An interesting observation in a recent post by Ardath Albee on the “Selling To Big Companies Blog” caught my attention when she said “The bigger concern these days is being found at that opportune moment“. I couldn’t agree more.

We just returned a call to a customer who has contacted us since they have a requirement we might be able to help them with although the first time we got in touch with her company was well over 3 months ago when they didn’t have this requirement and were not ready to buy. Whats important to us is that when they did have a requirement, we were up there on their radar. You have to agree that no matter how many features or how extensive your product or service is, no one is going to buy it till they are are ready to buy and have a clear requirement. How do you know when a prospect is ready to buy and know that opportune moment? Well you can’t always know for sure but thats why lead nurturing is so important.

Ardath also says “If you want to pass muster during your buyers’ qualification process, your marketing communications and website content need to help them explore, analyze and understand the options available for solving the problems they have.” Similarly when it comes to tele-prospecting your message should coincide with this pain point and focus around creating awareness on how you maybe able to help solve this if and when your prospect does come across this problem. Once they are aware of your offering its a matter of keeping in touch from time to time, directing them to your communications and website through nurturing and they will find you at that opportune moment when they are seeking a resolution to the problem that you can help them with.

A recent comment by “insidesalesdotcom” on a previous post got us really thinking about how quick are we when it comes to responding to web leads and what the effect of time on this response are. The comment refers to a recent MIT study on lead response management times which concludes among several other interesting finds that ideally a web lead should be contacted or responded to within 5 minutes of it being created and received and the odds of contacting the lead are 10 times lower in the next 1 hour and even lower subsequently.

How many of us actually respond to web generated leads within the first 5 minutes, first one hour or first 24 hours even after its been created? The longer response times are delayed on web leads your chance of conversion reduces. While its easy to understand that some businesses may not have the bandwidth to keep such a close tab on every web lead that gets generated through downloads, form fills or otherwise, we have received web leads generated from such campaigns for qualification from companies which have let those leads sit for up to 6 months after they were generated. Needless to say that very few of those leads had any memory of downloading the white paper the filled a form to read and the effectiveness of that campaign was far less than what it could have been had those leads been contacted soon after they had filled up their details.

This study simply confirms the importance of having a strong process in place to route web leads to the appropriate person and respond to them as soon as possible to ensure that you make the most out of your web lead channels. Keep this in mind the next time you get an alert for a new web lead don’t let it sit!

The only way to build this volume of content and get noticed is by a constant and consistent effort to develop more online content and put it out there for prospects to find. The more coverage you have, the better your chances of being found. A few must dos to get noticed are:

-Blog as much as you can and as often as you can for your business blog. If you can’t find the time to blog everyday, find others who can do this for you whether other colleagues or professional bloggers

-Push out articles and news releases regularly. PR is a great source of content and is often searched

-Build out landing pages & micro-sites with very clear specific messages for different offerings and targeted at specific groups of prospects. Each of these should be focussed on a specific set of keywords that your relevant market would most likely search

-Make use of other rich media content like videos, interviews, podcasts and images as a lot of these rank higher in search results as compared to text based content.

-Spend time daily on activities like building links to your content, interacting and commenting on relevant blog posts and forums

They key is to do this consistently and build on this every day. Adding online content to create that big footprint of your business on the web is a full time job and needs a dedicated effort but can have great results in the long run as your business comes up on more search results. Keep that content coming!

]]> http://www.demandgenerationmachine.com/2008/06/25/b2b-marketing-online-how-to-get-noticed/feed/ -1 http://www.demandgenerationmachine.com/2008/06/19/b2b-lead-nurturing-pull-is-the-mantra/ http://www.demandgenerationmachine.com/2008/06/19/b2b-lead-nurturing-pull-is-the-mantra/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:37:20 +0000 neil http://www.demandgenerationmachine.com/?p=30

Pull based marketing is the mantra of our times and words like web forms, click throughs, page views and webcast sign-ups make their way to every marketing meeting. While all these tools are out there waiting to capture responses from prospects and feed them into a lead nurturing system how do you attach a priority or a level to each of the leads to determine how qualified they are or how ready they are?

There was an interesting presentation by Pete Jakob of IBM UK who in his presentation “Click to Cash” actually covers and activity based scoring system they use to score response activities by their ‘readiness’. This scoring system or priority ranking is also a great measure of which leads need to go through the lead nurturing process longer before they can be passed on to sales.

Email opens, click throughs and page views make up the bottom of the pack and usually require a longer cycle of nurturing before they qualify as opportunities for sales people. This is followed closely by library resources viewed, articles viewed, RSS feeds viewed and online polls taken which maybe only slightly more qualified than the first set. Downloaded whitepapers, surveys taken, discussion form fills and webcast sign-ups rank considerably higher and can be considered more qualified leads which can often go directly to the sales stage. Finally you have attended webcasts, recorded webinar downloads, viewed demos and requests to be contacted by a salesperson which rank the highest and among those which may not require much lead nurturing before they are qualified.

