it was very effective and I wanted to work for a company where I knew their solution worked,” he recalls. “I was doing more than look for a job, I wanted to work for an organization that I believed in. I’ve found that at MECLABS.

“My goal is to be an intelligent follower. There’s no disgrace in following, the person who follows leaders most effectively is the one who develops leadership most rapidly. I’ve had great mentors here — when I started it was my program managers. Today, it’s Brian Carroll and Flint McGlaughlin (CEO and Managing Director of MECLABS). Their success is my success.”

I would love to hear your thoughts about the qualities you think are essential to be an effective teleprospector. Are you surprised by my conclusions? Are there other skills you think are just as important as the ones I’ve listed? Do you want me to expand on any of these thoughts? Feel free to comment below.

Teleprospecting, email campaigns, drip marketing, lead nurturing — all of these marketing tactics have one very important element in common. Each one begins with a list, and the quality of the data in that list has a direct influence on the success of each tactic.

Looking at the top of the funnel

“Data is so top of the funnel, yet it is so undervalued,” says Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for the Leads Group, MECLABS (the parent company of MarketingSherpa.)

He explains that creating a quality list begins with an organizational philosophy that places a high value on data quality. This might require a philosophy shift in some companies, and it will likely require leadership support in the idea that data quality is important and that this importance might need to be proven by testing.

“A lot of times I see that marketers think they have this really robust, large database, but soon find out that because of data quality issues, they only have a small segment of their actual ideal customers that they wanted to be focusing on,” says Stamschror. “They are kind of getting lost in the quagmire of trying to manage untargeted data.”

Pay more, gain more

Stamschror says the solution may be to spend more on data to reap the benefits of higher-quality lists.

He explains you want to:

• Be specific about the data you need to focus on
• Don’t collect more data than you really need on your ideal buyer profile or persona

If you don’t do these two things, it can become overwhelming to manage a very large list. And if your data quality is low, you might have a list of 50,000 contacts, with only 10,000 who are relevant to your business.

Data hygiene is an ongoing process

Looking at data quality isn’t something you can do once and be satisfied that you’ve completed a task to take off the “to-do” list. Stamschror recommends data remediation projects every three to six months if there is no other data hygiene process in place.

Even though it’s not cost effective having your lead generation and prospecting staff spend time tracking down bad entries in the list, or engaging in a wholesale data update, it is beneficial to create a process where your team is regularly updating and appending account information as part of their day-to-day activity. There is little, to no, additional investment for staff to update contact fields as they discover missing, or incorrect, items. Stamschror adds if controlling data quality isn’t feasible as an internal process, you should find a data quality partner you can trust.

He explains, “It is always important to have someone who has some distinct responsibility for data quality.”

Stamschror says that as many as half of all lists he’s encountered contain duplicate information because there is no data hygiene or remediation process in place to keep the database clean.

“It really gives you a false sense of security,” he says. “You think, ‘I have all these contacts that I can run email campaigns or teleprospecting campaigns off of,’ and then you find out once you get into it that your list isn’t really as big as you thought it was, or as robust as you thought, and worse yet, you are spending a lot of time just wasting time (with the bad list).”

Less can be more

Stamschror says it is much more important to have a very clean, but smaller, prospect list, as opposed to a bloated list full of bad and/or irrelevant data. He states this is particularly important for B2B marketers who should be focused on a smaller group of highly targeted prospects.

Stamschror offers a piece of final advice, “You know the companies that you really need to be focused on. So focus on the right one.”

Related Resources

(Members library) CRM and the Marketing Database: Data hygiene, behavioral analysis and more

(Members library) Cause Marketing: Marketer builds email list with 20% conversion rate

New Chart: Most effective email list growth tactics

Email List Hygiene: Remove four kinds of bad addresses to improve deliverability

B2B Marketing: The 7 most important stages in the teleprospecting funnel

Photo credit: Donovan Govan

We just launched the registration landing pages for our upcoming MarketingSherpa B2B Summits — the first will be held September 26-27 in Boston, and the second October 24-25 in San Francisco — and looking toward those events got me thinking about all the learnings I’ve taken away from these last months of digging deeply into the complex world of B2B marketing.

