Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

We’ve all seen it happen: at the end of the quarter, realizing that the quarterly goal has not been met, companies scramble to quickly close a few more deals. This is often done by spending on short-term lead generation, including cold-calling campaigns and trying to quickly close immature leads before the quarter’s end.

Needless to say, this is the most expensive and inefficient method of lead generation and usually drains budgets from subsequent quarters and campaigns. More importantly, these short-term initiatives typically fail because accelerating the buying process can’t be done at the very last minute and without any prior planning.

In order to help B2B organizations end the stress and expense of the “end of quarter scramble,” we have developed the following four steps to help your organization build a more predictable and sustainable pipeline from quarter to quarter.

1. Narrow your target audience

To stabilize your pipeline, you should actually narrow rather than expand your target audience. Through the use of segmentation tools, successful B2B companies are defining and targeting their marketing databases to focus on the sectors that are converting into legitimate sales activity. By narrowing their focus, these companies are able to personalize their messaging and develop content and campaigns more relevant to their target audiences, resulting in shorter sales cycles.

2. Help Sales Step on the Accelerator

A better understanding of buyer needs and an automated stream of relevant messaging to targeted buyers should accelerate the sales process. And this in turn would reduce the amount of deals stuck in the pipeline.

Case studies have consistently shown that unclogging deals and reducing funnel leaks makes companies less reliant on sales teams having to save the quarter with eleventh-hour deals.

Many B2B companies are supplementing marketing automation systems with sales acceleration tools. These tools enable reps to focus on deals in the pipeline with personalized attention via trackable emails and real-time actions. They not only allow sales reps to track ongoing activity and history, they also provide real-time alerts and triggers to allow reps to focus on the prospects that are active and ready to buy.

3. Converting Cold Calling to Warm Calling

Instead of pouring money into “dialing for dollars,” more B2B companies are shifting their teleprospecting investments to qualifying and nurturing prospects that have already shown some interest in their solution.

By focusing on prospects that have had some prior contact, inside sales or call centers typically have much higher success rates in creating opportunities for the sales team because they are spending time on “warm calling” rather than cold calling.

Sales intelligence tools not only allow sales reps to do “pinpoint prospecting,” they also help to identify “trigger events,” which can drive short-term sales opportunities. Real-time lead alerts can increase connect rates by up to 10X. Reps armed with website visit history, campaign and detailed prospect information have more confidence and more information to effectively engage with interested prospects. The result is a much higher success rate then traditional, often futile, cold calling.

4. Start Planning Two Quarters Out

Automation and sales intelligence tools can help accelerate the flow of qualified leads into the pipeline, but the fundamental shift for many companies is improving the long-term visibility of pending deals.

One of the first steps to achieving longer-term visibility is measuring the average conversion rates for prospects through different stages of the sales funnel. That means measuring from initial inquiries to qualified leads and then from opportunities to closed deals.

While measuring the flow from inquiry to close is an important step, the hard work of improving the conversion rates at each stage is heavily dependent on a company’s lead nurturing programs. Lead nurturing programs help increase the volume of sales-ready leads in the pipeline. They allow the sales team to close out the quarter by focusing on the truly hot leads that are likely to buy, while marketing continues to warm up those longer-term opportunities that need education.

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Obviously, it’s impossible to ensure that all sales reps will start reaching quota, but implementing these tools and processes will have a significant impact on shortening sales cycles and improving win rates. With these in place, the quarterly close can be a smoother and more predictable process rather than a late-night panic.

Saying that “content is king” has become such a cliché – so much so that I went back and forth on whether I should even say it here. I decided to go ahead, because no one who does marketing can afford NOT to discuss the importance of creating useful, rich, varied content.

Content is king in B2B marketing because long buying cycles mean that rather than pouncing, marketers need to patiently build relationships with prospects. A single inquiry does not turn someone into a sales-ready lead, and sending those leads to Sales would be a mistake. The need to patiently build relationships with prospects until they are sales-ready, a process that can easily take months, brings us to the perhaps overused, but in no way overhyped, concept of “content is king.”

