Six Keys to Lead-Generation Success

This article was recently published in MarketingProf.com.

Lead generation is an important function, yet one of the least understood and most mismanaged in many organizations. Why is that so, and what can you do to put in place a best-in-class lead generation program?

Here are six keys to success that I have formulated over years of working with B2B companies to get lead generation right.

1. Get sales and marketing on the same page

Lead generation is a strange animal. It is usually executed and owned by Marketing, yet its success is really judged by Sales. When you go to the board meeting, you can show how great your programs are and how many leads have been generated, but if the sales VP says your leads are no good, that's what the board will hear.

For a lead-generation program to be successful, its goals must be clearly agreed upon by both organizations. That's not an easy task, but it's doable. The agreement between Marketing and Sales ought to spell out which leads should be passed to Sales and which should remain with Marketing.

To reach an agreement, both sides must make an effort to leave their fixations behind. Marketing has to realize that salespeople care only about leads that are ready to engage in the sales process. At any given time, the amount of leads that should be passed to Sales is probably no more than 5-15% of all leads generated.

At the same time, Sales expectations must be realistic and match market reality. In an early market, Sales should not be looking for leads that have well-defined needs, budget, and authority. There are just not enough of them out there. Your salespeople must be willing and equipped to start the sales process with prospects that have a latent need and work them to the point they are ready to buy.

2. Offer content that delivers value to buyers

People love buying but hate to be sold. Naturally, they are suspicious of anything that smells like a sales pitch. They are looking for credible sources to help them make an informed decision. They want to be educated, and if possible even entertained—two things that can be rarely achieved by your typical sales pitch.

So rather than telling them how great your product is and offering them brochures and datasheets, you can help buyers get educated by enlisting the help of more credible third-party sources, such as industry experts and analysts.

The most obvious and credible source you can use is your existing customers. Customer success stories are always effective, but some are more powerful than others. Make sure the story describes the problem that the customer is solving with your solution. Try to get into the details so readers get a real flavor for the problem and how it is solved. If the story sounds like an infomercial, you lose credibility. Use the customer voice as much as possible. Make the customer the hero, not your product.

Once you have the story written, get it placed in an industry publication. Publications are usually hungry for content, and it will carry much greater credibility in the eyes of your prospects.

3. Put in place the process and tools

Lead generation is a process, not a once-and-done project. Just like your salespeople can't stop selling, you cannot stop filling up their pipeline with new opportunities to pursue. And just like you cannot time the stock market, you cannot time the sales process.

You need to constantly reach out to each prospect, so when the time comes for them to start the evaluation process they have you at the top of their minds. You want to contact each prospect at least once a month, preferably 2-3 times. Don't worry about overdoing it. As long as your content delivers value, your prospects will appreciate it. And the few that will opt out probably wouldn't have been be buyers anytime soon anyway.

Frequent use of your list gives you an opportunity to optimize your response and conversion rates over time to make the most out of each outbound campaign. You can and should continually optimize the message, the format, the day and time you send your messages, and how you segment your list.

Touching each prospect 2-3 times each month means that you need a good database to manage your prospect data. You cannot manage all this activity without some automation.

That doesn't mean everything has to be automated from day one and in a single system. Rather than rushing to pay big bucks for an all-encompassing system that automates everything, first figure out the process, then put in place the systems to support it.

You might start with a collection of a few small systems stitched together by some manual steps before you know what you really need and are ready to invest in a more complex, enterprise-type system. It is important that you figure out how the system can help you connect Marketing and Sales and whether the two organizations will use a single system or two separate but integrated systems.

4. Ensure timely follow-up

Many good lead-generation efforts go to waste due to poor follow-up. Some research shows that if left up to Sales, up to 90% of the leads would never be followed up. A "hot" lead that is not followed up in a timely manner will cool down very quickly—some studies show that response rates to a follow-up call can diminish by 50% if you wait just 48 hours, and as much as 90% if you wait a whole week.

