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If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

How to Write Good: 12 tongue-in-cheek rules and a proofreading service

It will take you less than 10 minutes to complete, and you will automatically qualify to receive a free executive summary of the study results.

If your answer is yes to any of the following questions, you will want to participate in this important B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study.

• Are you interested in knowing how your company’s programs and results compare to other companies’ B2B lead generation efforts?
• Do you want to know if your company is investing enough in its B2B lead generation?
• Do you need to know how your lead generation, follow up, nurturing and qualification processes compare to those of other B2B companies?
• Do you want to know if your B2B lead generation results are better or worse than average?
• Are you wondering about the B2B lead generation media and tactics that will get you the best results?

Please take the online survey here.

Need more information first? Please visit www.lead-generation-benchmarks.com

Do you know others who are responsible for B2B lead generation?

Thanks in advance for encouraging your peers at other companies to take the online survey too. The more people who participate in the study, the better the results will be. With this in mind, please consider:

• Tweeting "B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Survey: Takes 10-minutes or less & you get a free exec summary - http://bit.ly/1Gpme" 
• Mentioning this B2B Lead Generation Study, and providing the link to the survey at http://bit.ly/1Gpme, in your own blog or e-newsletter
• Using the "Share This" link below

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study 2009

Of course branding and awareness are also roles that can be played effectively by B2B marketing, but from my point of view these are only supporting roles—secondary to the primary objective of helping drive sales.

In many, if not most, of the companies that sell their products or services to other companies, driving their sales with marketing is best accomplished by using one-to-many marketing communications tactics: To be found by or to proactively contact prospective customers; to deliver key messages and offers to them; to motivating these prospects to become sales leads by their responding, providing information or taking actions that identify them as representing real sales opportunities that the company’s salespeople, reps, resellers and distributors can turn into closed sales and revenue for the company.

Other B2B companies try to skip the leads-to-salespeople-to-sales process, instead encouraging prospective customers to initiate purchases themselves from print or online catalogs and/or via order forms, e-commerce sites, phone calls or purchase orders. Yet many of these same companies eventually come to the realization that not every prospective customer is ready to buy now. So they grudgingly develop programs to proactively follow up with and try to influence these longer-term prospects to move forward in their buying process and to consider the company’s products or services as they approach their purchase decision points.

What’s all this have to do with social media?

I have been working hard, for at least a couple of years now, trying to use social media to measurably move the needle in regard to generating B2B sales leads and driving B2B sales.

I’m sad to say I’m not seeing anything beyond anecdotal results, either from my own extensive social marketing efforts, or from those of my clients.

So I’ve also been searching for evidence of leads and sales from social marketing everywhere I can.

However, the only clear cases of success I have been able to find have involved the people who sell products or services to others who are practicing or interested in learning more about social marketing—preaching to the choir, so of speak.

Examples that come to mind include David Meerman Scott, speaker and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly, and Joel Comm, the Internet entrepreneur, speaker and author of Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time.

Some new studies that start to quantify the impact of social media on generating leads and driving sales have been recently released.

A blog post I wrote a few weeks back, How does social media rank in influencing business technology purchase decisions? talks about a recent Forrester Research study that looks at social media’s influence on the business technology buyer. Unfortunately, it does little to quantify any actual leads or sales results.

Michael Stelzner, best known as the author of Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, recently released his report on the results of a survey on social media marketing that he’s using as bait for the Social Media Success Summit he’s producing in May. Although “Generated qualified leads” and “Helped me close business” were listed as benefits seen by the users of social media, they were near the bottom of the list of eight choices, and no information was given about actual numbers of leads, sales or ROI. I think it is interesting to note that most of those who said social media helped them generate leads and close business have been active in social networking for years and/or are investing more than 16 hours a week in it. By the way, some of the results in Stelzner’s report may be biased, considering that only social media was used to promote survey participation, starting with a tweet on Twitter that got retweeted by others and was seen by Twitterers’ networks on other social media including Facebook and LinkedIn.

Regarding social media’s impact on B2B sales, last night I read a briefing from B2B sales guru Dave Stein’s company, ES Research Group, called Do The New Social Media Enable B2B Selling? about a survey they recently conducted. It reported that a large majority of the nearly 400 B2B sales professionals who participated in the survey said they are using LinkedIn and approximately a third of them said it has helped them win sales sometimes or often. Not bad! However, only a small number of them reported using any other social media, and only a small percentage of those users reported that those media helped them win sales.

Marketers, please keep in mind that these LinkedIn users are B2B sales professionals, leveraging it to make one-to-one sales contacts—not marketers trying to use LinkedIn as a one-to-many lead-generation tactic. Again, so far, I haven’t found any B2B marketers who have been able to share concrete numbers regarding leads and sales from their marketing via social media on LinkedIn or anywhere else.

A side note: To learn more about how the B2B sales industry is leveraging social media, software and the Internet, consider attending Sales 2.0 in Boston on May 21.

My quest for quantitative proof that social media is an effective tactic for generating B2B leads and sales continues.

I remember a mentor of mine once saying, “Mac, don’t confuse activity with productivity.” I think that thought applies to social media. Sure it’s getting a lot of activity, but is it really productive at meeting what I believe should be the primary objectives of B2B marketing—driving leads and sales?