So a good exercise would be to identify your lead sources based on how ready are the leads you get from them and then design a lead nurture process for them based on where they fit so that these leads are directed correctly and you make the most of your pull marketing strategy.

Yes the recession has hit companies worldwide and everyone has felt the pinch. Time to cut costs, jobs, budgets and expenses. Lets start with the pay cuts. No bonuses or increments for the staff this year, in fact half will have to take pay cuts. No free lunches, no client entertainment budgets, we’ll cut IT spending by 50%, inventory by 30% and marketing and lead generation budgets by 50% as well.

Stop! Rewind! Can you repeat that last part? Did I hear cut marketing and lead generation budgets as well?

Now every marketing and sales team knows you need to generate X number of leads or prospects to have Y number of opportunities in the pipeline to close Z number of customers. In tough times when companies are holding back from buying it doesn’t mean that all prospects are going to stop buying altogether so you should stop selling, it only means they are going to be harder to come by. So if they are harder to come by within the same pool of leads then you need to increase Y and to do that you need to increase X. So to close the same number of customers you would target under good market conditions you would have to generate, comb through and qualify a larger volume of leads and generate more opportunities understanding that the rate of closure will be lower. So contrary to hacking away at the marketing budget like the others, step it up to ensure a better chance of being able to close the sales targets you set out to achieve.

How much should lead generation be stepped up? Work backwards. Determine where you stand, how far are you from your target closures and then accordingly decide how many more leads would you need to start off with to close the remaining. Its not rocket science. Its about generating sales.

There has been a lot of discussion on what will be the “in things” within B2B lead generation and what to look out for during the rest of 2008/2009. BtoB Magazine published an interesting article on “What is working well for lead gen”. Marketing leaders shared their views which ranged from lead management through well configured CRM systems, networking at dinner events to newsletters and blogs. There are several different takes from several different marketers on the trends within lead generation and while all of them depend on what works best for specific types of companies one thing is clear: Businesses are clearly moving a lot of focus towards online marketing.

The shift in focus from traditional outbound marketing, email marketing, tele prospecting, direct marketing towards online lead generation has seen marketing leaders allocate more resources towards blogging & online content development, landing pages & microsites, podcasts, white paper campaigns, SEO, SEM, online lead capture and nurturing and more. The whole process of how to generate more interest online, capture web leads through online form fills or downloads, optimize search results and create more awareness is clearly a common area of interest across different types of businesses this year and one that wont lose momentum any time soon.

Companies experimenting with social networks, advertising on twitter, capturing information on web visits, overhauling their websites are all going to be things to look out for over the next year. Its quite clear that the lead generation is shifting online and while there is no substitute to the cold call or the email right now it will be interesting to see how the shift towards online lead generation develops.

Handling expectations is a crucial aspect of any business and there is no exception when it comes to B2B lead generation and marketing support. Evaluating third part companies or vendors who can support or supplement your lead generation efforts to drive more sales can be a harrowing experience but a lot of this is really about matching requirements and expectations. As a marketer or sales manager here are a few things you should know while looking for support with your b2b lead generation activities:

• Decide which areas you could use a vendors support, what activities can they supplement and where you would like to focus your internal teams skills so that you use external support to maximize efficiency of your internal efforts. For example if your internal sales team spend more of their time looking for decision makers and contacts within accounts rather than making sales calls
• Outsourcing some of your lead generation activities or by engaging a vendor for services should mean you have less of an overhead and fits in seamlessly with your existing process. If outsourcing your requirement involves high involvement of your time and your internal teams time then its not very productive and defeats the purpose of engaging a vendor.
• Select a service or vendor that fits your requirements on an engagement model you are comfortable with. Support can be availed on resources or bandwidth that you need for your activities, time based pricing, performance based pricing (which is what we primarily offer at Better Inc), long term commitment basis, project basis and more. Factor in your budgets, your time lines, whether you are looking for a long term partnership or you just need extra bandwidth or support when things get hectic and you need in spike in lead generation efforts. Select a model that fits you.
• Outsourcing demand generation activities doesn’t mean giving away your entire process of generating good sales leads. Always test with a smaller project or a smaller commitment if you are unsure and gradually increase as you become confident that there is value in what you are paying for.

If your requirements are clear, expectations are right and you have located a company that could fit well with your requirements then outsourcing some of these activities can give you a great boost with meeting or exceeding your sales targets.