Since I began covering the MarketingSherpa B2B beat toward the end of last year, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many marketers, industry experts, and our internal researchers and thought leaders here at MECLABS (MarketingSherpa’s parent company). One area that really separates B2B from B2C marketing has come up many times — the complexity of the B2B sale and the length of the B2B sales cycle.

Our research, based on interviews with 935 B2B marketers in the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, found marketing to a lengthening sales cycle as a growing concern, and the third-most-pressing challenge for B2B marketers today (trailing only quality and quantity of lead generation):

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That same report shows that more than one-third of B2B sales cycles from first inquiry to closed deal last seven months, or longer:

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During my B2B beat reporting I’ve learned quite a bit about three very interrelated marketing areas that address this challenge — the strategy of lead nurturing, the tactic of drip marketing campaigns and the use of marketing automation software tools.

Growing the lead into a sales-ready prospect

A lead generated is very rarely a lead ready to hand off to Sales, and when your sales cycle is measured in months, or even longer than a year, you want to have a lead nurturing program to keep in touch with that potential customer and turn them into a sales-ready lead.

Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research, MECLABS, explained to me that most lead nurturing programs don’t have an impact on conversion before at least five meaningful touches, and that the important thing is to continue nurturing leads whether it takes five touches or 25 touches to get them to the sales-ready point.

He says, “If you have a nine-month sales cycle, you should nurture a lead in those nine months, and that’s at a minimum level. So that means nine nurturing patterns during the course of that lead.”

Here’s a table from the 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook outlining some lead nurturing basics:

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If you notice, content is a major aspect of that table. That’s because content marketing is a key element in lead nurturing. New information about your product is a good reason to reach out to the nurtured lead. So is a vendor-agnostic article from an industry thought leader that provides usable information or advice on your business area.

Other touches might include an invitation to an event, such as a webinar, or maybe an executive summary and key takeaway list from an event along with links to video or audio excerpts from the presentation.

Content marketing is not the only piece in a lead nurturing campaign, but it should be an area of high priority focus.

Keeping those touches coming

If lead nurturing is an overall strategy to meet the challenge of a long sales cycle, drip marketing is a specific tactic to execute that strategy. Drip marketing involves automatically sending marketing messages to your list via email or other methods. The messages are “dripped” in a series based on the specific behavior or status of the recipient.

Here’s Jeanne Jennings from a SherpaBlog post on drip marketing:

Drip campaigns take their name from drip irrigation, which saves resources by allowing water and fertilizer to be consistently delivered directly to the roots of plants. There’s less waste than with sprinklers and topical fertilizer application; drip irrigation also provides a consistent level of moisture to the soil, rather than the “soak and dry” experience that sprinklers provide.

Drip marketing campaigns are most commonly delivered via the email channel because of its short turn-around, quick delivery time and cost-effective nature. A drip campaign involves a series of messages that are sent or “dripped” in a predefined order at a predefined interval. Each message in the campaign stands on its own but also builds on the missives that have come before it. A drip campaign is a response to a specific behavior or status of the recipient – and it encourages a specific action.

… and then SkyNet took over

Actually April 19^th has passed and I’m pretty certain no terminator robots are heading back in time as I write this post, but lead nurturing does have a powerful tool that makes the entire process much easier to manage — marketing automation software.

Marketing automation offers many benefits for marketers:

• It provides a trackable database and measurable analytic results for marketing efforts
• It, well, automates many marketing tasks that previously had to be handled manually
• For a long sales cycle, multi-touch lead nurturing campaign, it allows marketers to focus on determining the creative elements of the effort — email copy, content with each touch, etc. — and setting the timing and triggers for each touch, and the software handles the actual execution of the campaign

A small business with a handful of leads to nurture can most likely run the campaign manually. A large corporation with hundreds, thousands, or even many more leads will require marketing automation to run an effective lead nurturing program.

