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…

In our most recent episode of Marketing Research in Action, I discussed how lead nurturing could help your B2B marketing efforts with Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS, based on data from her 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt here).

Here is a look at some of the research Jen and I discussed with direct links to that part of the video.

0:38 – Organizations that are engaged in lead nurturing realize higher ROIs on their lead generation efforts.

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2:01 – Top tactics for creating engaging lead nurturing content

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5:40 – Frequency of lead nurturing touches

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Related Resources

Email Marketing: The importance of lead nurturing in the complex B2B sale

Lead Nurturing: Pilot campaign increases conversion 32.6% with automated emails

Lead Nurturing: You could be losing as much as 80% of your sales; here’s how you keep them

MarketingSherpa Webinar Replay — 5 Key Components for Establishing and Optimizing Lead Nurturing Campaigns

While gathering presentation material for the upcoming MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 (February 7-10 at Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas), I had the chance to reach out to Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MarketingSherpa, to get some additional background on lead re-engagement and nurturing.

Jen was the lead author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, and was very helpful in finding a couple of relevant charts for me, providing some additional comments on what this research means for B2B marketers.

73% of all B2B leads are not sales-ready

The first lesson Jen offers is almost three quarters of all B2B leads are not sales-ready. This means Marketing needs to engage with those leads in some fashion to move them down the buying funnel. This also means it’s possible for leads to “go cold” somewhere between entering the funnel and becoming sales-ready. Those are the leads Marketing needs to reengage with.

Here is the first chart of MarketingSherpa research Jen provided:

Chart: Average percentage of total lead volume that is sales-ready

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And here is Jen’s commentary:

The above chart is the demonstration of why all leads cannot go directly to Sales.

At the time of original lead conversion, an average of 27% of those leads will be qualified to the point where they are ready and willing to engage with Sales.

The remaining 73% are not there yet. When these leads are prematurely sent over to Sales, they are not receiving the experience they desire and will look elsewhere for it.

Besides, do you really want your Sales team spinning their wheels making dial after dial where nearly three-quarters of those leads are not ready?

So, a large majority of B2B leads are not ready for Sales. This is where lead nurturing campaigns come into play.

The usual touch point for lead nurturing is email. These campaigns are greatly enhanced by utilizing marketing automation software to track and score those leads, and send triggered email based on demographic, firmographic, and probably most importantly as the lead moves closer to be becoming sales-ready, behavioral information. Behavioral information would include website visits, whitepaper downloads, webinar participation, and similar activities that indicate the lead is getting ready to buy the product or service.

With that in mind, this second chart is not good news for many B2B marketers:

Read more…

In speaking with many, many marketers over the past year, two words — well, actually one word and one acronym — stand out in my mental word cloud when thinking about marketing in 2011: revenue and ROI (return on investment).

The first is a term more commonly seen in financial reports and tossed around the conference table during company meetings. The second is another financial term.

And I’m not just dreaming that these words have infiltrated marketing. Research from the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report found that 54% of surveyed marketers think “achieving or increasing measurable ROI from lead generation programs” is a top strategic priority for 2012.

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I know I’ve written about Marketing proving its worth within the company in terms of revenue generation or measuring ROI more than once over the last year.

Menno Lijkendijk, Director Milestone Marketing, a Netherlands-based B2B marketing company, says the emphasis on ROI in marketing should be reexamined.

Menno’s main point is unimpeachable — return on investment is a financial term with a specific definition that has a very specific meaning to the C-suite in general, and particularly to the CFO. His concern is, not only is the actual ROI of some marketing activities overemphasized, the term itself is gathering too much marketing “buzz.”

He provided an example of a comment left on an online video of his that referenced “intangible ROI,” something he (rightly) says does not exist.

“There is no such thing as intangible ROI. The whole definition of ROI is that it should be tangible,” Menno says.

