Monthly Archives: June 2010

Lotsa leads? Or quality leads? Pick one.

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If you’re in marketing, you’re building a business. If you’re building a business, you need sales. To get sales, you need leads. It’s a basic equation. Whether you’re delivering campaigns for a storied global enterprise, or printing business cards in your dining room, you need leads. Names. Contacts. Prospects. Suspects. We’re talkin’ people, people!

And the more, the merrier, right? So throw all kinds of budget at the wall. Banner campaigns. Events. Lists. Who cares how you do it, just flood the joint with leads. Leads galore. Leads up to your eyeballs. You want to be sifting through sales prospects until you can’t see straight. You’re swimming in a pool full of 24-karat gold-plated leads. You’re in the money!

Except you’re not.

Once you’ve gathered hundreds of names from people with varying interest in your business, you have to start calling each one of them. Some names may be real gems with the budget, the need, and the authority to buy, but the rest are fools’ gold. A waste of your time. You’ll probably never find the right ones. You’ve got way too many leads. Is that possible?

Damn straight it is. It’s not only possible to wind up with too many leads, but it goes on in sales offices all across the country. You may be surprised to hear is that even well-run campaigns based on brilliant material aimed at highly-targeted audiences can deliver a long list of names that is 80% useless. Why does this happen? The answer is that the need for a big list of raw names often trumps their quality. Number is easier to measure than quality, and marketing leaders like you are often compensated for the raw number instead of quality measurements.

Why? Quality takes time. It might be two years before a lead you hauled in pans out, and by then you’ve already done the ‘see-me-in-my-office-bring-a-box-for-all-your-stuff’ dance with the boss. When sales flag, marketing gets the pole.

So what do you do?

First, fight the need to haul in huge numbers of raw leads. Don’t be afraid to ask the burning questions. If people are really interested in your product, they’ll give you the answers you need. Ask for this kind of information:

  • Name
  • Title
  • Role (Decision-Maker? Influencer? Recommender? Freaking Intern?)
  • Company
  • State
  • Zip
  • Email
  • Phone
  • Website
  • Company Size (Employees)
  • Reason for Search (Why are you looking for a new solution?)
  • Budget for Solution
  • Current Solution (Do you use a similar product now?)
  • Decision Timeframe (When do you plan to buy?)
  • Source (How did you find us?)
  • Have Sales Contact Me (Check the box)
  • Newsletter Opt-In (Check the box)

And depending on your industry, there may be many more dimensions you can ask about. And be honest; don’t try to trick people by calling it a ‘quiz’ or taking them through several form pages. If you gather this information, you can use it in two ways: to filter people completely out of the lead process, to be nurtured by an automated email campaign; or you can hand over everything to sales, and they’ll decide who to call first.

I know what you’re thinking; “My boss will never allow me to ask these things. He wants leads no matter what their interest.” You just have to ask, “If they’re not interested, why do we want their names?”

The truth is, in this era, it has never been easier to gather names. Your company can mine LinkedIn and other business intelligence vendors. You can get 70,000 Twitter followers by sticking a few interns on the project. You can throw budget at a bunch of banner and PPC campaigns and gather trainloads of people who will never buy anything. If you just want names to waste your sales organization’s time with, that’s easy.

Today marketing is about the targeted process. To make your sales organization happy, don’t firehose them with a list of 80% lousy leads. Hand over the best 20%. The lousy leads will be there when you need them.

Which you won’t.

B2B Lead Generation: It’s All In The Timing

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We B2B marketing professionals think about our target audience practically every minute (It’s kind of an obsession). We know their revenue, number of employees, titles they hold, their budgets, their hobbies, and most importantly, their decision roles. This is static lead info, and we try to know as much as we can.

But what about dynamic info, that changes over time? For instance, are people ready to buy?

That’s where decision staging comes in. A decision stage is a unique point in time a B2B prospect is in during the lead cycle. It’s another way to segment leads, because they have such different needs in each stage that we may as well treat them like different people. This affects how we find them, how we evaluate them, and how we pitch them.

We all have our own ideas about marketing process. Here are my five B2B buyer decision stages:

The Five B2B Buyer Decision Stages

1. Problem-Solving. This is the first stage where a B2B buyer realizes a need for a new solution. We marketers hardly ever hear about this person unless we have consulting partners that cover our industry, or have massive ad budgets that make it impossible for buyers to miss us. The method for this stage is not a push strategy, but a consultative approach focused on detailed technological discussions with content experts. This stage is the biggest reason we need social media, partnerships, blogs, forums, associations, and networks.