Related Resources

Members library – B2B How-To: 5 lead nurturing tactics to get from lead gen to sales-qualified

Members library – How-To Increase Relevance: Integrating drip marketing into an email campaign

No Budget and Less Time? Lead Nurturing in Five Simple Steps

Lead Marketing: Cost-per-lead and lead nurturing ROI

B2B Marketing: Calls-to-action and the business buying cycle

Members libarary — How and When to Use Content in the B2B Sales Process

Over the last two weeks I’ve covered a number of angles on lead nurturing. Last week’s Sherpa B2B newsletter took a look at five lead nurturing tactics, and yesterday’s blog post was on why you should consider nurturing leads lost to competitors along with tips on how to do just that.

Today, MECLABS’ Executive Director of Applied Research (Full disclosure: MECLABS is the parent company of MarketingSherpa), Brian Carroll provides insight on how to look at both cost-per-lead generated in terms of lead nurturing and measuring the success of a lead nurturing program through return-on-investment (ROI).

Cost-per-lead is the wrong metric

Although many marketers are interested in the cost-per-lead number, Carroll says this is the wrong metric to focus on. He explains by saying if a lead is generated at a low cost, but never contributes to the sales pipeline, it is a wasted expense. Great cost-per-lead number, but terrible (non) contributor to the bottom line.

Carroll believes two metrics that are better measures across the entire process are cost-per-opportunity and cost-per-pipeline revenue. Cost-per-opportunity helps you understand how Sales accepts and pursues leads, and in the long run that metric shows if those leads are actually helping Sales, and if Marketing is contributing to the pipeline.

He says to take a look at your entire marketing expense-to-revenue, and then contrast that number to expense-to-revenue after implementing lead nurturing.  He adds lead-to-sale conversion rate is the most important metric in the entire process.

Carroll states, “We have examples of nurturing programs returning a ten-times return for every dollar spent, and we had other examples of nurturing programs where it is a fifty-times return for every dollar spent, meaning for every dollar that we put towards an existing lead, we are generating $50 of top line revenue.”

Here is a list of metrics and indicators from one of Carroll’s blog posts:

These are real-world metrics that every marketer should track in their lead generation program:

• Number of inquiries? (people who raised their hands)
• Number of leads? (qualified as “sales-ready”)
• Number of opportunities? (leads that move to pipeline)
• Number of closed sales? (generated from marketing leads)

If marketers know those metrics they can start to track the following key performance indicators:

• Inquiry to lead ratio (cost-per-lead)
• Lead to opportunity ratio (cost-per-opportunity)
• Lead to pipeline revenue ratio (cost-per-pipeline revenue)
• Lead to sale (win) ratio (cost-per-closed sale)

A value-driven mindset requires leaders and marketers to plan and budget for the long term and to take a more holistic view that goes beyond cost-per-lead budgets.

Using ROI to measure lead nurturing success

Carroll began this conversation by describing lead nurturing investment. He gives an example that if you plan on spending $100,000 on a new lead program, $25,000 of that investment should be allocated to lead nurturing. Lead nurturing should command about 25 percent of a lead campaign’s budget.

When looking at ROI goals for lead nurturing, he believes you first look at the objective of the lead generation program — ten times, 20 times  return or whatever goal you set — and use that goal as a starting point for the lead nurturing goal.

He adds what companies generate from a lead nurturing program is going to be affected by a number of factors:

• The product sold
• The brand
• The value proposition
• The offer
• The ability of Sales to convert leads into revenue

It’s also important to remember nurturing programs take longer to provide a return because a typical lead nurturing program involves multiple touches over a period of time, but marketers can point to building momentum toward final conversion as a positive result of nurturing.

Carroll says, “I documented a case study of someone seeing a four million dollar lead nurturing pipeline impact in year one, and that same company, the following year, with the same budget from that same lead nurturing program saw a fourteen million dollar pipeline impact because returns on nurturing over time grew to be exponential.”

A lead nurturing analogy

To complete all this talk about lead nurturing, here’s an analogy from Carroll:

I worked on a farm growing up and the farmer said, “You don’t pick your corn to check if it is growing. You have to nurture it. It needs sun, it needs water, it needs good soil to provide a yield.” And the same is true in these relationships that we are building as well.