He continues, “This term — ROI — is now starting to lead a life of its own, and is being used by email service providers to explain to their potential customers that doing business with them will give them great ROI on their marketing investment.” Menno also mentions email providers are not alone in using this sales pitch and cited search marketers, social media markers and other agencies.

“There is more than just ROI, and the real value of marketing may require a different metric, or a different scorecard, than just the financial one,” he states.

– Read more…

Last week in Boston we held the East Coast leg of B2B Summit 2011, featuring two days of case studies and actionable marketing advice for more than 200 attendees.

Following lunch on day one, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, bounded onto the stage, thinly-disguised as Donald Trump to host an interactive panel of four experts, presented in the style of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”

Daniel quickly passed the “boss” baton to the entire audience who had the chance to vote on which panelist gave the best advice on three lead generation scenarios. The panelists each had three minutes to offer quick-hit tactics for each challenge.

For this post, let’s take a look at each expert’s take on one of the situations.

– Read more…

While digital marketing and social media are all the rage (and rightly so), there are a number of reasons for B2B marketers to use teleprospecting as a foundational element of their lead generation strategy.  In fact, for those marketers who don’t own the teleprospecting function, here are nine reasons you should.

If you are trying to reach prospects who won’t spend more than $10k to $15k per year for your products or services, then using the phone for lead generation will probably not prove economically viable. You need to use lead scoring and route those leads to an inside sales team or your indirect channel.

If you have higher value deals, teleprospecting can be a valuable tool.

It is especially useful for pilots. Consider these four ways you can use teleprospecting in a pilot scenario:

1. Conduct end-to-end lead generation. Teleprospecting can function as an end-to-end lead generation capability. That is, you can generate demand and then qualify and nurture leads all within the teleprospecting function. That means there are fewer moving parts. For those marketers that need to demonstrate the potential of lead generation, fewer moving parts simplifies measurement and coordination issues.
2. Leverage small sample sizes. The conversion rates are usually much higher with teleprospecting than with other forms of contact so the sample size can be much smaller. This factor is especially helpful if you want to focus on large accounts where the deal sizes are often large and the number of accounts to call is low.
3. Gain valuable market feedback rapidly. You can get on-going quantitative and qualitative market feedback. If you have digital recording technology, you can even hear exactly what customers are saying. I love statistics. But sometimes, to more deeply understand market behaviors and attitudes, you must hear how potential customers respond to your value proposition. In fact, even if you can’t conduct a statistically valid test, you can use teleprospecting to get directional indicators and then leverage more scalable media.
4. Experiment. Because of this depth of feedback, you can experiment extensively with targeting, messaging, cadence, and integration with other channels and then make rapid course corrections.   For example, you can test leaving voice mails or not, the timing of calls and emails for both lead follow up and for lead generation, the interplay between phone and email, and much much more. This is a factor that is inexplicably under leveraged by B2B marketers.

Measure the ROI

Let me add a final word about measurement in a pilot.  From an executive standpoint, there are two ways to measure the financial benefit of teleprospecting:

1. As a tool for qualifying and nurturing leads. The issue is whether the added cost is worth it.  The simple equation would be this:

ROI = (cost of generating inquiries + cost of teleprospecting + sales costs)/revenue from the qualified leads.

That will give you an expense-to-revenue ratio that your CFO will appreciate. The reason to include sales costs is because the quality of leads can either increase or decrease sales productivity.

2. As a demand-generation channel. In this case, you are looking at teleprospecting as one of many ways to generate demand and so you’re trying to see where it works best so that you can allocate sufficient budget to it relative to other choices.  The simple equation would be this:

ROI = (cost of teleprospecting + sales cost)/revenue from the qualified leads

If you were integrating outbound teleprospecting into other forms of outbound contact (e.g., following up a direct mail package with a phone call), then you would need to include the costs of all of the integrated demand generation channels.

You may need to estimate sales costs.  One way to do that is to set up a control group that gets leads and one that does not.  You can then get sales budget numbers for each group.   