The number-one problem with lead follow-up is ownership. Marketing assumes that Sales will do it, while salespeople are too busy closing deals and chasing their own prospects. They also don't trust the quality of Marketing's leads and often see them as a waste of time.

The success of your follow-up is tightly related to the alignment between Marketing and Sales. Once salespeople are confident that the leads they get are ready for a sales conversation, they are more likely to follow up on these leads and can be held accountable for it.

To make sure they get only the leads that match your criteria, you need a way to qualify all incoming leads. You can collect qualifying information in your registration forms, although in many cases a follow-up call to verify some information would still be required. This could be the job of Inside Sales, but it works better if you have a special lead-development function that reports to Marketing.

5. Have the metrics to measure success

Your metrics should reflect the three steps that lead up to sales, which are reach, response, and conversion: how many people you reach, how many of them respond, and how many of these responses you are able to move to the next stage in the sales cycle.

Most marketing departments do a decent job of measuring reach and response. Once you have an agreement that leads should be passed to Sales, measuring conversion becomes relatively straightforward as well.

Not every campaign will generate the same numbers. Some campaigns have a broader reach and response with lower conversion rates; others are more focused but generate higher conversion rates. For example, you might have a whitepaper campaign that will generate many responses from early-stage leads, and follow it up with an evaluation offer to a smaller portion of the database that will get a lower response but higher conversion rate.

As long as you define a clear goal for each campaign, you can design a mix that will address all three metrics and allow you to measure the results against your goals.

6. Find your lead-gen champion

As with everything, it all boils down to people. You need people who are dedicated to lead generation. They need to have the right set of skills to manage lead generation. And they have to be passionate about it.

Most companies have no problem hiring additional salespeople but fail to staff the lead-generation function adequately. The truth is that finding people with expertise in lead generation is still tough. Most people that are looking for marketing positions think of themselves as the creative types, while lead generation is 70% process and 30% creativity; so you might have to go outside the traditional marketing talent pool to find your lead-generation champion.

Why do organizations fail?

Your lead-generation program is only as strong as your weakest link. If any of the above is missing, your entire program will be compromised.

* * *

From what I have seen, not many organizations are able to master these keys to success. At the end of the day, it all comes back to the fact that most senior managers still don't have a good grasp of lead generation. They may understand sales, they may understand marketing, but lead generation is a strange animal that requires specific expertise, which most of them still lack.

The good news is that lead generation is a discipline that can be learned; so if you can recruit one expert, either as an employee or a consultant, she or he can pass the knowledge to others and help you build a best-in-class lead-generation program.

The Buyer's Journey through the Leaky Funnel

The Leaky Funnel is a book by Hugh MacFarlane that should be added to the “must read” list of every sales and marketing executive. The premise of the book is “how to earn more customers by aligning sales & marketing to the way businesses buy.” I like the extension of marketing and sales alignment to the way customers buy. Rather than just advising sales and marketing to work better together, it gives both organizations a guiding post to align with – the customer.

The two concepts the book is focusing on – the leaky funnel and the buyer’s journey – are tightly related to each other. Many potential buyers start on a journey that could lead them to your solution, yet only a few finish there. Most will get distracted on the way; some will get lured by more promising value propositions; others might give up if the journey looks too challenging, or simply get bored with what you have to offer.

Here are some basic things you can do to keep buyers on track and reduce the funnel’s leakage:

• Clarity: buyers are looking for guidance. If your offer is easy to understand, more buyers will follow your path. Keep your value proposition clear and simple.
• Uniqueness: if your value proposition looks like many others, it is easy for buyers to get confused and hop on a different trail. Make sure your offer is differentiated enough so buyers can evaluate it against the rest of the field.
• Ease: buyers today are busier than ever. In our multitasking world, they embark on many journeys simultaneously. If finding the information they need in order to take the next step is not easy enough, they may choose an easier path. Make it easy for them to find the information they need.
• Frequency: there are many bumps on the road to your solution. If buyers get stuck on one of them for too long, it may be tough to get them back on track. Don’t wait until they ask for more information; offer it to them early and often.
  

