MarketingSherpa Blog

According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), 71% of survey respondents indicated that generating high-quality leads was a top challenge.

So, in today’s blog post, let’s look at lead generation budget trends (hint: money is moving to online tactics) and provide some resources to help you make wise use of that budget.

To help you get the most effective use of your budget, here are several case studies and how-to articles for some of the tactics mentioned in the above chart.

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

If there is a chance to network and build relationships, there is opportunity to generate and nurture leads. Trade shows, workshops and webinars are gold mines for obtaining information. It’s fair to say 98% of attendees likely have an interest in your solution, and that is enough to begin the nurturing process.

Of course, it is very important to capture attendees’ contact information and product interests at that point of high interest, and then act on that interest before it fades.

Generating and nurturing trade show leads

In this particular test, conducted by Craig Mullenbach, Program Manager, MECLABS, and his team, an industrial testing equipment manufacturer wanted MECLABS to follow up on leads generated through campaigns and trade shows.

The goal was to determine

• if following up on trade show contact information would translate into leads,
• when calling should cease, and
• if analyzing this process would allow us to optimize similar contracts in the future.

Answers came screaming through the data we tested.

The test found that 90% of successful lead follow-ups occurred within 28 days of first contact; 60% of those leads were actualized on the first day of calling. Halfway into the calling (day 15) proved to be the last point at which 1% of conversions occurred. The graph below displays our findings.

Interest degradation

From my experience, the interest of a prospect drops off significantly over time after they leave an event or attend a webinar. The half-life is likely only a few days, and once you reach 20 days out, people can barely remember they attended the event, let alone remember a specific product.

During this test, the last conversion occurred on the 343^rd day. At some point when running an experiment, you must determine the point when the diminishing returns make further data collection no longer worth your while.

What can you learn for your own lead generation and nurturing efforts?

For every company and every product, the correct calling procedures will vary. Say the product of interest is worth thousands of dollars. In that case, continuing to call into that 41^st day may be worth your while — it just depends.

It’s all about maximizing the potential profit in the least amount of time. Beyond the specific results of this test, I think the biggest takeaway that will help you is this: Start testing your own lead programs if you aren’t already.

You can test different approaches and timeframes to see which brings your company the highest ROI. You’ll learn what works, what doesn’t work and what value you can identify from analyzing this entire process. We found immense success, and we continue to refine it to better the data and practices we employ in this specific follow-up situation.

Creating a successful lead program is an iterative process

Each trade show, webinar, and/or workshop is an opportunity bursting with potential leads. Setting up a repeatable, iterative process that you can learn from and continuously optimize will help you get the biggest return for your investment:

• Create a plan of action before the event — How will we turn this information into leads? What can we analyze and test from this information gathered?

• Capture important information — Obviously, contact information is important. But, thinking beyond the basics will help your follow-up efforts. Why are they there? What information most appeals to them? What solutions most interest them?

• Follow up promptly — As you can see from this test, follow-up should often occur within 30 days, if not sooner. But remember, it is important to determine the most successful timeframe for your own efforts …

• Test your follow up efforts — Which timeframe is most successful? Which follow-up methods work best (e.g., email and a call, or just a call)? Which offers resonate the most? Which areas do we want to learn more about? And, ultimately, what will bring us the greatest results?

• Take what you learned and build off it for next time — How can we improve? What elements can we optimize and test further? How can we implement this new strategy?

Related Resources:

To Call or Email? That is the Question

Nine Simple Tactics to Drive a Higher Return on Trade Show Investment

Lead Generation: Phone calls turn first-time webinar into million-dollar leads

Organizations target quality, but they don’t pay for it. That is one of the latest discoveries from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free 10-page excerpt at this link). Let’s take a look …

Click to enlarge

“In the past, it may have been acceptable to assume that if an organization can lower their upfront cost-per-lead, they will also increase lead generation, improve ROI and drive revenue,” said Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS.

“This makes sense when calculated on a spreadsheet, but when rolled out in an evolved marketplace with an empowered buyer, it’s going to take a lot more than simply lowering the cost-per-lead to achieve the goals of today’s CMO.”

So how can you balance cost and quality of leads?

  Read more…

Back in 1992, if you wanted to find information about a company or its products, you had two choices:

1. Spend hours at the library poring over periodicals, annual and industry reports, and magazine and newspaper clippings. (Do you remember microfiche?)
2. Meet with a salesperson.