]]> http://www.demandgenerationmachine.com/2008/06/09/what-you-should-know-while-outsourcing-b2b-lead-generation/feed/ -1 http://www.demandgenerationmachine.com/2008/05/13/this-could-be-complicatedbut/ http://www.demandgenerationmachine.com/2008/05/13/this-could-be-complicatedbut/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 13:02:42 +0000 Neil http://www.better-marketing.com/blog/2008/05/13/this-could-be-complicatedbut/

Now if there is one thing peculiar to technology sales and marketing within the B2B space is that some technology can be complicated to explain. Trying to explain or pitch a solution that can scan and analyze living tissues while transferring data gathered in real time can be a mean task. So can explaining a tracking system which uses radio frequency technology to locate your company’s fixed assets and value the net worth of your capital investment. Whether you use emails, talk to a prospect over the phone or do a sales presentation of your technology for the first example you are most likely going to explain to them how your analysis algorithms enable rapid and objective quantitation of tissue samples and while this message may really contain the core benefit of your technology and value proposition it’s only relevant if your message is going to a technical decision maker who understands your technology and its benefits. Now a research head at a biotechnology lab may see the value powerful analysis algorithms but if you were talking to an investor who has privately funded this lab and you want to win his vote with that you are better off sticking to explaining him how your solution can save lives by delivering reports quicker than conventional systems and give your lab an edge over the others.

Technical details are important but provided they are reaching the right ears or eyes. While getting a message out to non technical decision makers simplify your message and offering. Now many will argue “how can we do that, our product or offering is technical in nature” or “there is no easy way to explain this to someone who does not understand technology”. Thats not entirely true and you know it. Technology is used to simplify things. The means to the end maybe hard to explain in a simple way but the end itself is always to simplify something or do something better using technology. In this particular example it was simply to provide a quick way of scanning and analyzing tissue samples quicker so patients health problems can be diagnosed quicker and more lives can be saved.

Having worked with technology companies who deal with some very specific requirements and having to pitch those products to both technical and non technical decision makers we know that technology can be complicated and not everyone may understand technical terms but if you start looking at what it helps you do rather than what it is, you will find it a lot simpler. A good technology sales person need not be the one who can pitch a complex product to the CIO or Director of Technology but one who can do that and just as easily explain it to his/her ten year old, the person behind the drive in counter at McDonalds or the guy walking his dog across the street. Complicated? Just simplify it!

Just as gatekeepers can be a tele-marketers nightmare, the spam filter can be the email marketers boogeyman. Millions of carefully crafted B2B email messages sit in the spam boxes of executives laptops and machines every single day and fail to fulfill its purpose. Most of you would agree that spam filters are a necessary evil and personally I don’t believe I would be able to live without one. With the volume of junk emails that pour into our inboxes everyday it only makes sense that these spam filters tighten the criteria and handle incoming mail more strictly even if it means that one or two legitimate emails are sacrificed in the process.

B2B email marketing campaigns still play a crucial role in B2B lead generation strategies and that is not going to change anytime soon. They can be expensive, require careful consideration and thought to execute well and can be disappointing when you’ve done everything right and the only reader was a piece of software code which scanned your email, identified a few trends and confined your email to that horrible place marked “SPAM or JUNK“. The only thing email marketers can do to get their message across is understand the reasons their emails are being filtered out and keep a step ahead by making sure they do everything to avoid being filtered.

Some tips to evade that junkmail folder :-

-Make sure your emails are sent from an authorized service provider or a server that has not been black listed

- Avoid using words or language patterns that are typically found in bulk-mail or common spam

- Choose your subject line wisely and make sure it does not come across like an unsolicited advertisement or a subject line typically used in bulk mail

- Avoid too many links within the email body and use them only where required. Links are often frowned on by most spam filters

-Avoid attachments as far as possible since attachments are the amongst the first things a filter would scan for a s a virus threat

-Stick to using plain text as much as possible while drafting emails, HTML emails are more likely to get filtered

-Avoid adding more than 2-3 emails in the BCC section, large number of BCC’d mails are trademarks of spammers

-Here is a great list of words “not to use” in your emails “Click Here”

- Test your final draft, send it to people you know, use a tool like Content Checker to do a dry run and if its still being filtered take another crack at the draft

Try some of these tips the next time you send out an email campaign. The only way to stay ahead of those pesky spam filters is understand how they work and then work around them. Happy marketing!

The thing about closing deals and getting contracts signed in B2B selling is no matter how good you are, there can always be unpredictability and its not over till its over. How many times have you been so sure that a deal was going to close when the day before the contract was to be signed, the company who was buying got acquired, the person whom you negotiated with moved to another company or decided they may have to wait since something has just come up which may change things?

Just when you think you are done with your sales quota just before the end of the quarter and you think its time to take it easy now and all of a sudden something changes, the pipeline of closures that were supposed to fall through don’t and you are left high and dry without much time left to set things right. Alright I admit that may sound a bit dramatic but closure is not always predictable and doesn’t always happen the way you expect them or when you expect them and its always better to be conservative with expectations and end up closing a bit above the goal rather than falling short. Some things you can do to avoid disappointment are:

- Set expectations right while setting your goal and plan for the worst

- Don’t count your chickens before they hatch or rather before they sign the dotted line that way you know exactly where you stand at any point in time and are not looking at what the numbers might be should everything work out perfectly and every prospect convert into sales

- Always maintain a larger pipeline of qualified warm leads than you need so you have prospects to fall back on if some of those you are expecting will convert don’t work out

- Pursue closures aggressively right from the start and don’t wait till the end of the month or for just before a sales target deadline to push for closures

Its not over till the fat lady sings …. or the sale is complete.