Demand generation isn’t as straightforward as one would think. When it comes to B2B buyers especially, the process of generating and maintaining interest in your products is a delicate dance. Make the wrong move, and you risk upsetting your dance partner. Here are two demand generation tactics that can backfire, and two tactics that work.

Demand generation: what doesn’t work

1.Generic emails, email blasts, and marketing pitches that aren’t directly relevant to your prospects’ needs. In the era of the Internet and of social media, B2B buyers are highly educated and very choosy. They expect a relationship and they expect value. They already gathered the basic info they need via the Internet. Treat them with respect, add value to their search process and address their pain points, and they’ll gradually come to respect you and trust you. Blast them with generic emails touting the features of your product, and they will simply opt out. Their inbox is already out of control. The last thing they need is another annoying sales pitch.

2. Cold calls. Cold calls used to work to some extent when sales people had all the info. The cold call would serve to educate the prospect about your product. Nowadays, the info is out there on the Internet. A cold call that introduces your product without adding value is downright irritating because it wastes your prospects’ time. Of course, it wastes your sales reps’ time too.

Demand generation: what works

1. Personalized emails that address your prospect’s specific concerns and add value in the form of targeted, relevant content. Your prospects obviously have a pain point (otherwise they wouldn’t be on the market looking for a solution) and will welcome quality information that addresses that pain point. But the information has to be current, relevant and add value beyond what’s available via search.

2. Real-time follow-up with qualified prospects. A prospect that clicked on a link in a recent email you sent them and just spent seven full minutes on your site reading about your product, downloading a white paper and perusing your FAQ section has just demonstrated a real interest in your solution. Having a sales rep contact them as soon as they leave your site, armed with the knowledge that they are indeed interested and that they have a specific solution they are looking for, is exactly what the sales organization is supposed to do: zero in on the most qualified prospects and contact them at the right time, with the right info.

NOT calling that prospect is a huge waste of opportunity and practically pushing them into the arms of your competitors.

A recent post to the LinkedIn Lead Generation and Nurturing group by Beau Bratton raised the question “How do you think your contact rates would differ, if you called a lead in 15 seconds instead of 5 minutes? What about after the first hour?”

This is a question that I often get asked by customers.  The eTrigue real-time lead alerts that come via email when a prospective customer is on your web site open a whole new dimension to the sales process.  It’s more than just will I connect? It’s also should I connect and if so how far should I go?

For Beau’s question, how would contact rates differ;  there have been multiple studies that find you are typically ten times more likely to contact a prospect or customer in the first half hour of their engagement of your website. This is one of the primary reasons that Intelligent Demand Generation or Marketing Automation solutions like eTrigue make sales teams so successful. A real time email lead alert with the visitors contact information, history of their overall engagement with your company, as well as the current visit details including all of the pages visited today will arm your sales team with the information to have an informed call.

Given that your company will be top of mind with a visitor; your sales team is also much more likely to have a positive engagement which will improve the likely hood that your rep can effective qualify each visitor.
To the second question, should I make contact, how quickly and how far should I go? it depends? I know I know… that’s a big help.  This question was recently addressed in a recent blog by Mike Damphousse on his Smashmouth Marketing blog: Web Leads – Pounce, Pause, Nurture or Wait? http://ww2.etrigue.com/lp/BLOG/B2damphousse.html

You can read more there, but I think that the one thing that is often overlooked… The relationship with a new prospect is a delicate dance.  Typically, a series of interactions that build the relationship by continually offering value combined with additional qualifying works best. Having the opportunity to interact with highly successful sales teams on a daily basis, my suggestion is to POUNCE! But Pounce lightly. If you make the call, you have started the relationship. You have a 10X better connect rate so that saves precious sales time and reduces overall cost of sales.  In addition if that call is an introduction, a quick question to see your offering is in their sightline and finally a close with a promise to follow up with some quality information to help them make a better decision regarding your product you have had a successful call.

They know who you are, you have given them something the helps them to build a relationship, and finally you understand their timing. This is the most important aspect. How aggressive you are all depends on timing. If they were looking at you to justify the purchase of another product, you had better get in there. If they are three months out, put them on a moderate drip program, and if they are way out, nurture slowly and follow up with a periodic qualification call.