Keeping the frequency of information flow to buyers is a challenge. Many companies spend a lot of money on marketing campaigns that generate buyer interest, but fail to keep buyers on track with timely and relevant follow-up. There are three common reasons for this failure:

1. Ownership: passing all the leads to sales is a sure recipe for a huge funnel leakage. As much as 70-90% of the leads that are passed to sales are never followed up since sales believe they are not worth the time.
2. Timeliness: being late is almost as bad as not following up at all. Some research shows that the likelihood of reaching a prospect on a follow-on call goes down by 90% within one week from the initial inquiry.
3. Relevance: I don’t have statistics on this one, but this is what happens when a salesperson calls someone that downloaded a white paper and asks if they have an active project and approved budget. If the follow-up call is too aggressive, it fails to match the next logical step in the buyer’s journey. The results can be disastrous, as buyers will not only get lost on their journey but may also tune out any future communication.
   

How can you avoid such failures and ensure effective follow-up? Here are some things you can do:

1. Plan the follow-up as part of each campaign
2. Match your follow-up communication to the buyer’s journey
3. Dedicate specific resources to do the initial follow-up and screening of leads before they are passed to sales
4. Be clear on which leads should be passed to sales
5. If you don’t have the bandwidth to follow-up in a timely manner, get outside help

Let me know what you think or if you need help with any of the above.

Best practices, optimization, or proven steps – which one would you choose?

This week we had a good reminder on the importance of testing your message. Working on a client’s campaign, we tested three different messages promoting a new whitepaper. We tested the messages as a lead nurturing campaign to the client’s house list, with the intention of using the best performing version for a lead acquisition campaign to a rental list later on.

The three messages were identical in format and most of the text. The only differences were in how we phrased the topic of the whitepaper, which appeared in the message subject lines, the title, and in one line in the e-mail body. The three variations were:

- Ten ways to optimize
- Ten best practices
- Ten proven steps

The results were rather striking. Open rates for all three messages were rather similar despite the differences in the subject line (24.0-24.8%). However, click through rates were significantly telling:

- Ten ways to optimize – 21.9%
- Ten best practices – 16.0%
- Ten proven steps – 32.1%

Given the significant differences in click throughs, I was a bit surprised to see the similar open rates for the three different subject lines. At the same time, it has been a trend I have been seeing developing for awhile. My take is that sender name has become much more important than the subject line (we used the name of a salesperson + the company name as the sender name, with the salesperson’s e-mail address). If the sender is someone I know and trust, I would probably take a look at the e-mail.

So what did we learn from this experiment?

1. Obviously, we know which message we will use for the rental list.
   
2. The parity of the open rates does not mean that we should stop paying attention to the selection of subject lines. I am pretty sure we could have come up with some bad subject lines that would have performed significantly worse even with the same sender name.
   
3. With sender name having a major effect on open rates, it is more crucial than ever that each e-mail we send delivers value to our audience. Once they stop reading our e-mails, even a great subject line is unlikely to reverse the trend.
   
4. Above all: we are going to continue testing as much as we can. 100% more clicks is not something we can pass on!

Please send me a note or post a comment if you have any interesting test results you can share.

Starting the Year with a Bang

Conventional wisdom says that as far as marketing activities go, the first quarter is a big ho-hum. January is typically eerily quiet, as the marketing department struggles to recover from last year’s holiday parties and finalize the new year’s budget and work plans. This is also how January looked in past years at Cimatron Technologies, Inc. (CTI).

Does it have to be this way? CTI’s Director of Marketing Lisa Sterling was determined to prove the contrary.

It all started back in 2006, when Lisa and Sam Golan, CTI’s President and CEO, set to outline the 2007 marketing plan. Over the past couple of years, CTI has developed a respectable portfolio of marketing activities that generated satisfactory results. Even the salespeople were hardly complaining about the lack or quality of leads (can you believe?!). But rather than just duplicating last year’s plan with some minor modification, Sam has challenged Lisa to raise the bar for 2007.