Content is king for marketers because building those relationships with prospects is best achieved by being useful to them and providing them with timely, relevant information. Whether you provide that information that sustains the relationship through social media, white papers on your website or email – ideally a combination of those – the information needs to be of high quality.

“High quality” means, of course, well-written, but it goes beyond that. High quality content is content that is relevant to the audience you serve, and content that is timely for that audience. Ideally, you want to send an email to a prospect that addresses a major pain point for that prospect, and you want to send it at the right time.

While your marketing organization would need to create, or outsource the creation of, great content, making sure it is delivered in a relevant and timely manner can be achieved by automating your lead management process. Marketing automation and sales acceleration tools provide your marketing and sales organizations with the information about prospects that enables them to deliver that great content to the right person, at the right time.

In a market where B2B buyers report that they were the ones who have found the vendor, make sure they find YOU by creating and distributing consistent, constant, high-quality content that keeps your company top of mind when it’s time to make a buying decision.

We all know that the rules of demand generation marketing have changed. They’ve been different for a long time now, but it’s not easy to accept – let alone embrace – those changes.

With the vast majority of decision makers now saying that they have found the vendor rather than the other way around, and with an ever expanding gap between marketing planning and buyer preference in the B2B space, marketers must adapt and indeed, embrace the fact that the buying process is now buyer-focused rather than led by the vendor.

Buyer focus isn’t necessarily a bad thing – in a way it evens the playing field. In the past, the company who could allocate more resources to marketing activities had a huge advantage and a far better chance of closing a deal. Now, it’s not so much about your marketing budget as it is about your ability to build and maintain a meaningful, long-term relationship with buyers.

Lead nurturing can only work if we are willing to set aside old assumptions about how marketing is “supposed” to work and embrace the new rules: a long buying cycle, where buyers take the lead, and where our job as marketers is to nurture a long-term relationship with them where we provide them with useful information, tailoring that information and its frequency of delivery to the needs of the specific buyer.

Managing long-term relationship with B2B buyers is of course a challenge in itself and something that no marketing organization can be expected to do manually. Marketing automation software thus changes its role from a supporting role into necessity that the modern marketing organization can’t manage without, at least not effectively.

The patience, persistence and precision needed to effectively and successfully nurture a lead from the initial marketing inquiry until they are sales-ready becomes attainable by automating the nurturing process. Timely, precise messages tailored to each prospect’s specific pains and level of readiness align marketing campaigns with prospect needs and readiness and increase sales effectiveness, and the company’s bottom line.

We live in the era of the Internet and social media, and whether we like it or not, we as marketers need to adjust. The era of social media has changed the rules of the marketing game dramatically. This is true not just for the B2B space but for every space and for every type of business relationship.

In the era of the Internet, people and businesses no longer rely on companies’ sales representatives to provide them with information. I don’t know about you, but as a consumer, I do all my research – certainly the initial phases – online. Whenever I am faced with a buying decision, the last thing I am going to trust is some promotional email or a brochure from a company. I certainly don’t want a sales person to pressure me to reach a buying decision before I am ready. I am much more comfortable taking my time, carefully researching my options, sometimes waiting for a while before I am ready to make up my mind and part with my money.

In the era of the Internet, B2C and B2B are not that different. I doubt if they ever were that different – after all, when you sell to a business, people are the ones who make the buying decisions, so you are always dealing with people and their reactions and preferences. Now more than ever, the people who make the buying decisions in the B2B space act just the way I act as a consumer – they want to go at their own pace, do their own research online, gather as much info as they can, and take their time before they make a decision.

While your prospects are taking their time and researching, what you want to be doing is not pressuring them to decide with email blasts and painfully obvious promotional content. You want to take a gentle yet effective approach, to always be there in the background, making yourself available to answer questions and to provide truly valuable information. In the era of social media, you want to take it slowly and build a relationship with your prospects, to keep the connection going without pressuring.

However, doing that is very difficult. When you have a fairly large database, how can you possibly keep everyone engaged, provide them with the content they are looking for, answer their specific questions, never become generic or impersonal, and still be in a position where you can pounce and make the sale – at the exact point where your prospect is ready to buy?

