Demand Generation is the use of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and/or services, according to Wikipedia. They call it a marriage of marketing programs coupled with a structured sales process.

Denand Gen

That sounds great, but how can you bring that into practice? In this post I’ve collected 7 best practices for demand generation.

1. Define Your Ideal Lead

The way you develop your campaigns depends heavily on who you are trying to reach. Start with a list of all the typical characteristics of a good lead: job title or job role, location, company size or industry, and so on. If you’re not sure, look at some of your existing customers: they can be good sources of inspiration.

If you target multiple types of leads (e.g. both developers and managers), define them separately.

2. Create Highly Targeted Campaigns

Of course, you want to get a high response rate for your campaigns. The best way to do this is to make your campaign highly targeted to a particular audience. If step 1 gave you multiple ideal lead profiles, don’t try to reach all leads with the same campaign: leads don’t respond to irrelevant campaigns. If you only have time for one campaign, start with the most important segment first.

3. Address the Prospect’s Needs

Once you have defined your segments, you are ready to define the campaign’s content. You have described your ideal prospect in a lot of detail, so you should already have a basic idea of what they are interested in. But you’ll need to do some more digging to find the most important areas of concern for these people. What are the main challenges they face in their job? If you succeed in presenting solutions for some of these issues in your campaigns, you can expect an excellent response rate. So please don’t push your product, but give them some ideas they can use right away, with or without your product.

4. Use Several Ways to Reach Your Audience

In the previous paragraphs we talked about defining your ideal audience, the segments and the messages. But how do you reach this audience? I recommend using multiple ways to drum up interest. If you buy lists, make sure they are targeted, and – if needed – do a manual cleanup. Test the results, so you know which lists work best. Working with media partners (like a magazine) can be a good way to improve targeted lead quality, but the cost per lead is often higher.

An often overlooked way to reach leads is to work together with partner companies who sell a non-competing product to the same audience. And finally, you can use search advertising to get highly targeted leads. There are many more ways to reach your audience: by combining multiple channels, you optimize your reach.

5. Plan for Long Term Nurturing

New leads may not immediately be ready to buy. Once leads are interested to talk to a sales person, they may have to wait until they can replace an existing product, or until new budget becomes available. Therefore it’s essential that you keep touching your list at least once a month. Keep this up for at least a couple of months. If competing products have 1-year contracts, continue nurturing for a full year to make sure you touch them when the product replacement decision comes up.

6. Use Multiple Channels and Offers

Different people have different communication preferences. Some are very good with email, while others prefer postal mail, or respond better to phone calls. If you invite people to a webinar by email, why not also send them a postcard and leave a voice mail. It’s more work, but you’ll dramatically increase response rates (especially important for high-value leads). In the same vein, use different types of offers in your campaigns, such as whitepaper, webinar and customer case studies.

7. Align Sales & Marketing

Once leads show interest, it’s up to sales to find sales opportunities and close the deal. When your demand generation processes are up to speed, sales will hopefully have too many leads to follow up with. To ensure the most effective follow-up, sales and marketing need to agree on what the most valuable leads are. Ask sales for their priorities, and provide them with a list of new leads ranked by priority. When the ranking is sub-optimal, work with them to refine it. With improved collaboration, sales will also give you valuable feedback to improve your demand generation campaigns.

Just back from the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco…WOW! What a difference 3 years makes. When Genius organized the first Sales 2.0 conference in 2007, it was on the back of the whole Web 2.0 movement and was just a loosely defined concept to help Sales managers understand the huge impact Web technology could have on sales productivity. From Webex, to Oracle, to Hoovers, to Genius, the founders of the movement were tapping into a rich vein of business insight just waiting for a huge audience.

Sales 2.0 2010

Here we are 3 years and one HUGE RECESSSION later and boy has Sales 2.0 taken off. From an intrepid early visionary event of less than 200 people, to over 600 people and growing fast, the conference and movement have taken on a life of their own. The biggest change I noticed was in the audience.  Now over 50% of attendees were marketers, there to learn how marketing can drive bigger Sales results at lower cost. This sea change was also reflected in the vendor lineup.  From being the being the only marketing automation company at the first 6 shows, but Genius.com has been joined by worthy competitors like Marketo and Eloqua–all jumping on the Sales 2.0 bandwagon. It’s great to see that our friends in the Marketing Automation space are now getting it: marketing really is all about Sales. The more of us who jump on this message, the better it is for customers.

And that really was the vision of Sales 2.0 from the beginning. In fact, the Fall show will probably be called “Sales and Marketing 2.0″ As I said in my remarks at the first conference, “Sales 2.0″ is really “Buying 2.0.” On Amazon, there’s no difference between the marketing process and the sales process. It’s one seamless buying experience. And that’s what Sales 2.0 needs to aspire too. It’s truly gratifying to see our baby all grown up and embraced by so many new advocates.

Long live Sales 2.0!