Here is a link to an eTrigue lead alert. Are you arming your sales team with the tools they need to be successful?
http://ww2.etrigue.com/lp/BLOG/b2alerts.html

Earlier this week I had the same conversation I have with prospective customers over and over again:  “We have a lack of cooperation between the sales and marketing teams — how do we align their initiatives to create a sales funnel where both organizations contribute and are accountable for driving revenue?”

It’s comments like these that drive home the point that over 80% of B2B organizations acknowledge a lack of synergy between the sales and marketing organizations according to a just released study from the Aberdeen Group:  “Lead Lifecycle Management: Building a Pipeline that Never Leaks.”

This is one area where the implementation of the right marketing automation tool can actually force sales and marketing to work together and focus battling the competition and not each other.  The research showed that Best in Class (BIC) organizations were almost twice as likely to use lead management tools compared to Laggard organizations.

And from my perspective, when it really comes down to it, Lead Lifecycle Management is all about more sales via better lead management through automation! The need to increase sales is the driver and the solution is automating the lead generation process.

The report found that top pressures driving change in demand generation processes are: Increase top line revenue (62%); increase lead to sales rate (55%); and increase the return on marketing investments (30%).
With regard to automation,  the top two strategies being employed by companies to improve the bottom line are segmentation for more effective targeting and the development of formal nurturing programs. Aberdeen’s research also found that BIC organizations are more likely to embrace strategies to segment and target more effectively (60%) and develop formal nurturing programs (45%)as compared to Lagers with (43%) and (35%) respectively.

Aberdeen provides some real world guidance to help your organization develop more effective lead management programs. Bottom line:  companies need to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles and increase revenue.  Neither marketing nor sales can do this alone.

Across the board, the economic slowdown is taking a toll and many businesses are in survival mode.  Sales and marketing teams are working over time to decrease the sales cycle and increase sales.

In a new article on destinationcrm.com, eTrigue’s Jim Meyer suggests seven timely tips on accelerating sales and making the most out of resources in a down economy.

In this article, Meyer gives quick and easy, back-to-basics ideas to help accelerate lead flow and sales without breaking the budget. These tips are easy to execute, don’t incur costs and require very little time. The article offers tips on taking demand generation to the next level — ensuring a measure of success that exceeds mere survival.

In addition, it’s worth taking a look at DemandGenReport.com’s article by Amanda Ferrante: “New Benchmark Study Showcases Payoffs from Lead Generation.”  Ferrante points to a new study on the critical role lead generation plays in the sales success of BtoB companies.  The study shows that companies aligning sales and marketing with lead generation outpace their competitors.

Tighter budgets and fewer bodies — that doesn’t have to be a recipe for less-effective marketing. Faced with the challenge of doing more with less, automating your marketing efforts can be the great equalizer. The process begins with a demand-generation system that efficiently customizes, tracks, nurtures, and identifies interested prospects over time, easily providing the marketing and sales teams the information needed to help close sales faster.

“Nearly 63 percent of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs and point to poor feedback from sales regarding the status of leads as a prime culprit, according to a new study by the Sales Lead Management Association,” reports Christopher Hosford, senior reporter BtoB magazine.

The study also notes that marketers are also to blame with 56 percent of respondents stating they do not qualify their leads before sending them to sales; And you wonder why sales doesn’t trust marketing’s judgment?

We have always purported that determining who is real and where they are in the buying process is essential in determining whether or not a prospect is ready for interaction from your sales team. Our recent webinar hosted by Andrew Gaffney, Editor of the DemandGen report, “Real Revenue Gains with Marketing Automation” showed how this plays out in the real world with real companies:

• 2-4x higher Lead Conversion Rates for companies using lead scoring

• 181% higher average close rates from the use of Marketing Automation systems

• Bid-Win ratios 150% higher for organizations that deliver real-time lead alerts to sales

• Sales teams with database filtering tools reported 200% higher average revenue growth in 2008

Automation has helped B2B and B2C companies alike automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile and timing. With multiple scoring techniques to choose from, marketing/sales teams can fully understand how each prospect moved to the front of the line. Custom scores based on virtually any single or compound criteria also proved valuable in identifying unique buying behaviors.