The best way – probably the only way – to efficiently manage today’s complex marketing campaigns and to keep the conversation going with each of your prospects is to automate your marketing. Marketing automation works by allowing you to keep in touch with each prospect in a way that makes your communications with them helpful rather than annoying. While doing so manually – segmenting prospects, identifying their needs and responding to them individually – would be too time consuming, marketing automation systems allow you to develop a relationship with each of your prospects and to keep your communications with them helpful and to the point, gently leading them to the sale while allowing them to stay in control.

The short answer: because you want to nurture your leads, not to annoy them, to scare them away, or – equally bad – to neglect them.

We all know by now that lead nurturing is crucial for B2B marketers. Long buying cycles mean that many prospects take a long time and multiple touches to warm up to the point of being ready to buy. In the meantime, while prospects take their time making a decision and doing their research, you want to keep in touch with them, stay relevant, and make sure they remember you when it’s time to buy.

But to be successful, lead nurturing needs to be done right, and to be done right, it needs to be fine-tuned and tailored to each prospect.

Gone are the days of sending out weekly or monthly generic email blasts to all of your contacts. If you’re still doing that, you are risking getting more and more opt-outs, as B2B prospects are becoming more and more picky about the type of messages they are willing to receive.

Prospects now expect high quality, useful messages that are tailored to their exact business needs. They expect you to provide value long before they become customers and to never be too aggressive with them. The challenge for you as a marketer: If you pounce on a cold prospect, you risk losing them, but if you hold off on contacting a hot prospect, you risk losing them too!

Segmenting your prospects via marketing automation software helps you to avoid alienating prospects and losing them. It also helps you to avoid overlooking prospects that are ready to buy. By using tools such as prospect activity tracking and 3-D lead scoring, you get a real insight into your prospects and can tailor a sales plan which is focused on their needs and on their level of readiness. You are also able to automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile, and timing.

Segmenting prospects enables you to send different messages to different prospects that show different levels of readiness, and to adjust the frequency of your communication as well. The result is a lead nurturing process that truly nurtures leads rather than neglect them or scare them away. This type of fine-tuning can be done manually if you have a handful of prospects in your database, but for most companies, automated marketing tools are the only way to do lead nurturing properly.

She lands on your site, browses through a few pages, then leaves. She’s VP Marketing in a young startup – your ideal customer. You have her email address in your database now. But is she ready to make a buying decision? Should you ask your sales rep to contact her or would he be wasting his time?

Surveys show that in the vast majority of cases, your website visitors are not ready to make a purchase – yet. This is not to say that they will never buy from you. If they bothered to visit your site and browse for a while, they likely have a pain that your solution might be able to solve – but the buying process itself may take some time.

Life would certainly be easier if corporate buying decisions were made instantly. But the reality is, corporate buying decisions are becoming gradually more, and not less, complex. More people in the organization than ever before are now involved in each decision, and the process – which used to be passive and led by your marketing team, is now active and involved. Organizations are researching their options online, often for several months, before they are ready to buy.

Obviously, you don’t want to drop these prospects. They may not be ready to buy right now, and some of them will never buy, but the majority of them WILL make a purchase at some point (there is a pain to be solved after all) – and you want them to buy from you, not from your competitors.

So in the meantime, you nurture these leads. Lead nurturing is the process of building and maintaining a relationship with prospects that are not yet ready to buy, via timely and targeted delivery of engaging, relevant educational materials such as White Papers, eBooks, tutorials, demos and more.

Ideally, you want to nurture your leads with the content and at the rate that are appropriate to their readiness level. Segmenting prospects becomes a crucial part of lead nurturing – you send more emails to “warm” prospects who are opening your emails and clicking on your links, and you send them content that is relevant to their specific issues, as determined by their browsing patterns on your site.

Needless to say, lead nurturing is an extremely complex process. Nurturing your leads manually is so costly and time-consuming, it’s nearly impossible. This is why B2B companies are turning to Marketing Automation solutions to speed up the sales process and reduce their costs by automating all aspects of the marketing process, including lead nurturing and lead scoring.

The best part? When the prospect is sales-ready, the system emails a real-time lead alert to your sales rep, enabling him to contact the prospect immediately, with the confidence that can only come from knowing that the person is interested and is ready to buy.