Related Resources

No Budget and Less Time? Lead Nurturing in Five Simple Steps

Are Marketers Measuring Their Success or Someone Else’s?

Lead Nurturing and Management Q&A: How to Handle 5 Key Challenges

(Members library) Lead Gen Overhaul: 4 Strategies to Boost Response Rates, Reduce Cost-per-Lead

Every company is going to define its process, but the basic lead lifecycle consists of three parts: lead generation, lead nurturing and hand-off to Sales. Lead nurturing, particularly in B2B companies, is key because that stage turns the face in the crowd with the raised hand asking for more information into a sales-ready prospective customer.

Adam Blitzer, Co-founder and COO of Pardot, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing automation platform geared toward small- to mid-sized businesses, recently shared an interesting lead nurturing idea he has — nurturing leads lost to competitors.

Often once a prospect makes a purchase decision, and that choice is with a different company, the lead completely leaves the pipeline. Blitzer says there are good reasons to keep that now future prospect in a nurturing program, and discusses how Pardot continues to nurture lost leads.

You have something of a counterintuitive idea — actually nurturing leads lost to a competitor. Is this idea based on research or other metrics?

Adam Blitzer: It really started more as an experiment internally. Since the nurturing is automated, with no real work required on the part of the sales rep, there’s no reason not to try out an idea like this. We saw a fair amount of prospects come our way because they were unhappy with their current vendor, so it made sense to us that someday these leads lost might also be unhappy with their choice and be looking for a new solution.

We started nurturing lost deals back in 2007 and noticed that within a year, we started to win back a reasonable percentage of them.

Explain the reasoning behind nurturing lost leads.

AB: If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to keep in touch with those lost leads – if your product was on their short list, they saw something the liked in what you are offering. Your sales rep has already invested a good amount of time building a relationship with the decision maker.

Putting them on a nurturing track allows you to keep them informed of new features and updates that you’ve pushed out over the course of their current vendor contract. In a fast-growing, SaaS industry like our own, the scope of a product can change greatly over the course of a year. It’s possible that the feature that cost you a deal might be now be implemented or that you’ve added something new and innovative that puts you leaps and bounds ahead of the vendor that your prospect chose.

It’s really just a way to keep your company top-of-mind in case they are looking to make a change. It isn’t unusual for a company to shop around when their current contract is approaching renewal.

There is also the simple matter of making the most of your marketing dollars, which is the goal of any nurturing program. You spend a lot of money generating leads and even more to generate sales opportunities. If they convert, it is likely a very low touch sale (this time around). You have already spent the funds to try to convert the prospect in the previous year and do not have to re-spend it when winning back the client.

How can a marketer begin reaching out to these lost prospects with a track specific to the vendor who won the deal?

AB: If a good relationship was established with the prospect during the sales cycle, it can actually be as simple as the sales rep setting up the campaign by saying that they wish them luck with their implementation, they’d love to keep in touch and they’ll send them over any information they run across that might be helpful.

Marketers know their competitors well. They can easily set up a different “lost opportunity” track for each competing solution, with content specific to that vendor.

The challenge is keeping automated content “fresh.” The easiest way to do this is to have fairly static email templates that point to dynamic or constantly updating content.

A great example is to have an automated email (personalized from the sales rep) suggesting the prospect take a look at their newest feature and interesting blog post. In both cases the link would just point to a page that is dynamically updated anytime a new feature or post is produced. That ensures that anytime the email is sent out, it points to something fresh and relevant, all without the marketer ever needing to change the nurturing program or email template.

How does timing come into play in this variant on traditional lead nurturing?

AB: The timing or cadence of the nurturing program will actually depend on the competitor to whom you lost the deal. If you know your competitor typically does annual contracts, you can start the program gradually (perhaps one email in each of the first two quarters) and then pick up steam as the prospect is closer to his renewal date.

One of the nurturing best practices we always try to remind people of is to know when to stop. If at any point a lead responds to a nurturing email — that’s a good time for the sales rep to pick up and engage personally with the prospect. And if you’re going to do this, it’s absolutely key that the person be removed from the campaign at that point, to avoid any conflicting messaging. It can be easy to forget this step, but it is so important.