The ingredients of the plan Lisa and Sam came up with remained similar to what has proven to be a winning formula: direct marketing activities focused on the company’s target customers, and emphasis on activities that deliver educational value to the audience. The difference was the frequency and reach in which they would execute the program: they decided to take the activities that have been successful so far and turn them from one-off campaigns into a systematic year-long program that would significantly increase the frequency and reach to new prospects as well as the existing customer base.

Here is what Lisa and CTI were able to accomplish during the first month of 2007:

• CTI has been publishing a newsletter focused on topics specific to the tooling industry, aptly titled Tooling Times. The newsletter has been published on schedule each and every month for over three years, and this January was no different when issue number 39 hit the inboxes of over 4,500 subscribers (up from less than 1,000 three years ago).
• A little over a year ago, CTI has started publishing a second newsletter called Tooling Tips, with technical information directed at product users. The newsletter has been a great success, with open rates topping the 40% mark. For 2007, Lisa has decided to further leverage this success and launch a monthly Tooling Tips webinar. Needless to say, the first webinar was conducted in January…
• CTI has been conducting solution-focused webinars for a number of years, but these have been sporadic in nature as Lisa often struggled to line-up the resources required to support these events. While drawing the 2007 plan, Sam has committed the application engineering resources required to support two solution webinars each month. The first two were successfully conducted in January.
• To top it all of, CTI ended the quarter with a webinar hosted by one of the industry premier publications. The webinar featured a CTI customer that described the adoption of Lean Manufacturing practices and how Cimatron’s products support the Lean processes. The webinar attracted over 600 registrations, with over 300 attending the live event.

That’s the way to start a new year!

If reading this story makes you envy of CTI’s vast marketing resource, I should probably mention that Lisa serves as a one-person marketing department. And if you thought that Lisa was busy this past month, I should complete the picture by adding that all these activities took place in parallel to the many other “routine” tasks that occupy Lisa on a day-to-day basis, including two new press releases, tradeshow preparations, ongoing sales support, and none less than the implementation of a new CRM… and just in case you were wondering, the February checklist looks no less impressive!

How has your 2007 started? If you have a story to share, I’d love to get your comment!

Top 13 Marketing Budget Wastes—and How to Avoid Them

This article was recently published in MarketingProfs.com.

Once again, it is that time of year... when marketing departments are busily preparing next year's budget. As we all know, chances are you won't be able to get everything you're asking for. But, believe it or not, this may actually be a good thing.

Take it as an opportunity to re-evaluate what you have been doing and how you have been investing your marketing dollars. There is always a way to do more with less.

To help you get started, here are some common marketing budget drainers to avoid.

Marketing Waste No. 1: Spending money to reach the wrong people

The biggest waste in marketing is spending money on activities that reach the wrong audience. This is especially an issue for B2B companies that have a limited target market (how many Global 2000 companies are there?). Advertising and large tradeshows tend to be the biggest budget items, yet much of the audience is often off target. You will get much higher return for your marketing dollars by going directly to the companies and individuals that can purchase your product.

Building a database of your target market prospects is not an overnight proposition, but it will be the best marketing investment you've ever made. See more about it in "Reverse-Engineer Your Marketing."

Marketing Waste No. 2: Generating leads that Sales doesn't want

The second-largest waste is generating leads that Sales will never follow up on. It is way too common to hear Marketing complain that Sales doesn't follow up on its leads, while Sales complains that Marketing leads are a waste of time. Both have to agree on what constitutes a good lead, and both sides have to be accountable for their share of the equation: Marketing for generating "good" leads, Sales for following up on them.

It's the CEO's job to make sure that Marketing and Sales are in synch, and lead follow-up is where the rubber meets the road.

Marketing Waste No. 3: Failing to follow up on leads

Invest in lead-development personnel. Some call them Inside Sales, others call them Telemarketing, but both fail to describe the role that will give you the most for your money. The lead-development function is the guardian of the agreement between Marketing and Sales. Its role is to make sure that every good lead generated by Marketing is passed to Sales, and save Sales from wasting time chasing leads that are not a good fit for the company.