And while Marketing Automation vendors , including eTrigue, continue to promote the importance of aligned marketing and sales teams. According to the study, “too many of these types of organizations operate within isolated silos and have not found a way to align the objectives of sales and marketing.”

Please visit the following link to read Hosford’s article:

Study: Small companies can’t track campaign ROI, fail to qualify leads

]]> http://www.etrigue.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/automated-lead-scoring/feed/ 0 http://www.etrigue.com/blog/index.php/2009/05/winning-with-marketing-ops/ http://www.etrigue.com/blog/index.php/2009/05/winning-with-marketing-ops/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 20:48:46 +0000 jmeyer http://www.etrigue.com/blog/?p=76

An interesting article by Andrew Gaffney of the DemandGen Report “New ROI Study Shows Firms with Ops Teams, Metrics Outgrowing Competitors” highlighted a new study by the Lenskold Group / MarketSphere that showed that firms with Marketing Ops are outpacing their competitors 52% to 46%.

“We consistently see that the high performing marketing organizations tend to have advantages in marketing operations, strengths in generating insights, and ROI discipline,” says report author Jim Lenskold, president of Manasquan, NJ-based consultancy the Lenskold Group. “The economic pressures are increasing the demand for measurements and ROI, and should motivate marketers to improve their capabilities. It is a critical time to understand and manage marketing effectiveness. And as marketers experience the opportunity to improve marketing effectiveness with better insight, we would expect those practices to hold steady and continue on beyond the economic recovery.”

This is a trend we have seen for some time. Firms are measuring both their marketing programs and marketing organizations more than ever before. The ROI of marketing spend and the volume of sales-qualified-leads delivered to sales are now common measures for compensating marketing executives.

Measurement is just one aspect of the general shift marketing organizations are making as they begin to own the upper portion of the sales funnel. “A more operational approach to the marketing function makes organizations more accountable and more efficient.” According to Mark Lewis, Director of Marketing at Fujitsu Computer Products. “Just as Sales organizations have added Ops support to better understand and manage the sales cycle, marketing organizations need to measure their performance as well.”

And while Marketing departments are becoming more analytical, don’t expect the science of marketing to render the art of marketing obsolete. As Dan Pink describes in his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, the right side of the brain skills such as creativity, empathy, contextual, and big picture thinking are going to become increasingly important as we outsource and automate marketing.

Is your marketing organization measuring its way to success?

While this may sound a bit self serving given companies who provide Marketing Automation platforms like eTrigue benefit from customers with large prospect lists, it may be time to re-think your email list strategy.

Our customers, who cover a wide variety of industries have traditionally followed similar strategies—build a list that targets the budget holder, typically the decision maker, and nurture until sales ready. This may be one or two different contacts at a company.

What worked in the past may not be appropriate today. The current recession, albeit over-hyped, is being reflected in how companies evaluate spending decisions. In fact, the financial crisis spooked many companies into what is likely to be a long-term change in both spending habits and their decision making process. We are seeing dramatic results from smart marketers adapting to this change by casting a much wider net at each target company. Where a single individual may have been responsible for vendor or product selections that process now may include two, three, or more to make a buying decision. These extra eyes on the spending process requires company-wide nurturing to assure that once the buying process starts, it moves rapidly. A group decision making process makes it harder than ever to identify who has influence, so broader marketing strategies are appropriate. This in turn means larger lists and an often requires an automated lead nurturing process.

Marketing automation allows companies to appropriately target each decision maker based on their particular concerns. A CEO may be interested in revenue and cost, the CFO in cost only while Sales is interested solely in revenue. Using a batch and blast solution that doesn’t let you effectively segment and drive recipients to the appropriate content lessens the likelihood of a sale or best case extends the sales cycle.

Beginning with a message that is typically appropriate for a given title is a good place to start. Following up with a second email based on content viewing habits that tell the whole story rather than title helps you focus on specific pain points. Behavior and motivations change in tough times. Revenue may not be a concern of the CEO and the moment; he may be solely focused on cutting costs. If you continue to bombard him with revenue messages, you’re less likely to get his attention. Well crafted emails and content targeted appropriately can be the difference between winning and losing a customer.