2. Solution-Seeking. In this stage, the person has an idea what they need and is searching for a company to provide it. At this point the solutions can vary widely. If a prospect finds you at this stage, your material should be crisp and oriented toward the value of your solution. Your company’s experience and capabilities play a large role in this stage. And that should be amplified through your expert webinars, white papers, and thought-leadership. It’s clear why your presence in the previous stage can build credibility for this one.

3. Criteria Development. Now your buyers have found which companies seem to offer a relevant solution, and are developing decision criteria. If this is your first contact with prospects, they are likely interested in your spec sheets, because they’ve compiled checklists and will toss your company in or out based on how well you match up. Your benefit statements are nice, but ultimately the question is: Do you deliver or not? It’s best if the criteria already match your product, because the customers found you in the first or second stage.

At this point I’ll be Captain Obvious: As it gets later in the lead cycle when prospects find us, the worse off we are. By stage 3, they’ve already determined the problem, how to solve it, and which companies probably can. After stage 3, buyers are just rounding out the field to justify the decision they already have in mind. Still, many companies focus their marketing efforts on the last two stages:

4. Application Testing. If this is when prospects find you, during a final sweep for companies that meet their criteria, this is when they’ll register for free trials, watch videos, grab brochures at trade shows, click on your paid search ad, and sign up to win the iPod you’re giving away. Your cost per lead might be lower at this stage, but there’s a reason; the close rate will be almost nil given that this person has not heard of you during the first three stages.

5. Final Purchase. This is the default value for how marketers and sales execs treat most prospects. We assume they are ready to buy, so we speak to them that way. We tell them how much money they will save or how much faster their systems will be, because we know we’re trying to influence a decision that is already made. This is where the big money is spent on publications, online banners and email lists, and this is where the traditional marketing metrics are well known: Impressions, Opens, Clicks, Eyeballs, Views, and Conversions. We all know how low these rates tend to be. For many reasons, the final purchase stage is almost always inappropriate for B2B marketers, but we do a ton of it.

So how do you manage these five stages? First, I admit that the categories are simplistic. They are meant to easily identify what message, what material, and what method we should use for each stage. Secondly, I understand that not everybody has the same business needs. But in general, the earlier a prospect learns about you, the better. If your company is out there with consultative discussions, technical materials, benefit statements, crisp differentiation, and thought-leadership, you will be in the catbird seat, and someone else will be the afterthought.

It may be irritating when you get a prospect who is a year from making a decision, but it’s powerful information to have. And it beats learning about that prospect a year later, when it’s too late.

Cookie Cutter Social Media Strategies (For Cookies Only)

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Look, I’m new to social media, so I won’t shovel you expert advice about building a huge following. Your Twitter mojo is probably a thousand times mine. If you rock the social media house, keep doing whatever you’re doing. I’m probably learning a lot from you.

(The truth is, I’ve never worked for someone who saw any value whatsoever in social media, and I wasn’t able to sell it to the boss. So my opportunity to jump on the social media bandwagon was spent doing old-school stuff; powerpoint decks, data sheets, press releases. I know, I know. That’s another post.)

But like everyone else, I do have an opinion on how best to use social media to grow your business. That’s what it is ultimately about, right? Growing your business? Building a base of people in your community, so that you have a wealth of knowledge and experience to draw on to help you deliver a finely-honed service or product to the people who are willing to pay you for it? Creating mind-share? Getting noticed?

I’m looking for all of that, too, and the advice I’ve found on how to use social media in my marketing strategy follows a massive bell curve. The range seems to break down like this:

Social Media Strategy - Bell Curve

The advice in the middle approaches a ‘best practices’ tactic for social media in marketing. Although I think we’re still a long way from that. If you are a thought-leader who publishes new material all the time, social media is exactly what you need it to be. You can gain a massive following and if you’re good, you can monetize that following.

But a cookie-cutter strategy won’t cover everyone. No more than a great cookie recipe will help you make a cheeseburger. If you’re selling air conditioner parts, the best social media model really isn’t there yet. If customers found out about you through Twitter, it’s a safe bet you’re a long way from a sale. You should use social media to build a community and get links, but not leads. And that reality will drive your strategy more than anything else. For the average B2B company, social media is still a luxury.

So if you’re not a constant online publisher, why worry about strategy? You’re still in the “Just Do It!” stage. Jump in.

Look at email marketing, which was the Wild West about ten years ago, but is now a (variably) respected marketing and communications tool that offers tracking, best practices, compliance guidelines, and an entire realm of best practices and expertise. Social media looks at email marketing the way email marketing looks at postcards. The strategy will come.

I’m not going to prescribe any specific approach, except to suggest that you take advice that works well for a publishing model with a grain of salt. In ten years it will be easy to know the best way to use social media, but today, despite all the hollering, we know nothing. I’m just saying; “Relax!”