As a B2B marketer you may have at some point received emails asking to be removed from your list even though they may have opted out. As a sender you may have received such emails asking their email address to be put on a do-not-email list. If an email was received by the recipient in error, overlooked or sent to someone who did not opt-in it is essential and responsible for the B2B marketer or ESP to act on such requests.

Email Abuse Helpdesk

It’s good sender etiquette to ensure that emails sent out are stamped with an email address where complaints can be addressed. Complaints of this nature are often sent to an abuse email address.

You may have seen an email address such as abuse@domainname.com and perhaps wondered what that’s all about. An abuse@domainname.com email address is a role account [RFC 2142] where an Internet user can complain when they experience difficulties with the use of their service.

Historically system administrators who received email to their network’s abuse email address fielded complaints made by customers, employees, security issues, law enforcement requests, malicious activities and unsolicited emails.

Unsolicited emails, commonly known as ‘spam’ amounts to the highest number of complaints seen in an abuse inbox today. If you are either a sender or receiver it’s very important to respond to spam complaints for either inbound or outbound emails. If you’re a sender then you may see a high number of abuse complaints from your customers emails depending on their campaigns, this is sometimes the only way to know how well customers are doing on your network and provides an opportunity to quickly change their practice, this benefits both the sender and their customer.

It’s not easy to manage an abuse inbox because there may be too many complaints to manage and often resources are not available to process these complaints.  If you are a service provider or part of the email sending community then you have to establish an abuse helpdesk to deal with complaints against unsolicited email. Attending to abuse complaints and following up on them is a mark of good sender etiquette, ignoring complaints will only affect your reputation as a sender.

Tips for managing an email abuse helpdesk:

1. Establish an abuse@yourcompany.tld email address if you haven’t done so. If you have an abuse email address ensure that the appropriate people who can act on it are receiving it.
2. Establish an abuse helpdesk website from your sending domain. If your sending domain is separate from your corporate site or application it is highly recommended to create a webpage that can provide assistance to the end user on how to file abuse complaints.
3. Ensure that your sending domain reflects the abuse email address in WHOIS as well as abuse.net. If you received an IP allocation from a RIR then add an abuse handle with appropriate contact information for your abuse helpdesk.
4. Ensure that the abuse mailbox does not have any kind of filtering. You want to make sure that you see all complaints and nothing treated as spam and moved to the junk folder.
5. Implement bounce address tag validation to accurately identify that the from address matches emails originating from your network.
6. Add abuse helpdesk information the in the header of your emails. Here is an example:
   

   Headers

7. You may wish to implement auto responders towards abuse complaints but ensure that you follow up on their request with a personal touch. Build a process around this so that the communication is effective.
8. Honor the request of the user complaint. If the user requests to not receive any future emails then acknowledge this and ensure they are put on a “do-not-email list”.
9. Build some metrics around abuse complaints so you can measure costs from a business perspective.

Implementing a responsive abuse helpdesk demonstrates you are not only a responsible sender but also listen to email recipients who do not want to receive unsolicited emails. You will often find that complainants are grateful that action was taken on their request.

As I explained in Content Mapping 101: Building Personas, content mapping allows you to customize an experience for different groups of readers or consumers. In lead nurturing campaigns, 64% of marketing and sales executives say they are unhappy with their nurturing program results, and that’s because one size does not fit all. Because prospects are people, and people are interested in different things, have different roles in companies, and have different ways of communicating their concerns the first step to mapping content is to identify and define your buyer personas.

Content Mapping 101: Questions

Once you’ve defined your personas, you should understand them intimately, you should have a greater sensitivity to the way they access information, approach conflict, address challenges in their daily and work life, and how they process information, or ask questions through a given process, essentially–how they solve problems.

In order to be on the same page with your prospects throughout the buying process, you’ll need to determine what kinds of questions they might ask, per stage of the process. The first step is to make sure that Sales and Marketing are in agreement on what that process actually looks like. We identified 6 key stages:

1. early  – no awareness of a problem
2. mid-early – awareness of some problem
3. late-early – inspired to solve a problem
4. mid – awareness of solution set
5. mid-late – understand solution needs
6. late – product selection

For each of these stages you should have a different goal. By determining the goals for each stage, you are one step closer to mapping the content per persona, per stage. For the early stages your goals may be; to make them aware there might be a problem, to educate them on why they should fix it, and what solutions are out there to help. For mid stages, your goals may be more focused on demonstrating your expertise or differentiation, while the final stage is usually validation.

Below is a simple chart I’ve created using excel (might not be the best tool for this, but it works for this demonstration). You’ll want to detail out a chart like this for each of your personas. Because the behavior and information will vary, you’ll want to make sure you are creating individual content paths which is done by creating separate maps for each persona.

Content Mapping to Persona Stages & Questions

In the first column you’ll see each I’ve labeled each of the 6 buying stages we agreed on, along with the corresponding goals. The column in the middle is the one you’ll want to focus on today.