Life was simpler then: You could reach quota by sending some direct mail, making a few phone calls, and scheduling a few meetings. After all, the customer had very few alternatives to inform themselves. You could succeed without a solid strategy; all that really mattered was the size of your Rolodex. Lead generation as we know it today didn’t exist. Frankly, it really didn’t have to.

Those days are long gone, yet too many organizations are still selling like it’s 1992.

How do I know?

All it takes is a quick review of MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link). Of the 1,745 B2B organizations that participated, 61%  still have that big-Rolodex mindset – they send any lead that responds to a marketing campaign directly to sales. Furthermore, check out the chart at the right: The vast majority has not applied strategy to any aspect of lead generation.

These statistics are just a reflection of the day-to-day behaviors and attitudes that keep sales and marketing organizations stuck in a time warp. Here are five of them:

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

When I first started making test calls with MECLABS (publisher of the B2B Lead Roundtable Blog), I was unsuccessful, to say the least. I was unaware of the real goal of the call, lacked an effective strategy, and was generally unprepared. After about 900 calls, my results were disappointing — I only had one lead!

Since I was unsuccessful, I lacked confidence in my ability, and that feeling came through on each call. After receiving both informal and formal training, as well as making the choice to dive into the task at hand, my results grew to six leads after only 575 calls. That was an 839% improvement.

Although I did not realize I was following a defined outline at the time, after completing MarketingSherpa’s B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Online Course, I was able to see the improvements I made broken down into three basic principles for effective teleprospecting:

• Be human
• Build a relationship
• Be knowledgeable

Of course, it’s difficult to translate these blanket statements into applicable action. I learned the translation must start with the individual who is making the call, because teleprospecting leads starts with a one-on-one phone conversation.

Be human

“We believe that people buy from people, that people don’t buy from companies, from stores or from websites; people buy from people,” said Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS.

To be human, on an individual basis, phone call by phone call, one must be completely mentally present. This means, concentrating on each call, focusing on each decision maker, and determining the qualification of each company.

The most difficult aspect in being present during calls is leaving any anxieties unrelated to work outside of the workplace. Teleprospecting can be a highly stressful, tedious and monotonous task, but mistakes can be prevented by giving the proper energy to each call and leaving unrelated issues aside. I discovered that by creating a healthy work-life balance, I could decrease the inevitable potential for anxiety that often comes along with the position.

Along with focused energy, starting fresh with every call is essential in teleprospecting. Carrying any mistakes, assumptions or a bad attitude from one call to another is a sure way to miss out on opportunities for qualified sales leads. Whatever was done or said by one decision maker should not affect the next company’s opportunity to have a pleasant, unbiased conversation.

In any case, you must continue to optimize your approach to the call, notes on the call and call style by finding the best method through tested means and with applicable feedback from mentors and managers. In teleprospecting, you must always be open to constructive criticism. With the use of analytics in the marketing world growing, there is a ton of data supporting methods and ways to optimize.

Build a relationship

The phone call must be between two humans, and not between a human and a “salesperson” focusing on the universal lead definition (ULD). The great rule in sales is to ask open-ended questions. This allows for less questioning and a better flow during the conversation. It also gives the decision maker a chance to supply complete information about the company’s issues and solutions.

Another essential element to teleprospecting is conversing by the 80/20 rule: Listen for 80% and talk for 20% of the conversation. The universal lead definition configures the notes, but attentive listening provides the information. Avoid interrogating the lead; instead, engage in a conversation.

Be knowledgeable

First, be knowledgeable by creating good habits for a good call. This includes not only knowing how to build a relationship and starting every call fresh, but it also includes remembering the goal of the call: qualifying sales-ready leads.

Many think this will be automatic, but it’s easy to get sidetracked in other action results for a call. For example, good habits include trail closing even if you “think” there is no interest, and avoiding using actions that could be considered a crutch, like scheduling a callback time or sending an email.

Other actions besides the goal of the call are sometimes beneficial, but this is only after a conversation and/or close have been attempted. It is important to remember these are not substitutes for the true goal of the call: qualified, sales-ready leads.

Second, be knowledgeable by knowing your product or service. Be aware of the company’s value proposition by clearly defining the unique benefit to the customer over the competition. It’s a good practice to be able to summarize this in a sentence or two. Know common objectives and competition to your product or service so you can be prepared.

Overall, don’t get bombarded with facts, tactics and questions; keep it simple. As Dr. McGlaughlin has also said, “Clarity trumps persuasion.”