Make sure the lead volume uses as much of the sales capacity of the test group as possible.  Then you can simply measure the revenue difference between the two groups.

The good news is, it’s not uncommon for teleprospecting to yield at least 20 dollars of revenue for every dollar of investment. So the ROI is often outstanding.

Related Resources

Lead Generation: 4 critical success factors to designing a pilot

Lead Generation: How to get funding to improve your lead gen

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

B2B Lead Generation: Why teleprospecting is a bridge between sales and marketing

I’m sure you’ve seen these blog posts before. They’re looking for a hook, so they throw a topical subject in the title to get you to click, and then share the deep marketing wisdom that you would naturally expect to learn from Charlie Sheen, The Bronx Zoo Cobra, and Justin Bieber.

I thought of this topic the other day because we actually did something I just knew we would never do on MarketingSherpa. We published those two proper nouns – Justin and Bieber – right next to each other.

In fairness, it was in an excellent email marketing case study about a very impressive trigger alert program, and Justin Bieber was only used as an example of search keywords this events company was targeting. But you better believe Senior Reporter Adam Sutton endured a relentless week of teasing for including the Biebs in his case study. There were the Photoshopped pictures. There were “Belieber” taunts.

Why? Because, and here is my indefensible blog post (with a hearty tip o’ the hat to Esquire magazine), marketers can’t learn anything from Justin Bieber. Or Lady Gaga. Or that kid who got his 15 minutes of fame for pretending to be in stuck in a weather balloon.

Think about it, what are 3 lessons from Charlie Sheen? 1. Be born to a famous dad. 2. Get a formulaic but highly rated sitcom. 3. Have an extremely weird but very public meltdown (using social media)

Does this really help your marketing campaigns? Get some ideas to generate more leads? Increase sales?

So, here’s the approach we take at MarketingSherpa. Perhaps the best people to learn marketing lessons from are…wait for it…actual marketers. That’s why we survey more than 10,000 marketers every year for our benchmark reports. That’s why we conduct more than 200 interviews every year for our free marketing newsletters. That’s why we invite dozens of marketers to present their case studies to their peers at our summits. And that’s why I’m writing this blog post today.

So, if I had to break down five marketing lessons I’ve learned from marketers, I would say…

1. Successful marketing comes from hard work, not “secrets” and “tricks”

Internet marketing is flat out hard work. The successful marketers I’ve seen go-to-market with a regimented marketing plan.

They understand what KPIs are key to their success – both the intermediate metrics that will help them make course corrections, as well as the key results that are critical to their business leaders.

They find ways to tear down artificial silos in their organization – between Sales and Marketing, between online marketing and offline marketing, between email marketing and social media marketing – to facilitate a cohesive funnel that drives customers to conversion.

They tame unwieldy, disjointed technology platforms to create tools that improve marketing campaigns and create clear, unified reports. They do this even though they don’t have a tech background. They do this even if it means having long conversations with IT about why Ubuntu is better than Windows.

But they don’t have “secrets to Internet marketing success.” And they don’t have “10 supercool tricks to boosting SEO.” They have war stories. And if you can get just a few minutes in their busy day to hear them, you just might learn something.

The battles are won in the trenches.

2. Your customers don’t care about your emails, your PPC ads, or even your TV campaign

They don’t even care about all that fun inbound stuff like your blog posts or YouTube videos. And they certainly don’t care about the latest features of your product, your mission statement, or your corporate structure.

They care about doing their jobs better. They care about having clean water for their kids. And they care about taking their wife out for a 12^th anniversary dinner that she’ll never forget.

Never confuse a feature with a benefit. And never confuse a marketing “benefit” with what really matters to your customers.

3. Successful marketers have losses

This is marketing, folks. You don’t have to be one of the “crazy ones,” but you do need to push the limit on what your company thinks is possible.