For each of these stages, fill in the questions (start with three, there will likely be more) that each persona might ask at a given stage. In the early stage, a CEO for example, might ask “how do I get more revenue?” “how to I make my employees more successful?” or “how can I do better than the competition?” While at a later stage he might ask “how can I make chages easy, so my sales teams can adopt?”

Start with all possible questions (later you can edit out questions that might not really fit into the paths you are trying to design) your persona might ask. Since you’ve already defined your personas, you’ve probably completed the research that will allow you to determine these questions, either way, it’s best to interview some of your current customers, or sales people (or support) that might have great insights into your customer’s and prospect’s minds.

As we have been hearing a lot lately, buyers have changed, and the process of buying a selection has changed. They don’t move through the sales process in a linear fashion anymore, they go back and forth as they please. They ask questions of their peers (those are the questions you want to isolate) they ask for advice, the typical hierarchy within a company is evolving, and people are making purchases more at a departmental level. All of these insights should be considered as you determine these questions.

The next step in the process is going to be the actual content mapping, we will cover that next week, please let me know if you have any questions on everything we’ve covered so far.

To grow revenue, you need more leads. Since this is often urgent, it’s easy to use quick-fix lead generation methods which are not always the most effective. If we take a step back and look at the big picture, what’s the best way to approach lead generation? In this post I’ll cover 5 tips to improve the effectiveness of B2B Lead Generation. Please let me know whether you agree, and what your tips are!

1. Know Your Ideal Prospect

When people ask me for advice on lead generation, I always first ask: “who are you trying to reach?” You can answer that question in a number of ways:

1. Which country or region are they in?
2. Do they work for specific companies, within specific industries, or a certain size?
3. What are their job titles?
4. What are their job responsibilities? (this is usually more insightful than job title, but harder to find)

If you’re not sure, look at your existing customers, and identify the key decision makers and influencers. People like them are likely to be your ideal prospects.

2. Be Where Your Prospects Are

If you start a lead generation program, ask yourself where the ideal prospect learns about new developments in their space. Some industries – like technology – are primarily online. Others – like construction – are more focused on advertising, tradeshows and word-of-mouth. But it’s not just industry-specific: it can also depend on seniority, geography or personal preferences.

Once you know where your ideal prospects hear about new industry solutions, you can choose lead generation tactics that are most likely to reach them. Do prospects use the web to learn about new solutions? If yes, focus on inbound marketing. Are they into magazines or tradeshows? Or are they passive, waiting until they are approached by a solution provider? If yes, use outbound techniques.

In most cases, there is no single best way to find new leads. You’ll need a mix of tactics to generate the number of leads you need. And most likely, you will need to do some tests to optimize your marketing mix (see Tip 5).

3. Add Value, Avoid Quick Sells

You can’t assume that prospects are ready to buy when you approach them (in fact most are not). Pressured for quick results, some marketing teams send out aggressive campaigns to new leads, like “10% off before the end of the month.” But, this hardly ever works. If prospects don’t know you yet and you haven’t shown the value of your solution, why would they respond to a discount, demo, phone call or other high-commitment offer?

Start with a soft-sell, offering something that will help them in their jobs. Here are some examples. If you’re selling insulation materials to contractors, offer a guide with information on “how to build energy-friendly at the same cost.” If you’re selling loyalty programs to the Fortune 500, offer a list of “The top 10 loyalty programs of all time.”

With such offers you will increase response rates dramatically, and attract the right type of prospects. Just make sure you set up a lead nurturing program, so your company stays top of mind until the prospect has an active need for solutions like yours.

4. Make Sure You Get the Right Leads

B2B Lead Generation is just as much about quality as it is about quantity. Of course, you want lots of leads. But if none of the leads are turning into customers, you’ve attracted the wrong audience. If you have defined your Ideal Prospect (step 1), you can set up a lead scoring profile, to measure whether you’re attracting the right type of prospect.

Additionally, I recommend partnering with inside sales. They are contacting the leads, so they have a very good idea whether the leads are any good. Ask them for honest feedback, and use that to refine your lead generation programs.

5. Test & Measure

It is sometimes hard to know beforehand which lead generation tactics will work. I recommend keeping a detailed record of the cost of campaigns, the number of raw leads, and the number of qualified leads. Ideally, you should also keep track of how many sales opportunities you get for each campaign. In my post on Demand Generation Metrics I talk in more detail about measurement.

In some cases you can test different versions of a lead generation campaign: if you use pay-per-click, you can try multiple ad versions. For email blasts you can test multiple subject lines, and so on. Just make sure you have enough volume to get statistically significant results.

And finally, assign enough budget. Unfortunately you sometimes just have to spend the money, even though you’re not sure about the results. Personally, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on list rental, until it turned out that the cost per qualified lead was 5 times higher than any other campaign. Don’t be afraid to try something, as long as you adjust quickly when it doesn’t work.

What’s Your Take?

I hope these tips were useful for you. I’m curious to hear your opinion, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment below!