Related Resources:

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

Nine Reasons Why B2B Marketing Should Own the Teleprospecting Function

B2B Lead Generation: 300% ROI from email and teleprospecting combo to house list (via MarketingSherpa)

B2B Lead Generation: 4 ways to use teleprospecting in your next pilot (and 2 ways to measure it) (via MarketingSherpa Blog)

Marketers rank webinars among email newsletters, Sales calls, whitepapers and thought leadership articles as top lead generation tools, according to the chart at right from the just-released MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link).

But Jeanne Hopkins, Executive Vice President, Smartbear Software, advises that if you’re new to webinars, proceed with care.

“Unfortunately, most people think that having a webinar is easy,” she says. “That’s because they don’t prepare enough. Webinars are very resource intensive if you want to produce results.”

And, if anyone knows, it’s Jeanne.

She was most recently vice president of Marketing for HubSpot where, under her leadership, the organization held webinars that attracted 25,000 sign-ups, 10,000 attendees and 3,500 new leads. She’s been a marketing executive since well before webinars came into existence, and leveraged their predecessor, the teleconference.

She draws from this experience to inform her three most important tips for novice webinar producers.

  Read more…

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

I just arrived at the Pre-Optimization Summit workshop in Denver and caught the end of Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s Value Proposition Session.

In this Landing Page Optimization Workshop, Dr. McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, taught the live audience here at the Denver Marriott Tech Center about a simple case study drawn from the MarketingExperiments research library.

In the case study, Dr. McGlaughlin revealed how one company clarified the value proposition of a landing page for a 201% increase in captured leads.

Here are the details of that case study:

The Background:

The company in the case study was a B2B company (anonymized for its protection) selling data and mailing lists to other businesses. The goal of the page was to capture a lead.

The Control:

Here’s a screenshot of the control.

Click to enlarge

The Treatment:

Here is a screenshot of the competing treatment.

Click to enlarge

The Results:

And here are the results.

The winning treatment generated a 201% increase in captured leads by clarifying the value proposition of the page.

So, how can you, a B2B marketer, replicate the success of this case study? Throughout his presentation, Dr. McGlaughlin drew out some principles we could apply to our own pages.

PRINCIPLE #1: Frame your value proposition with customer logic

The first principle Dr. McGlaughlin mentioned is this:

“The value proposition must be framed with customer logic rather than company logic.”

The primary question we must answer to determine the value proposition of a page is in the first person: “If I am the ideal customer, why should I purchase from you rather than any of your competitors?”

By answering this question in the first person, we are able to view the message through the customer’s eyes. This is helpful because we most often view the message through our own “marketing” eyes.

PRINCIPLE #2: Determine the necessary derivative value propositions

“Customer logic demands an obvious connection between the company, its various products and its different prospects.”

While your company likely has a primary value proposition, your landing page may not be the best place for it. A landing page may have its own value proposition, while a PPC (pay-per-click) ad may have another one. All of these, however, are derived from the primary value proposition.

Dr. McGlaughlin grouped these derivative value propositions into four main categories:

• Primary Level: the overall value proposition of a company
• Product Level: the value proposition of an individual product
• Prospect Level: the value proposition for an individual prospect type
• Process Level: the value proposition for a specific step in a process

PRINCIPLE #3: Map the micro-yes pathway for each product- and prospect-level value proposition

“For every product value prop, and for every prospect value prop, there is a micro-yes pathway up the side of the inverted funnel.”

When you are determining the product- or prospect-level value proposition, you must understand that your customer must make a series of micro-yeses before you can get to the ultimate yes, which is the conversion you are after. These yeses occur on the side of an imaginary inverted funnel.

To effectively communicate the value proposition on our lead capture pages, we must be able to map every micro-yes on the inverted funnel.

PRINCIPLE #4: Use the process-level value proposition to achieve each micro-yes

“For every micro-yes pathway there are a series of process-level value props.”

The last principle Dr. McGlaughlin mentioned ties everything together. To achieve the necessary series of micro-yeses, you must use process-level value propositions at each step.

In other words, every step in the process must answer this critical question:

“If I am the ideal customer, why should I take this next step rather than end the process?”

Related Resources:

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

How to Test Your Value Proposition Using a PPC Ad

Conversion Rate Optimization: Building to the Ultimate Yes

Landing Page Optimization: Value-focused revamp leads to 188% lead gen boost, increase in personal interaction

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

When you’re converting inquiries into qualified leads, it’s widely believed that time is of the essence. Even research published in the Harvard Business Review says you’re almost seven times more likely to qualify a lead if you respond by phone within five minutes than if you respond an hour later.