As Theodore Roosevelt said, “There is no effort without error or shortcoming.”

If you don’t have losses – a “negative lift” on a test, a failed product launch – you’re not pushing hard enough. And if you don’t have losses, you’re not really learning anything. You’re just guessing.

The great thing about digital marketing is that it has never been easier to learn about your customers. You’ve got real-time data you can analyze and an endless possibility of tests you can run. Test two headlines you simply can’t decide between, two offers, two entirely different approaches against each other in a real-world, real-time environment and let your customers tell you which one is better. Test new landing pages against your top performers.

Sure, it’s scary, you might lose. But if you do it right, you’ll definitely learn.

4. Strategy is better than skill

This is something that I’ve heard Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, say in almost every meeting I’ve had with him. Drill it into your team as well.

Marketers are all too used to having a goal placed in front of them – double leads, gain market share – and churning and burning and blasting and using every tool they can think of to hit that number. Just…one…more…email send…will do the trick.

Sometimes it helps to step back and look at the big picture. Is it worth scrapping and fighting for a tenth of a point of market share with your fiercest competitors? Are you inundating your lists with offers?

Take the time to step back from the marketing machine and determine what your value proposition truly is. Don’t dictate your value to your customers. Discover what they find valuable about your products and services. Why do they put their job on the line to hire your consultants? Why do they part with their precious cash to buy your products?

As with any job, you can work harder, or you can work smarter.

5. Be the customer advocate

As a marketer, you spend almost every waking moment making a proposition to the customer. That makes every customer your customer. So make sure your company comes through.

Stay in constant contact with customer service, product development, services, manufacturing, and sales to make sure you are truly serving the customer. What are customers complaining about? What are you doing right? How can you make their lives easier, better, smarter, more fun, more fulfilling? Are sales reps over promising? Does everyone understand the value proposition of your brands? Do you all speak with the same voice? Do you walk the walk and live the brand?

Hey, that’s no easy task. But if you’re looking for easy tasks, you’re in the wrong business. See point #1 above.

Your customer is empowered like never before in the history of commerce. Today, you must assume that every customer is a publisher as well. How would you react if you knew the editor of The Wall Street Journal was eating in your restaurant, trying on a suit in your store, or purchasing your software platform? There is no quicker way to sink your brand and your marketing campaign, and the huge amounts of time and money you have invested in them, than by ticking off the editor.

You know what you expect when you’re the customer. Under promise and over deliver.

And to over promise to you, my audience, my customer, I dug up a sixth lesson. But instead of telling you one more thing I’ve learned from you, I asked author and behavioral expert, Beverly Flaxington, what she’s learned from marketers. Beverly has built her career around understanding other people. Here’s what she had to say…

6. Provide your audience the context

In too many cases, a marketer develops information and materials based solely upon the data and information about a particular product or service. The marketing material reads like this: “We do this. This is what we do. This is how we do it.” It’s a great deal of data without a lot of context around why it is important to the targeted audience.

The missing component is the “So what?” What’s so important about how you do what you do? Why should someone care about it? What is it going to do for them and how will it do it? This goes deeper than the idea of selling benefits. It actually asks the marketer to create language that speaks TO an audience about their needs, and helps that audience to easily make a connection as to why what the marketer is proposing is good for them.

As you develop materials or write marketing copy, ask yourself the “So what?” question as you make statements and provide information. Think in terms of “This is good for our audience because…..” The process can be very eye-opening because instead of assuming that someone will get why what you’re saying is so important, you can more likely guarantee they will understand!

Thanks for reading today’s blog post. Stay tuned to the MarketingSherpa blog next week, where we’re going to talk about what marketing lessons you can learn from Michele Bachmann, New Mexico wildfires, and Greek debt.