Marketing Waste No. 4: Killing the conversation

Provide Sales with follow-up tools and templates. Even when Sales is willing to follow up on the leads it gets, the conversation often dies once the lead is handed over to the salesperson. The easiest thing for salespersons to do is copy an old email or use the same opening sentence they always use when calling on a prospect. This is like starting all over with a new pickup line rather than continuing the conversation that has already begun.

So don't leave it to chance: If you're putting together a campaign, make sure you provide Sales with the follow-up scripts and email templates they can use when the leads start coming their way.

Marketing Waste No. 5: Overemphasizing new leads

While Sales might dismiss some leads as "old," those are actually the best leads you can give them. Software buyers require multiple touches before they are ready to engage in a serious sales conversation, so your best chance to make a sale is to someone who has already been in touch with your company.

If you continue pursuing only new leads, you will soon find yourself out of companies to go after, and even sooner out of budget.

Marketing Waste No. 6: Targeting new leads with late-stage offers

While lead nurturing is crucial, you still need to acquire new leads that have not heard from your company yet. Since you have to buy access to these leads (in the form of list rental, newsletter sponsorships, tradeshow booth, etc.), lead acquisition is expensive.

Good lead-acquisition activities are those that appeal to a broad audience of early-stage prospects, such as whitepapers and webinars that are focused on industry issues, not on your product.

Marketing Waste No. 7: Direct mail and rental lists

Email promotions to your permission-based list will usually generate response rates that are 5-10 times higher than email to rental lists and 10-15 times higher than direct mail, at a fraction of the cost. As a result, cost per response from your email list can be over a hundred times lower than for any other method. In addition, turnaround time for email promotions is shorter, which means you can communicate in a more timely fashion.

A good permission-based email list is your company's biggest marketing asset and your best lead-nurturing vehicle. At the same time, if your email is not permission-based, you run the risk of breaking the law and alienating your audience.

Marketing Waste No. 8: Failing to use your permission-based list

You don't want to inundate your prospects with too much communication, but most software companies fail to communicate enough. Newsletters and blogs are great vehicles to keep the communication flowing.

Your customers are eager for knowledge; so, as long as you keep your content relevant to your audience and tone down the sales pitch, most of them will welcome your emails. For those who don't, offer ways to opt out of specific items so they don't have to remove themselves entirely from your list.

Marketing Waste No. 9: Failing to get the most out of your email marketing

A well-designed message (not necessarily a pretty one) can increase response to your emails by up to 50%! That's a huge difference in the return on your marketing dollars.

There is no magic formula for a good email message. To make sure your message is well designed, you have to test every element of the message—from the subject line to the placement of the links and the call to action.

Marketing Waste No. 10: In-person seminars

Webinars are much more effective than in-person seminars. They cost less—and you can draw a national and even an international audience to a single event. The typical seminar will draw 25-50 people, but it is not uncommon for a webinar to draw hundreds.

A webinar can also be easily recorded for future use as an on-demand presentation, extending the lifespan of the event months or even years beyond the initial take and generating up to twice the responses of the live broadcast.

Marketing Waste No. 11: Losing people on your Web site

All roads lead to your Web site. Any serious prospect will be looking at your Web site multiple times throughout the interaction with your company—before, during, and after the purchase decision.

The first thing you need to make sure is that your Web site content is of interest to your prospects. The second thing is to have calls to action that will get your Web site visitors to engage—view a webinar, download a whitepaper, fill out a survey.

Last, you need to make sure that you can track these interactions. With this information in hand, you can fine-tune your follow up to match your prospects' interests and avoid wasting valuable marketing and sales resources.

Marketing Waste No. 12: Failing to double (and triple) dip

Creating new content is often the bottleneck to new marketing initiatives. Once you have created some good content that will engage your customers, don't let it go to waste. Your prospects process information in different ways, so you can take the same content and repurpose it in multiple ways.

For example, turn your webinar into an article, post it in your newsletter and blog, pitch it as a PR placement, or offer it as a podcast.