I’m hopeful that at least a few—among the thousands of B2B marketers who have jumped on board the social media bandwagon—will soon be able to prove, through quantitative data rather than one or two anecdotes, that their social media marketing programs are helping drive more leads and sales for their companies.

In the meantime, I’m going to consider marketing through social media to be a tactic more appropriate for branding and awareness, and think of LinkedIn as an effective sales tool for B2B salespeople rather than B2B marketers.

But when my primary objectives are generating leads and driving sales—more difficult than ever in today’s challenging business environment—I’ll skip social media and instead use some of the many other B2B marketing tactics that already are proven to be productive.

Marketers: What measurable results are you gettting from using social media to generate B2B leads and sales?

If you have any quantitative data that shows the effectiveness of social media as a tactic for generating B2B leads and driving B2B sales, please tell us more about it.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

Is social media effective for B2B lead generation?

After you have identified the right companies and contacts to target with your B2B lead generation efforts, you need to determine the best ways to reach them.

The first step is to determine to what media your target audience is exposed to. For example, which magazines do they read? This may include national business or industry magazines as well as regional and local trade journals.

In addition, you should think about the

• Professional associations to which your target contacts belong.
• Conferences and tradeshows they attend.
• Newsletters (print or electronic) to which they subscribe.
• Websites they visit for professional or produdt information.
• Radio and television programming that attracts them.

Each of these, potentially, is the source of a mailing list, website, conference or publication that would be appropriate for reaching your target contacts.

Another way to reach your target companies and contacts is through their professional advisors. Accountants, attorneys, consultants and other advisors often provide recommendations on purchases relevant to their spheres of knowledge. In other words, they influence buyers. For example, a decision-maker in search of a commercial printer might ask his/her graphic design firm for recommendations. Therefore, your marketing plan should have some provision for articulating your competitive advantage to key these influencers.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

Marketing-for-Leads Guide: Step 10 - How will you reach the best prospects?

• Roughly 44 percent said their marketing spend for 2009 will be reduced;
• The hardest hit marketing budget categories are advertising (down 17 percent) and events (down 12 percent);
• 25 percent said marketing spending will remain about the same as in 2008.

However it appears that some B-to-B marketing initiatives are getting more funding rather than less.

“We estimate B-to-B companies are doubling their number of pipeline acceleration programs instead of focusing on new leads,” says Alden Cushman, SiriusDecisions’ research director and benchmarking analyst.>

In my opinion B-to-B marketers traditionally spent too much of their marketing budget on lead generation, but spent too little on lead development. I’m glad to see that this may be changing.

What’s happening at your company?

• Has your marketing budget been cut? If so, what got cut?
• If you are one of the minority of B-to-B marketers with a larger marketing budget, what are you spending the extra money on?
• Has your company shifted its marketing spending from lead generation to lead development?

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

Benchmarking shows B-to-B marketing budgets have been cut by roughly 44 percent, but spending on pipeline acceleration programs has doubled

Determine who has the business problem your products and services address, both at the level of companies and at the level of contacts within those companies.

Create three lists that rank your current customers using three criteria:

• Gross revenue. Place the largest companies at the top of the list and the smallest at the bottom.
• Profitability. List from “most profitable” to “least profitable.” Keep in mind that the most profitable are not necessarily those with the most gross revenue.
• Fit. Which companies represent the best fit for what you are selling? This ranking is more subjective than the first two. It identifies the companies you know well, those with business you understand, those that are fun to work with, those you understand best and those with which you have—or could have-a great working relationship. Rank these companies in order, descending from the best fit.

Your ideal customers are those that are at, or near, the top of all three lists. While reviewing your existing customers, consider the following questions:

• What industries are they in?
• Are they small, medium or large businesses?
• Where are they located geographically?
• What is their Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code?
• What are the titles or job functions of their decision-makers?

This information will help you find similar companies and decision-makers to target with your marketing efforts. Determine what is unique about them so that you can find more like them.

In addition to looking at your current customer base, review your company’s internal expertise and credentials to determine likely prospects for your solutions. If your company is a start-up and has no existing customers, you can leverage your own past experience and that of your people. Think about the kinds of companies you and your team have had success with in previous jobs.

You also can educate yourself on a vertical market (i.e., a particular industry, such as residential or commercial construction, banking, distribution or the retail clothing business), weaving the industry’s concerns and buzzwords into your marketing-for-leads materials. This will suggest that you do understand the market and its needs. However, be prepared to answer the question, “Who else in my industry have you served?” It is bound to come up.

If you don’t believe you can successfully sell into vertical markets, consider horizontal markets. These are markets that cross industry lines. To articulate a horizontal-marketing strategy, you could say, for example, “We are the inventory-control experts for small- to medium-sized businesses.”

Geographic markets are another possibility. You could combine horizontal and geographic marketing with a statement such as: “We are right here in Akron, Ohio, and we are uniquely qualified to help you with your inventory-control needs.”

Although theoretically every company in every business may benefit from your solution, you can’t afford to try to be everything to everyone. You must pick the companies with which you are likely to have the best success and the individuals within those companies who are in the best position to recommend or buy your products or services.

If you'd like to learn more, please use my Contact Form, call me directly at 1-800-944-5553 or +1-401-294-7730, or check out the marketing consulting or speaking and training pages on my website.

Marketing-for-Leads Guide: Step 9 - Who are your best prospects?