Related Resources

Evidence-based Marketing: This blog post will not solve your most pressing marketing challenges…yet

Loyalty Marketing: How to get customers to stick around (and keep buying)

The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing

The Last Blog Post: Marketers must embrace change

In my last blog post, I talked about getting funding by framing a strategic lead generation initiative properly for the sponsoring executive. Let’s talk about the first step on the road to an improved lead generation capability –  configuration of a pilot.

While there is an infinite number of ways to develop a pilot, a well-designed pilot depends on:

• The current gaps in your lead generation machinery
• Perceptions of lead generation in the C-Suite,
• The risk appetite of the company
• And your own credibility.

These four guiding principles, however, can help you scope a pilot in a way that leads to long term-success:

1. Start where the economics are most forgiving.

There are two big economic factors to keep in mind when designing a lead generation pilot.

The first is the deal size (or annual recurring revenue or lifetime value). The smaller the deal size, the lower your lead costs must be. Getting to a low cost per sales-ready lead takes a great deal of efficiency and scale. So why target a market where you must be highly efficient to have success?

The second economic consideration is probability of purchase. Customers, for example, are typically more likely to buy something else from you than non-customers are. There may be vertical markets or other segments where your products or services have a better success rate. Responders are more likely to buy than non-resonders. The higher the probability of purchase, the higher your conversion is going to be and the lower, therefore, your average deal size can be.

Combining a high potential average order size with a high probability of purchase gives marketers the most room for mistakes and course correction.  So play it safe.

Action item: Start with the most probable segment where you can sell big ticket items so that you have lots of room to experiment and course-correct and then test and iterate your way to the margins of your market.

2. Keep it simple

Lead generation has gotten very complex. You are not going to be able to optimize everything at once. So don’t try. Instead, tackle things in stages and look for ways to narrow the scope: fewer sales people receiving leads, a single solution area and/or market segment, and so on.

Action item: Once you determine where the low-hanging fruit is, figure out how to narrow the scope of what you’re doing so that it manageable by clarifying the objective and using that objective to simplify the pilot.

3. Make the pilot long enough for course corrections

Too often, marketers do not give themselves the room to learn and improve. New teleprospecting reps, for example, need 30 to 60 days to get reasonably good at what they do, and that’s assuming you have the right playbook and training to give them.

You may need time to see what competitors are doing, analyze online traffic patterns, refine your service level agreement with Sales for the pilot, or any other of a number things. But most importantly, pilots should be experiments in optimization so give yourself long enough to:

• a) course correct
• b) sample properly
• c) gather sufficient results.

And the longer the buying cycle, the longer it will take to get more definitive feedback on the outcome of the leads. And the lower the traffic, the longer the test must continue to gain sufficiency to project the results with the necessary confidence level.

If possible, make the pilot last for an entire fiscal year with the understanding that you’ll come back to management sooner if possible with a plan for scaling the initiative. That way, you won’t have to go “dark” while management decides on the speed of scaling your lead generation initiative and you’ll have plenty of room for testing and optimizing and tracking results.

Action item: Develop a conservative timeline that shows key milestones at particular stages. Make part of the deliverables of a milestone or two the new knowledge the company will have about optimized lead generation processes.

4. Base the measurement of the pilot on what you can control .

While you ultimately want to drive revenue, you can only control the quality of the leads you give to sales people…not what they do with those leads. So only promise the executive stakeholder(s) that by the end of the pilot, you will give salespeople what they ask for at least 75 percent of the time (90 percent or higher is possible).

You can and should refine your customer profile and lead definition and perhaps even the follow up and reporting processes. That’s what the pilot is for, in part. With enough experimentation, you’ll get to a definition that works for sales and that marketing can deliver consistently and scale.

Action item: Collaborate with sales on an ideal customer profile, a lead definiton, and the follow up and reporting requirements you will need in exchange.

Lead generation is a set of capabilities, processes and practices that you can always improve. So it’s a never-ending journey. And these four design principles will give you the best opportunity for that kind of long-term success.