Should the nurturing messaging be based on the winning vendor? If so, how?

AB: It is ideal to use the winning vendor’s name and any other information if possible. This makes the messages much more personal and less likely to be seen as automated. If you do have specific information about the vendor, it can’t hurt to point out the differences in your products, like where you feel yours excels over the competitor.

Should nurturing lost leads have an informal feel, or should these lost prospects be strongly pursued?

AB: While I do think it can be effective to use vendor-specific information that has a strong message, it’s often best to start out with a softer sell, especially at the beginning of a nurturing program. Since the prospect already has an established relationship with the losing sales rep, a personal, informal tone tends to work well.

These emails might include new features about your own product or perhaps even best practices information that could be helpful to them even as they are using a competing product. This best practices information still acts as a reminder that your company is a thought leader in the space and helps keep your brand top-of-mind.

Related Resources

B2B How-To: 5 lead nurturing tactics to get from lead gen to sales-qualified

B2B Marketing: The 7 most important stages in the teleprospecting funnel

(Members library) Lead Nurturing and Management Q&A: How to Handle 5 Key Challenges

Web Clinic Replay: How Lead Nurturing Produced $4.9 Million Pipeline Growth in Eight Months

No Budget and Less Time? Lead Nurturing in Five Simple Steps

photo by: Phil Roeder

The solution's complexity also affects the business buying cycle

One way to look at the Business Buying Cycle is to break it down into stages. There are lots of potential stages and we can talk about those stages later but let’s keep it simple for now and just use these five:

1. Connect Stage: for generating demand by helping a prospect connect a business problem or goal with the possibility of a solution
2. Validation Stage: for validating the worthiness of that expression of interest into a priority project
3. Investigation Stage: for doing a deep dive on one or more solutions in order to figure out what to do
4. Purchase Stage: for picking the right solution and negotiating the right deal and terms
5. Operational Stage: for implementing or using the solution

Calls-to-action in the form of particular pieces of content should align with these stages. In other words, you need a hypothesis of the stages of the buying cycle and a hypothesis of the content that maps to each stage.  If someone responds to content in a stage, marketing can use the interest in that content to score the level of interest higher.

By using this approach, B2B companies can use a call-to-action that is appropriate within the overall content marketing effort and extrapolates interest in the offer based on the stage of the buying cycle, testing and iterating to a more efficient demand generation and lead nurturing strategy

In this blog post, I will focus on four of these stages.

Connect Stage

When generating demand early in the connect stage, companies should use credible (often third-party) information about the business problem solved by their particular solution.

For example, research might reveal that problems with sales forecasting drive purchase decisions for sales force automation (SFA) software. To take advantage of this information, an SFA vendor might contract with a company with an industry reputation for providing credible information on sales forecasting best practices to write a white paper on sales forecasting, perhaps based upon field research.

On the other hand, if research revealed that chief financial officers (CFOs) were the individuals feeling the pain of faulty forecasts, perhaps a paper by a brand more familiar to CFOs would be more effective. In other words, B2B companies should keep in mind the target community when developing the call-to-action offer strategy.

Validation Stage

In the Validation stage, the offers need to perform a slightly different job. In this case, the responder has expressed an interest in the problem.  Now the offers need to validate the worthiness of the solution so that it becomes a priority:

• A case study
• An exercise to assess the potential return on investment
• A webinar that features a current customer with a well-known brand
• A report by an industry analyst (e.g., the Gartner Group in the computer industry)

Response to each of these offers indicates a higher probability of purchase than the initial response to an offer about the business problem.  In other words, it’s predictive of purchase intent. Again, interest in these content offers would result in a higher lead score.

Investigation  Stage

In the Investigation stage of the buying cycle, customers are generally ready to speak to sales.  Offers in this stage can identify those customers and prospects.  For example, a prospect may want to develop a request for proposal (RFP) to send out to a short list of vendors under consideration. As such, an RFP template (biased to the solution of the vendor) might be very useful to the prospect and even highly predictive of an increased likelihood of purchase.