Marketing Waste No. 13: Not knowing what you get for your money

Every marketing activity should be attached to a measurable goal. If it's not, you probably shouldn't be doing it. A measurable goal could be number of leads, number of new contacts, number of meetings, opportunities, deals, and all the way to revenue dollars. See more about it in "How to Measure Your Marketing" and "Measuring Marketing ROI—How Low Can You Go?"

The key to marketing optimization is continually weeding out the budget drainers while seeking new ways to deliver greater market impact at lower cost. If you're looking to do more with less, you must be willing to embrace change. As the saying goes, "You cannot continue doing the same things and expect different results."

Reverse Engineer Your Marketing

This article was recently published (with some minor modifications) in MarketingProfs.com.

Reverse engineering is the process of back-working a solution from the end result. In the era of result-oriented marketing (how did we ever afford to do it differently?!), reverse engineering can help marketers refocus their efforts and resources to ensure marketing delivers results that are on-target with business goals.

Let’s take a simple scenario.

It’s time for your quarterly board meeting. This time, you’re going in with a spring in your step. Last quarter you really nailed it with your marketing programs. You did a webinar, a white paper promotion, and you had your biggest tradeshow of the year. Altogether, these programs generated over 1,000 leads for your sales force. You did your job. Now it’s up to sales to follow up on these leads and convert them into real opportunities.

You present your numbers and sit down with a winning smile on your face. Next is the VP of Sales. You haven’t seen her in weeks, she’s been busy closing deals on the road. After presenting last quarter’s results (they didn’t quite make the numbers, but “it was a good quarter”), she talks about next quarter. The pipeline is dry, she says. There are not enough marketing leads. You hold yourself not to bolt out of your seat, but you politely ask what about the 1,000+ leads you just passed to sales. These are 1,000 names, she says, but they are not good leads…

You’ve heard this before. Who is right?

The biggest problem is that nobody knows (so nobody can get fired, although the VP Sales is usually the first to go, with the VP Marketing not far behind…)

The conventional process of sifting through thousands of leads and trying to figure out which are the good ones is time consuming, expensive, and in most cases is not followed through. Much of your marketing effort goes to waste, but you don’t know why.

Here is how you can do it differently with reverse-engineered marketing:

Stage One: Figure Out WHO Sales Wants to Talk to
And it cannot be "the person who has a check ready for me"... Jokes aside, before you spend a single dollar on outbound marketing, sit down with sales and clearly define who they are trying to reach.

Agree on the Target
Define the industries, company size, and any other characteristics that describe the companies your sales people are calling on. For them, these will be the only leads worth following on. Then get down to the individuals. Who are the decision makers, influencers, and gatekeepers they want to speak with? Write down these definitions and hang them on your office wall. From here on, everything you do will be focused on these targets.

Get the Names of these Companies
Most enterprise software companies have several thousands companies in their target market (how many companies are in the Global 2000?), so getting the names of these companies is a manageable task. Still, most companies don’t bother doing it. If the task seems too daunting to begin with, break it down into smaller chunks – by vertical, geography, solution – whatever makes sense.

Analyze your Target Market Coverage
Run your contact database against the list you have created. What percentage of the target market is currently there? How many more do you need to reach? Do the Same for Individuals. Do you have the type of contacts your sales people are looking for?

Establish Metrics
The end result of this analysis should be a measurement of coverage: “we have contacts at X% of the companies we are after, and Y% of them are at positions of interest to us.”

From this point on, marketing has two goals:

1. Move the dial on these numbers to increase target market coverage.
2. Generate repeat responses from target individuals at the target companies to create multiple opportunities for sales dialogue.
   

This is not a one-time analysis. These are numbers that you need to always have on your dashboard. Many executives are now adding demand generation metrics to their dashboards, so having agreed upon metrics is critical to establishing a common language for the boardroom conversation.

Stage Two: Figure Out HOW to Reach Them

Now that you know who you’re after, you need to figure out how to contact them and how to get them to respond to your message.