Related Resources

Lead Generation: How to get funding to improve your lead gen

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

B2B Lead Generation: Why teleprospecting is a bridge between sales and marketing

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

You’d like to take your lead generation function to a new level. But how? The cost of all you want to do is far more than you suspect you can get budget for. Plus, you’ve seen others try new things that didn’t work. They lost credibility and any chance for getting funding in the future.

In this economy, that’s the last thing you need.

Let me share a blueprint that’s worked for me. I first used this blueprint ten years ago to help Denny Head, who worked at Avaya, get the funding that resulted in a billion-dollar sales lead pipeline in 20 months.

When framing your lead generation pilot for your CMO, keep these four critical success factors in mind:

1. Sell a vision.

Lead generation scales sales organizations. That’s a big deal. Sales channels are the least scalable part of the go-to-market machinery.

And yet, a recent survey I conducted with an American multinational conglomerate corporation (the name has to stay confidential for competitive reasons, found that sales reps were spending more than 40 percent of their time looking for sales opportunities (i.e., generating their own leads). Even worse, new reps spent more than half of their time just identifying opportunities.

That use of time has a material cost. It also robs sales of revenue production. If sales reps are spinning their wheels generating their own leads, they’re wasting time that could be better spent closing deals.

So, a very large expense is at stake, far bigger than the cost of funding your most ambitious lead generation plans. More importantly, the potential for increasing the revenue capacity of your sales team can pay for incremental investment many times over.

In addition to the financial benefit, a lead generation model that delivers insight and predictability about revenue production is a great benefit to the C-Suite.

Action Item: Survey your sales organization to find out how much time they spend looking for leads. They may not realize how pervasive the problem is. In the survey I mentioned above, even sales managers underestimated how much time was being lost. On average, they underestimated the amount of time their reps were devoting to lead identification by 27 percent.

Then use the information from that survey to estimate the cost of this time to the company and to reveal how much money the company is already spending on “lead generation.” Then collaborate with sales leaders to determine what kind of revenue production that additional sales capacity might represent.

2. Tie the vision to corporate objectives. Often, marketers are so focused on tactical considerations they fail to see the big financial picture.  Each year, the CEO develops a list of strategic objectives. Every smart department head should look at those objectives and position any initiative in that light.

For example, if the objective is higher profitability, then show how lead generation can take cost out of the business. If the objective is revenue growth, then show how lead generation can contribute to revenue growth.

Action item: Find out what the strategic objectives are for sales and then figure out how to tie lead generation to one or more sales, marketing, and/or corporate objectives. Focus on what truly matters to your business leaders. What are their KPIs? If you can move the needle even a little in a metric that matters, your lead generation initiative will be a success.

3. Under-promise and over-deliver.

Too often, marketers think they need to promise a miracle in order to get funding. That’s crazy. By painting a big enough picture of the end-state, you can soft-sell the pilot phase.

Collaborate with the executive stakeholder(s) about their priorities and success metrics. As best you can, moderate expectations. Remind everyone of the impact of the buying cycle on revenue production. The buying cycle will elongate the payback.

And make sure everyone understands the need to test and iterate during the pilot. In fact, I always stress the importance of continuous improvement through a repeatable process and scientific experimentation. It works in manufacturing. Why can’t it work in marketing?

Action item: Find relevant examples of counter-intuitive marketing experiments that produced big results. (Hint: Our sister company, MarketingExperiments, is a great resource).

4. Provide a roadmap.

A vision is great, but you need to have a practical plan on how to get from wherever you are today to where you’d like you’re company to be. Maybe you need to improve the marketing database. Maybe your content strategy needs re-engineering. Perhaps you need to do lead nurturing and lead scoring in a new, shiny marketing automation system.

And maybe you need to tie social media into the mix and convert more visitors into leads via paid search. And, well, the list is endless and growing all the time with cool possibilities.