Likewise these calls-to-action will also indicate the customer is prepared to speak with a sales representative:

• Implementation guides
• Technical white papers
• Competitive guides
• Evaluation software
• Total cost of ownership exercises
• Other similar content

All of these relate to the concerns of customers and prospects entering into a deeper investigation of a particular solution.

Purchase Stage

Once the buying cycle has reached the purchase stage, the sales channels should primarily deliver call-to-action offers. Purchase stage offers include discounts on a product or a service, and sales representatives can use these types of offers to win deals and to expedite the purchase process. These offers should be left to the judgment of salespeople and their managers in order to avoid unnecessary discounts.

Across the entire Business Buying Cycle, vendors can also include generic offers such as sweepstakes or free merchandise to generate demand, and move prospects toward a decision. One thing to keep in mind, is unlike the more targeted calls-to-action, these offers are not as predictive of future purchase behavior.

Related Resources

Free Web clinic, March 30th — Converting Leads to Sales: How one B2B company generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in only 8 months

B2B Marketing: The FUEL methodology outlined

MECLABS

How and When to Use Content in the B2B Sales Process (Members library)

B2B Marketing: Relevant content must move beyond “glitz” and tell a properly sequenced story

Content Marketing: How to get your subject matter experts on your corporate blog

When I was on the phone with Stacey Epstein, VP of Marketing, ServiceMax, I remembered some advice I heard when researching our first article for MarketingSherpa’s Inbound Marketing newsletter.

I spoke with a lot of great experts for that piece. On content marketing, I spoke with Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute. He mentioned that marketers should avoid publishing too many types of content and focus on about three that fit their strategies.

“But you have to do one really well,” he said. “You have to do an awesome blog or the best e-book program that’s ever been run; focus on what you can do really well, better than anyone else in your industry.”

That is exactly what Epstein and her team are striving for with SmartVan. ServiceMax launched the site in January as a content portal for the field-service industry (which is served by ServiceMax), to help companies that send technicians out of the office for service, installation, and repairs.

“We noticed there was a complete lack of resources for these people,” Epstein says. “The site is meant to be a place for field-service professionals to educate themselves.”

Site traffic has grown faster than anticipated. After a just a few months, SmartVan holds the top Google rank for the phrase “field service news” and about 15% of its traffic comes from natural search.

“It’s great for us to be ranked so high so quickly,” Epstein says. “I think it’s a testament to how little content there is out there. It helps validate that we’re helping to serve this huge need.”

Weave the brand into the content

Epstein has big plans for SmartVan and hopes to continually grow its traffic for several years. One key principle is to avoid selling ServiceMax too directly, she says. Otherwise visitors could write-off the site as a marketing channel rather than a trusted resource for industry news.

“We’re really trying to create a resource for field-service people that doesn’t exist today… We feel that we’ll have a lot more success in getting people interested in the site and wanting to be on the site if we don’t try to sell them.”

The team does plan to incorporate ServiceMax into the site, but will do so carefully, and mostly around content. For example, a ServiceMax webinar on how the iPhone is changing the industry will be mentioned on SmartVan.

Also, a company blog written by ServiceMax executives will soon be hosted on the portal. Epstein also plans to offer an email newsletter to help build a database.

“We’ll never have a homepage that says ‘SmartVan is brought to you by ServiceMax. Go see us now and buy from us,’ etcetera. That’s not our intent.”

Content creation: easier than thought

A website that’s designed as the go-to resource for a specific topic cannot afford to have stale content. When planning SmartVan’s strategy, Epstein wondered how her team would keep up with the demands of a daily publishing schedule.

But that challenge has been easier than anticipated. The team has partnered with LaunchSquad to help manage the site and has pooled content from a variety of sources.

“We found some great contributing writers who were super interested to join us. We certainly contribute content from ServiceMax. We have a couple of guys from LaunchSquad contributing, and we aggregate content from other sources,” Epstein says.

“Between all those different people, I’m actually blown away by the amount of content. We’re serving up multiple pieces of fresh content every day.”