That’s why, when one of our Research Partners, a B2B telecommunications company, wanted to convert more inbound leads into sales-ready ones, we cut our response time. The results were surprising, as you’ll see in a moment.

We typically phoned people who submitted a Web form on the company’s site within about five hours. We slashed that to five minutes or less with:

• Automated alerts — Our IT team developed a program that notified our lead generation specialists to make a call the moment someone submitted a Web form.

• Adjusted hours — A lead generation specialist was always available during the hours when someone would most likely submit a Web form.

• An easier-to-use database — Lead generation specialists had to go through several steps to access the partner’s database; we revised it so they could reach the lead they needed in one click.

As a result, whenever someone submitted a form, the person received a call back within five minutes more than 85% of the time. At the end of six months, I was eagerly looking forward to the results. Here they are: Almost nothing changed! Even though we cut response time by more than 98%, the number of qualified leads remained virtually the same and the amount of calls it took to get a qualified lead actually increased slightly.

Our effort did not have much impact. So what did this teach us? To slack off and not respond to inquiries for days? Absolutely not. Instead, we learned three valuable lessons:

Lesson #1: Know your customers and their needs

Will they lose interest or select another vendor in the next hour or two? If so, then instant follow-up may be a good idea. But in the case of our partner, the potential customers? needs for B2B telecommunications were not going to change dramatically in a few hours, so cutting response times did not have much impact.

Lesson #2: Know what you’re selling

If it?s a transactional sale, five-minute follow-up may very well be worthwhile. Not so much, obviously, for the complex sale. However, again, that doesn’t mean if you have a complex sale you can kick back and wait to respond to inquiries. Our research in complex sales has consistently demonstrated that follow-up within 24 hours is always optimal.

Lesson#3: Test before investing

What works for someone else may not work for you — even if it was featured in the Harvard Business Review. Begin by identifying your key performance indicators: What you want to achieve. For this test we wanted to:

• Increase sales-ready leads — Our partners were satisfied with the amount inquiries their inbound marketing efforts were producing. They wanted more sales-ready leads — leads that fit their Universal Lead Definition.
• Improve lead qualification — Our goal was to reduce the number of dials required to attain sales-ready leads. We were hoping this could ultimately make our team more productive.

Once you set key performance indicators, measure them before and after the test, and compare. It’s really that simple. Start on a small scale, and then implement the program across your entire organization if the results merit it.

Related Resources:

To Call or Email? That is the Question

Webinar Replay: Research from Harvard, MIT Pinpoints Hard Lead Conversion Lessons with Easy Solutions

Webinar Replay: Teleprospecting that Drives Sales-Ready Leads

New Chart: Chief requirements for B2B lead qualification

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

In my most recent research project, the MarketingSherpa 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, we identified key behavioral and motivational differences between marketing specialists. Much of what we learned applies beyond HR and can improve your lead nurturing and sales efforts.

The key to navigating your way to a sales-ready lead is navigating through individual personalities. When you apply the human touch, you must establish credibility and, essentially, establish and manage relationships with many different people at many different levels in an organization.

You must, as Brian Carroll put it, ripen some bananas …

“Fully 95% of your leads are like harvested green bananas, and, off the top, your sales team needs only the other 5%, those that are ripe…

“Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful dialog with viable prospects regardless of their timing to buy. It’s about building trusted relationships with the right people. In the end, it’s the act of maintaining mind share and building solid relationships with economic buyers. It’s not a salesperson calling up every few months to find out if a prospect is ‘ready to buy yet.'”

— Brian Carroll, Executive Director, Revenue Optimization, MECLABS

Lead nurturing based on personality

Below are some characteristics you will want to identify in your prospects as early as possible. They will improve your understanding of the people you’re contacting, and set a path for helping them “sell up” or move to the next stage in the buying process.

The person you are talking to in a lead’s organization might be:

As you communicate with each of these three levels, try to identify which of these characteristics are prominent in the person:

Once you have communicated with your first contact or two, ask them about the decision maker so you can prepare them for the process of helping to achieve your mutual objective — putting Sales in touch with a decision maker ready to make a purchase.

Here’s an example of how to make this system work for you:

Scenario #1 — Wants to be a champion, but not very assertive

Let’s say your champion is not very assertive or a good communicator. He is much more detail- and process-oriented as well as very objective about his approaches. That means he will not be very subjective and will have an average or low individualistic profile.