There are “go-fast” scenarios and “stick-your-toe-in-the-water” scenarios. Which one is right for you depends on the risk appetite of the sponsoring executive, your personal track record, and the perceptions of lead generation in the company.

Action item: Collaborate with the sponsoring executive on a road map. Explain that there are many ways to get to lead generation Nirvana and it all depends on the tradeoff between the level of proof required and desire for speed and scale.

While there are many important considerations, I’ve found that these four factors are essential to get executive buy-in and to the long-term success of your lead generation initiative.

Related Resources

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

B2B Lead Generation: Why teleprospecting is a bridge between sales and marketing

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

B2B Lead Generation: Increasing leads 296% by analyzing Web traffic – Case Study

Few issues create more conflict between sales and marketing than lead qualification criteria. In the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Benchmark Report, 72 percent of marketers listed generating higher-quality leads as their single biggest challenge, up from 69 percent the prior year. In most cases, Sales and Marketing each see lead qualification from very different perspectives, both of which have value.

In sales, management spends considerable time, including extensive one-on-one coaching, teaching sales people about lead qualification criteria, often dissecting specific sales calls, contacts, opportunities, and accounts. Good sales people soon learn that qualifying prospects takes significant skill and judgment.  Invariably, the best sales people are superb at this skill.

In contrast, the best marketers look at a sophisticated combination of techniques for delivering more qualified prospects to sales:

• Targeting. By soliciting the right audience, fewer out-of-market prospects inquire.
• Messaging and calls-to-action. The right message and supporting content will attract the most qualified buyers.
• Explicit user-supplied information. Registration forms enable marketers to ask qualifying questions, questions that can evolve as the prospect moves deeper into the buying cycle.  Unfortunately, prospects are unwilling to fill-out a lot of information on a registration form so this tactic must be used with great restraint. MECLABS has one case study, for example, that shows a 189 percent increase in registration largely by decreasing the amount of information on a registration form.
• Implicit data. Increasingly, marketers are drawing inferences about not just an area of interest, but the likely depth of interest, the role of the responder in the buying process, and similar qualifying information, all based not on what a prospect says but on what he or she does, primarily via his or her clickstream behavior but also via other media and transactional information.
• Data Hygiene, enhancement, and consolidation. The cloud is creating very scalable and cost-effective tools for cleaning up inquiries, appending additional or better business card or firmagraphic information to each record, and consolidating duplicate accounts, contacts or areas of interest. The right processes will typically identify 14 to 21 percent of the lead pool as either duplicate or not usable (e.g., the visitor enters “Mickey Mouse” for a name).
• Lead Scoring. Lead scoring uses any and all of the implicit, user-supplied information along with explicit and appended information to identify and prioritize records worthy of human follow up.

Leaving aside tele-qualification as a marketing function, the key difference between the approach of sales and marketing is this: marketing uses largely quantifiable techniques, primarily driven by highly scalable business rules and automation while sales uses qualitative techniques that are extremely nuanced and very subjective and invariably much more exacting for a given account.

In other words:

• Marketing improves the probability of success across a pool of responders.
• Sales identifies the probability of success for a particular responder.

Customers and prospects hedge, withhold information intentionally, change their minds, and/or misunderstand and even fabricate information.  Sales people use, not just the words of a customer, but a range of information, including someone’s tone, body language (in the case of on-site sales calls), the perspective of others within the account, external sources, and many other tools to evaluate the probability of purchase. While lead scoring is improving every day, it obviously has a long way to go before replicating the qualification techniques of sales people.

The truth is these two approaches are highly complementary

The more sales understands the tools and limitations marketing uses, the more insightful their suggestions can be; likewise, the more marketing understands the criteria and methods the best sales people use, the more marketers can improve their own upstream practices.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 – in San Francisco and Boston

B2B Marketing: Building a quality list

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

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

Free MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter

Review: B2B Marketing Best Practices – MarketingSherpa 2011 Handbook by Lee Odden at TopRank online marketing blog