Changes and hurdles on the horizon

Epstein has promoted SmartVan with a press release, an email to ServiceMax’s house list, and mentions in Facebook and Twitter. She’s hoping the site will continue to grow through word-of-mouth and natural search.

A key challenge to growth, she says, will be connecting the field-service audience and encouraging visitors to interact. SmartVan will soon offer social features in hopes of fostering engagement, but this will be a pioneering effort for the industry.

“Right now, this is not necessarily a super tight-knit community,” Epstein says. “Part of that is because there isn’t a lot that brings them together. There aren’t a lot of trade shows, and there aren’t a lot of online forums.”

But that challenge is also a huge opportunity. SmartVan could become a powerful marketing channel for ServiceMax if it continues to grow at its current pace.

“If we can succeed in building this community and creating a place where all these people can go, interact and get educated, it will by far outpace any other traditional marketing strategy that we ever could have done and at a much, much lower cost and with fewer resources.”

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“What we have here is…failure to communicate.”

Much like Cool Hand Luke, who heard this iconic line from his despotic warden after misunderstanding the prison’s stance on attempted escape, B2B dialogue that is not relevant to a target audience will ultimately prove to be a waste of effort, and a failure in communicating value.

As we all know, no matter how fast, inexpensively or well-targeted a B2B company maintains dialogue with customers or prospects, the success of each email, tradeshow, phone call and sales meeting depends on the relevance of the message.

But the challenge that you and the imperious prison warden share is – how do you create a relevant dialogue with a skeptical audience who has heard it all before?

Recently, I was reading through The B2B Refinery: An executive guide for improving Go-to-Market ROI through greater Sales and Marketing Efficiency, by J. David Green, Director of Best Practices – Applied Research, MECLABS and Michael C. Saylor, and they discuss this topic at length.

Though I can’t get into everything Green and Saylor cover about this topic in the book, one thing was certain after reading it — this is a complex question with an answer that is constantly changing. Or should I say evolving…

Evolve with the buying cycle

The information needs of the customer or prospect change as they move through the business buying cycle. For example, the more products and/or services that a customer buys from the vendor, the less information the customer generally requires.

However, a B2B company cannot address a buying cycle in isolation. Relevance is challenged by competitive B2B dialogue, which is cost-effective dialogue conducted with lucrative market segments that stems from competition. This compels vendors to find more efficient means of delivering relevant dialogue than through sales representatives

Of course, this abundance of information ultimately compounds the problem. Apart from mirroring the buying cycle, what are the key characteristics of relevant dialogue?

• The dialogue must take into account past interactions of the prospect: especially his explicit and implicit areas of interest — with the most recent interactions often mattering the most
• The customer or prospect must recognize the context of the communication

Instead of creating relevant dialogue, however, most marketing departments focus on universal messaging, giving less attention to relevance. While it makes sense to give advertising a consistent look and feel, these marketing practices fall short of the needs of business customers.

Buyers need an evolving, personalized story from a vendor. And like any good story, this one needs to have a defined beginning, middle and end, with each “chapter” addressing the interests of the audience. If a particular sale takes a significant period of time – perhaps even over multiple years – then the dialogue needs to last just as long, progressing naturally with the buying process.

To continue an analogy from earlier, branding and positioning are merely the movie poster and “glitz,” whereas integrated communication is the writing, acting and direction. Sure, branding and positioning matter. But they are no substitute for a well-told, relevant story.

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Inbound marketing is growing in B2B companies. Investments in webinars, SEO, social marketing and page optimization are all on the rise, as noted in this chart from MarketingSherpa’s new 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

As inbound grows, more marketers are finding the right mix of tactics and channels for their companies. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but certain tactics are commonly reported as effective.

Below, we pulled stats from four charts in the benchmark report to highlight the most-effective tactics for B2B inbound marketing. Check out how the best tactics are interrelated.

Search engine optimization

• Most effective tactic: On-page content optimization

An effective SEO program is vital to an inbound strategy. Most B2B marketers research keywords and create great content about topics surrounding them. One of the most popular content platforms is the blog. Although blogging is not easy, many B2B companies have stuck with it (because it works).