The world has gone on-line, but many companies haven’t grasped the fact that for most of your potential customers, the front door to your company isn’t the one you walk in every morning–it’s your web site! You wouldn’t ignore a customer to your physical office, so why do companies fail to engage with potential customers that come to through their online front door?

I initiated this discussion at dinner the other night. A…B…C… Always Be Closing… I asked how many of the seven companies represented were actually tracking web activity down to the email address of the visitor. Only two of seven were using an automated marketing solution to track prospects and automatically follow up. They were instantly the best salesperson a guy could have. Even better, one was already a customer using eTrigue.

And while we take an educational approach to the sales process here at eTrigue, these marketing automation “converts” took a completely different approach. FEAR! “If you’re not tracking who is on your website and following up immediately, your competition is going to win the business” “No ifs ands or buts about it” It was actually fun to watch as these two street wise marketers, after a couple of drinks, school their colleges on the realities of marketing in down economy.

It gave me a new perspective on the nature of our current economy and how the strong/smart will survive. It’s becoming a competitive imperative that companies understand who is walking in their on-line front door, and more importantly following up with relevant communications. 85% of all B2B buyers use the web to research their buying decision. If your competition is reaching out to their saleable market with emails and tracking every move the recipient makes on their website and you’re not… Well, yes you do stand a good chance of losing. They know more about that prospective customer and are likely calling them within minutes of their web activity. The odds of contacting a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after a prospect engages with your company drops by 100 times according to an MIT lead management study.

Are you losing customers by not engaging with them as they tour your web site?

I had the opportunity to attend the Salesforce.com, Cloudforce event last week.  Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff was in tune as usual with all the energy of a first-grader after a second bowl of Count Chocula.  And while Mark’s keynote carried the standard theme’s;  Software as a Service,  10th anniversary,  and metrics of customer success with Salesforce:

• 52% increase in leads
• 34% boost in revenues
• 23% decrease in service and support costs
• 30% improvement in customer retention
• 80% reduction in application development effort

What was most interesting was the change in the tone of the attendees.  Fast forward six months from Dreamforce when cloud computing was defiantly a known entity but not a fait accompli for most visitors to today where it was a matter of fact: Customers, attendees and the press talked as if every application was running in the cloud and organizations no longer bothered with buying servers, software installs and service contracts. 

Granted the Cloudforce events are a microcosm, but unlike many technologies that take years to gestate and then even longer to move to emotional acceptance, the vision of centralized computing is back in vogue…. And for good reason.  As Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce’s senior director of product marketing put it “The vision of the company from Day 1 has been that it should be as easy to use a business application as it is easy to buy a book on Amazon.com”

Probably one of the most exciting things to me is seeing someone achieve success with your company’s product. It doesn’t really matter what type of product or even how it’s used. It makes you proud of your team, your partners and of course your customer. Delivering on your promise and seeing measurable results makes anyone feel like a proud papa.

And while we see customer success on a daily basis it is especially rewarding when it is also recognized by others. This week, Cisco Systems was awarded the DemandGen Report’s Sales & Marketing Alignment Award for the Enterprise category. See Story

Linda Fassig-Knauer, Cisco marketing programs manager in the US Theater, credited 3Marketeers and the eTrigue solution for helping Cisco increase appointments with SMB prospects by 25%

“eTrigue Intelligent lead scoring helps us determine which technology or offer the prospect is most interested in discussing with our sales teams and enables us to funnel those leads in a timely manner to our call center, who ultimately sends to our channel partners,” says Fassig-Knauer, “The information in eTrigue lead scoring gives us three times the information so our call center agents are much more prepared before a call. It also greatly increases the number of prospects we can identify as being interested in a solution because the system does not require the customer/prospect to register.”

While the tool is important, kudos obviously go to Linda and her team at Cisco and The 3Marketeers for successfully developing and executing a successful closed demand generation program. And of course, thanks to the folks at the DemandGen Report for recognizing success and the tools that help make things happen!

“The first tool I step on turned into a weapon” –Robert Frost