Get Additional Contact Information
There is no easy or cheap way to add new target contacts to your list. However, if you have to spend the money, at least you’re better off now that you know exactly what you’re looking for. You can buy lists of names that will match the specific companies and titles you are after. One way or another, you’ll need to put someone on the phone to use your existing contacts within an organization to get these additional contacts you need to reach.

Look at Past Results
Go back to your database and see what the people that fit your target profile responded to. What marketing vehicles seem to generate better response from your target prospects? Do certain messages seem to resonate better for specific segments?

Ask Them What They Care About
At times, we get so engrossed in analyzing our campaign data that we forget there is another way to find out how to get across to the people we are trying to reach: just ask them. Put together a short survey; ask them what their burning issues are and how they prefer to learn more about them. Have someone outside the company call them up; you’d be surprised how many people will give you a piece of their mind if you ask for it in a non-sales situation.


Stage Three: Execute and Measure

Get Started!
With all this information in hand, you are ready to start creating the content, messages, and campaigns that are targeted at your desired audience. I know I make it sound simpler than it is. You can have a good starting point, but don’t expect to have all the answers upfront. You cannot wait for that. Just start executing to the best of your knowledge, then continue to test what works best and experiment with different ways to reach your target audience.

Measure Against Your Goals
As you start generating leads, make sure you measure against the goals you have defined upfront:

1. Target market response: how many TARGET MARKET responses have been generated?
2. Target market coverage: how many NEW TARGET MARKET leads have responded?

As long as you keep hitting these goals, you are generating opportunities for your sales force to start a dialogue with the people they want to talk to and helping them move forward the dialogues that are already in place. And as long as you keep doing this, chances are your next board meeting is going to unfold better.

Some Additional Practical Details
As leads come in, you will need to figure out whether they fit your target market profile. The following chart describes a process you can use for that purpose.

Expecting sales to be responsible for the process is risky. I strongly recommend that you make this process part of marketing’s role in generating leads BEFORE they are passed to sales.


So put in reverse, and get your engines going!

Webinar Helps Close the Deal

Working with a new client is always fun. There is an inevitable apprehension about newly launched marketing plans. Once the results are in, seeing the skepticism giving way to sheer excitement is a very satisfying moment.

A couple of weeks ago I helped a client put together their first ever webinar. They were concerned whether their audience would tune in to this media. The results exceeded their expectation on every metric – from invitation open rate (over 40%) to the number of registration and attendance rate (over 55%). Moreover, Over 30% of the registrations were highly qualified NEW prospects.

It gets even more exciting.

The webinar took place Tuesday. On Friday morning we sent each person who registered to the webinar a follow up e-mail from the salesperson in charge of their account. By Friday afternoon I got a call from a salesperson telling me that he received five responses to the e-mail, all of them interested in learning more about the software.
Can it get even more exciting? You bet!

One of the e-mails was from a prospect he has been working with for a couple of months and was trying to close as a Q1 deal, but the guy has not been returning e-mails or calls in the past few weeks (I’m sure you’ve been there…). The e-mail said “come over and get a check for a 1/2 of the cost, we’ll pay the rest next quarter.” The date: Friday, March 31st.

This doesn’t happen very often, so the point of the story is not to create the impression that webinars are good deal closers.

The point is that you need multiple touches to move a prospect through the sales cycle. A salesperson can use marketing help in creating these touches by providing information that is of value to the customer. In many cases, these will generate better response than a sales call. And once in a while, it can even help seal the deal.

That’s fun!

What’s Your Pickup Line?

This is one of the best marketing posts I’ve ever seen. It shatters the value/word meter.

The Spark This blog entry hit my e-mail box as I was listening to a client presenting to a prospect and thinking to myself “why do they talk so much about themselves - who cares?!”

Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Just check out how many website homepages are about the company, its vision, its founders, its offices, etc, just not what it does for the customers!

Marketers beware - marketing myopia starts here…

Leads are People Too

There is nothing better than a good body massage. Naturally, I was excited to hear about a new masseuse that came highly recommended. The masseuse introduced herself as Olga and went right to work. There wasn’t the usual “what bothers you” and “how do you like your massage” questions I was used to being asked before getting a massage. Olga went straight to business. After about five minutes, I thought my back was about to crack. I was too shocked to even say a word, and barely crawled away from the massage table. I was bruised and sore for the next couple of weeks.