Social media marketing

• Most effective tactic: Blogging

Blogging is the most effective B2B social marketing tactic. This ties directly to the popularity of blogs as a platform for publishing search-optimized content, as well as their ability to engage audiences.

Website optimization and design

• Most effective tactic: Using unique landing pages for campaigns
• Second-most effective tactic: Optimizing design and content for conversions

Inbound marketing can pull more visitors to your website — but visitors have to take action when they arrive. They have to download a report, subscribe to your newsletter, request to be contacted, etc. Otherwise the traffic is wasted.

This is why using unique landing pages for each campaign and optimizing them are the most effective tactics for B2B websites. The tactics reach into all facets inbound marketing and ensure your traffic is put to use.

You can find out a lot more about effective landing page optimization and design tactics at the upcoming MarketingSherpa 2011 Optimization Summit in June.

Pay-per-click advertising

• Most effective tactic: Creating highly-targeted ad groups
• Second most-effective tactic: A/B testing landing page content

Landing page testing is nearly tied for first as the most effective PPC tactic for B2B companies. This, again, illustrates that websites have to be designed to convert traffic that is generated by inbound marketing. Otherwise the traffic is wasted.

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Content marketing goes well beyond publishing text-based material. Your company can provide videos, slide decks, Twitter feeds and even Web-based tools — like ClickMail’s ESPinator.

ClickMail pairs companies with email service providers (ESPs) and helps them establish effective programs. For years, its marketers have published a blog and an annual PDF guide about selecting ESPs.

“We’ve always felt that we had a clear view of the strengths and weaknesses of the various ESPs,” says Marco Marini, CEO, ClickMail. “From that, we evolved into an annual guide on selecting the best one. It’s completely vendor-neutral. It doesn’t talk about any vendors at all, just what the factors are.”

The ESPinator is the next step in that strategy, Marini says. Launched last month, the tool asks users a series of questions and suggests up to three ESPs that are well-suited to their needs.

“Every vendor at a trade show says their solution is the best. There truly isn’t a best solution. It all depends on what your specific needs are,” Marini says.

“There are more than 30 ESPs in the tool, and we don’t have a relationship with the vast majority of them. So this is truly more for the email marketing audience.”

Upfront investment vs. long-term upkeep

Content marketing requires investment. Someone has to create the content and it has to be really, really good. You can either invest your time or pay someone else. Either way, there is no free lunch.

This is also true of ClickMail’s ESPinator, which took over two years to create and is still in beta. One of the biggest challenges was building its scoring system. Each ESP had to be scored in various categories so it could be matched against a user’s needs.

One such category is each ESP’s depth of integration with salesforce.com, a popular CRM solutions provider.

“All [salesforce.com] integrations are not created equal among ESPs,” says Cameron Kane, CTO, ClickMail, who headed the project. “Some may synch simply contact data, some synch lead and contact data, some work with custom objects, some will not work with custom objects” and so on.

– Keeping content alive

Some types of content — such as books — require a onetime investment. Once a book is published, it’s published. Blogs, on the other hand, require on-going investment or they will wither and die. ClickMail’s tool is somewhere in the middle and will require updates.

“When an ESP on that list comes up with a new version or enhancements, we need to go back and modify the scores on those areas that they have potentially improved,” Marini says.

Marketing plans to attract attention

The ESPinator is so new that ClickMail has just begun its promotion. The team launched it at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit last month — the industry’s largest event — and plans to do more soon.

Ideas they are kicking around include:

• Offering co-branding partnerships to companies
• Offering the tool to prospects as part of the lead-nurturing process
• Pitching the tool to industry press and blogs (like this one) to score inbound links

Ultimately, the team hopes that the ESPinator provides a useful service and helps attract attention to ClickMail and its services. Furthermore, the tool’s calculated suggestions will help position ClickMail as a company that is well-suited to help marketers choose email providers.

“When you say content marketing, I immediately think of thought leadership,” Marini says. “Our company philosophy is to show that value upfront without asking for anything.”

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