• Demand Generation Machine





  • B2B Sales Lead Nurturing

    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.

     

    Speed & Web Generated Leads

    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!

     

    B2B Online Marketing: How To Get Noticed

    Its unanimous amongst marketers that good web content along with strong SEO is a top priority in 2008 and its all about getting noticed or found by prospects. The more content your business can generate online in terms of blog posts, articles, PR, news releases, document downloads, landing pages & micro sites the more visibility you have to those who searching the web. The number of links and pages you have a presence on has a direct impact on how big a footprint your business on the web and in turn how many eye balls you have managed to capture with your messages.

    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!

     

    B2B Lead Nurturing Pull or Push?

    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.

     

    Why revert to B2B Lead Generation in Times of Recession

    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.

     
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    • Hi folks, welcome to our blog where we discuss smart b2b demand creation strategies and highlight our experiences in delivering expert lead generation services to global technology companies at Better, Inc.
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