Sometimes I suspect that many in the software industry came from Olga’s school. We tend to forget to ask our customers what they really want. Owen Thomas writes about it in an excellent article titled What Silicon Valley can learn from UPS. This is true not only for engineers, but also for those that are supposed to be our best communicators – marketing and sales people.

Take lead generation, for example. A prospect downloads a white paper and, what do you know, a few days later a salesperson is calling assuming the prospect is actually interested in buying a product. At the same time, prospects who are really interested in buying may be waiting weeks for someone to call and help them buy.

Some forward-thinking marketing departments have embarked on ambitious efforts to avoid these problems by using sophisticated lead scoring models, attempting to assign an objective score that will tell salespeople which leads to follow up with. To be honest, I am not sure we need to go that far. Just like Olga, we fail to ask our customers a simple question: “How much pressure do you like?” As a matter of fact, we don’t really need to ask. The answer is there, but we fail to listen.

Let me explain.

If you walk in front of a store and there’s a guy standing at the door yelling how great his product is and trying to hand you a pamphlet, you’re probably going to walk a little faster to get away before he grabs you. But when you walk into a store and look at a product you’re interested in, you would probably appreciate if someone were available to answer some questions.

We appreciate responsiveness and care, we run away from pushy salespeople. So do our “leads”.

When a prospect registers to a webinar, all she’s saying is “I’m interested in learning about the topic.” The follow up to the webinar registration should acknowledge the interest and gently check what else might interest her. A white paper? A case study? Perhaps a product demo? Jumping ahead and talking about the product or asking about project and budget is like trying to grab a person walking in front of your store. All you’re going to do is make her run.

A well-designed marketing campaign will present the prospect with a number of options that can tell us how ready the prospect is, if we just listen. Instead of worrying about lead scoring, let’s look at leads as people. Ask them polite and relevant questions, be there to answer their questions, and listen carefully to what they are telling us.

In short, I believe the formula is rather simple: marketing’s role is to provide opportunities for starting a dialogue; the role of the sales team is to use these opportunities to take the dialogue one step forward, and follow the queues of the prospect as to how fast the dialogue can develop.

What do you think?

Can you sell? Can they buy? You don’t know until you ask the right questions!

I often wonder to what degree we can blame our fast-paced lifestyle for the difficulties so many software companies have meeting their sales goals.

I have recently been involved in a number of interesting exercises with several software companies that are trying to improve their marketing and sales processes. It has been interesting, and at the same time disappointing, to see how difficult it is for salespeople, marketing managers, and company executives to come up with a clear definition, not to mention a unified one, of what constitutes a qualified lead.

Now, I’m not talking about the terminology. Granted, “qualified lead” could mean different things to different people (read about The Fallacy of Qualified Leads). I am talking about salespeople not being able to come up with a clear set of questions that could tell them whether a company is a good fit for their solution.

So what do salespeople do when they don’t know these questions? They ask the easy question: “Are you looking to buy?” “Do you have an active project?”

That’s an order-taker question, not a salesperson’s! A salesperson is looking for a problem to solve, a goal to help a buyer fulfill, a pain to be relieved.

That’s where our hasty culture and go-getter attitude trip us. We are all in a constant race to do more and faster, that we don’t put the time to think through and come up with a solid, customer-centric selling process. Rather than take the time to understand the customer’s issues, we rush to tell him how great our product is.

The skill pool of solution selling is dwindling, and as a result, companies are missing their sales targets, while new salespeople and managers keep coming and going every 12 to 18 months through the endless motion of the company’s revolving doors.

How do we put an end to it? How do we get our salespeople to stop chasing and pushing and start engaging and cultivating?

I don’t have the answer, but I believe we first have to take the time to evaluate what we do. Going through these exercises, the companies I mentioned are taking first steps in this direction. I just hope they have the patience to see it through.