Even if his corporate attachment is strong, he is going to need your help motivating the influencer. On your call, help him understand that you are there to support his efforts and achieve his goals so he can obtain what you are offering.

Work with him until he is comfortable with all the technical benefits of your product. Then ask if you could get on the phone with him and the influencer. Remember: You are his team member. Use phrases like “we,” “our,” and “us” a lot!

Scenario #2 — Is an assertive influencer but not convinced yet

Now, if your influencer is the exact opposite, then he will be less than excellent with details but an excellent relationship person. When you talk to him, focus on how this will help the individuals within the organization and make the department more efficient and effective.

Provide “global” concepts and images since he is more subjective in his thought processes. This is where your role becomes critical, because to influence a decision maker (who is obviously assertive and controlling), you must provide this “people person” with a compelling sales proposition. You must formulate that concept in his mind so it is the first thing out of his mouth when he meets with the decision maker.

Now, since we know the decision maker is assertive, let’s say he is also somewhat analytical and highly objective, only considering the bottom line. Then you must prepare the proposal or PowerPoint for the influencer with a “bottom-line” focus.

You want to help the influencer see that you want to help make him “look good” by identifying the key points most decision makers look for — “What’s it going to do for me today?” It can be as simple as an opening statement like, “How much effort does it take to add $100,000 to the company’s bottom line? ABC can do that with little to no long-term investment.”

However you set your approach, using this form can help you identify the key traits of the people you’re contacting. Instead of marketing to job titles, you can market to people and their personalities.

Related Resources:

Lead Nurturing: 9 questions answered on lead qualification, nurturing, and Marketing-Sales alignment

Lead Nurturing: 12 questions answered on content, tactics and strategy

Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects — not selling them

Marketing Management: What is your company doing to increase knowledge and effectiveness?

Marketing Career: 4 questions every marketer should answer (and what you need to know to start asking them)

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

As the MECLABS Research Partnership analyst team, my colleagues and I speak with professionals who attend our events (like the next month’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas), purchase our publications, and want more information about how MECLABS can help grow their business. So every day we hear about the challenges they’re facing.

One issue that surfaces all too often is optimizing databases: When you have a database of thousands upon thousands of names, how do you help your team easily and effectively prioritize who to contact? Nearly every company I talk to does some kind of lead scoring, but rarely do those lead scores align with their database in a way that allows their sales teams to determine — at a glance — which prospects are the right fit at the right time.

This hit way too close to home. Here at MECLABS, my team was struggling with the same issue. Through events, publications, and general inquiry, we add hundreds of interested potential partner inquiries to our database every few weeks, sometimes even thousands. We have an ace IT team that has set up platforms so we can quickly identify who fits our Ideal Partner Profile, and we’d contact them as soon after they express interest in our Research Partnership program. We are very well aware of the importance of timeliness for marketers who are struggling to optimize their sales and marketing funnels. And we’d follow up based on the next action that was associated with their file.

But it took Brooke Bower, our data-analysis whiz, to help our team look at our database from a new perspective, one that would help us get the highest return on our time by focusing on the most promising potential partners, as opposed to merely the most urgent.

What we realized was missing was a comprehensive at-a-glance snapshot that basically shows us the key factors that define a successful research-partnership engagement:

• If the individual making the inquiry is a decision maker or an influencer
• How many events the individual, and his team, have attended and publications they’ve purchased compiled in an easily sortable list
• Their organization’s firmographic details — such as revenue, marketing budget, sales cycle and size

We enlisted the IT department to add fields to our existing platform to bring together these details into a single “opportunity grade” that would be applied to each potential partner’s account. (The concept of an “opportunity grade” was recommended to us by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS.) The higher the grade, the better fit for a long-term, strategic research partnership.

Within just a few days, through the teamwork of IT, marketing and sales, we have sorted our database so that it reveals to us that “opportunity grade” for each partner. It wasn’t rocket science, just taking the time to ask the hard questions (thanks Brooke), and look at what we do from a fresh perspective, to give IT the parameters they needed to bring it all together. This is a project that will never be completed, of course. We’re going to continually work with Brooke to analyze what qualities make up our most qualified research partners and make sure our database can easily and accurately help us identify them.

Great results happen when people and departments with different skill sets take time to put their minds together — in this case it was Brooke’s data savvy combined with my hands-on experience talking to potential Research Partners about their challenges.

I’d really like to hear about your experiences in building a database that helps you engage more efficiently and effectively. I welcome you to share them in the comments.