Many marketers involved in lead generation have long had a nagging suspicion that their sales team doesn't take their leads seriously.
Published reports show that up to 80% of marketing generated sales leads lost, ignored or discarded when they are handed to sales person. If this sounds like you, you’re probably missing an effective lead management process.
Lead management is a multistage process that manages the conversion of sales leads to customers.
7 major stages of effective lead management:
1. Lead Generation
2. Lead Qualification
3. Lead Refinement
4. Lead Distribution
5. Lead Pursuit
6. Lead Tracking and reporting
7. Lead Nurturing
I find most marketers need to put more attention on the processes of lead qualification and nurturing.
With lead qualification, the key is to match readiness of the buyer with expectations of your sales team. Otherwise you'll have a serious disconnect. You need to examine each lead ask if they are "sales ready" meaning they are ready to speak to a sales person.
Often when prospects have an identified need, they can spend months researching and seeking information on solutions that may satisfy that need. They are seeking education and information but would rather not talk to a sales person yet. This is why I think marketers should hold back and nurture early stage leads (with a human touch) on behalf of their sales team.
The goal of lead nurturing is to maintain a relevant and consistent dialog with viable leads - regardless of their timing to purchase - until they are sales ready. A key aspect of lead nurturing is the ability to provide valuable education and information to prospects up front, so that you become more than an expert; you become a trusted advisor.
Lead nurturing is a multi-touch process. Without lead nurturing program in place, I've found that early stage leads receive just 1 or maybe 2 touches before they are handed off to sales people. And that's not enough, especially if you have a complex sale. At InTouch, we’ve found early stage leads may require 8 to 12 (or more) meaningful nurturing touches before they are truly sales ready.
In cases where your experience tells you that a lead is sales-ready, or would best be in the hands of a salesperson, you should create an exception code or status. I recommend asking the following question, “Can marketing continue to nurture this opportunity until they are more sales-ready or is this a situation best handled by a salesperson?”
This is why communication and cooperation between sales and marketing is so important. Sadly, sales leads often land on the scrap heap because marketers throw leads over the wall and then expect sales people to catch them.
I think marketers must start by viewing the sales team as our customer. Simply put, we need to be committed to helping our sales team sell. Marketers can help sales people prioritize their time by going beyond the basic lead. We can to help them qualify, cultivate and develop opportunities until they are mature sales ready leads.
How should marketers qualify leads? Not by using forms. Conversations are better. That's why I think the phone is all too often overlooked by marketers. This is unfortunate, because if done well, outbound calling is by far the most effective tool for qualifying leads—particularly for the complex sale, in which few other economical options exist for contacting high-level decision makers.
So if marketers are committed to provide genuine, sales-ready leads to their sales team, they need to pick up the phone. In fact, this function is so important that companies are now creating or outsourcing the teleprospecting function to do lead qualification and nurturing so they can add a consistent "human touch" and maximize the potential of early stage leads.
Stay tuned, I’ll be sharing more detail and best practices for each stage of the 7 stages of lead management in the coming months.
Generating Leads With Social Media
For all the talk about social media—blogs, podcasts, wikis, forums—the majority of marketers I talk with are still uncertain about how to apply social media to their lead generation efforts.
In too many cases, social media initiatives are funded as pet projects—a sudden itch from on high that needs to be scratched.
These are real quotes:
“We have to have a viral video piece on YouTube ready for our customer conference.”
“Our competitor has a new blog, and we can do a hell of a lot better.”
“Our CEO wants us to start podcasting.”
Now, I’m all for innovation. Whatever it takes to get the ball rolling. But I can count on the fingers of one hand the marketers I’ve spoken with recently who are aggressively and systematically applying their knowledge of lead generation fundamentals to social media. That number needs to grow. So let’s dig in a little and talk about social media in the context of applied marketing and lead gen.
If you’re new to the social media discussion, the first thing to understand is that social media signifies a big shift in marketing. What you used to call a market, or a market segment, is now a networked customer community. Attitudes are no longer driven by your carefully crafted message, blasted relentlessly through a series of channels to gather 1.5% response. The internet makes it easy for people to connect and share information, and they know there’s a lot more value in learning about products from others like themselves than from marketing campaigns.
What this means is that markets are increasingly driven by content, conversation and community. Instead of flooding the market with pick-up lines, you need to listen, engage and catalyze your customer community. If you do it well, if you have something of real value and interest for your market community, they’ll spread your message for you.
The best place to start is by finding out where your customer community is already connecting to talk about your market, and who is influencing the conversation. You can begin by using some of the many new tools focused on searching through social content. You can search social bookmarks for keyword concepts related to your market on Del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia. You can search for recent blog postings on Technorati. You can search for news items related to your market that were highly rated by web users at Reddit, Digg or Sphere. And when you're ready to start seriously tracking the flow of conversation and the impact of key influencers, you can check out tools like Buzzlogic and Factiva’s Reputation Intelligence.
Once you know where the conversation is happening, the best thing you can do is to spend some time just listening. What are people talking about? What issues are driving the discussion? If you have something meaningful to say, then jump in. But get engaged as an interested participant, not as a product shill. As a useful analogy, think of your market as a dinner party. Imagine your attitude toward someone who butted into a conversation, talked about how great he was for a few minutes, and then walked away to barge into the next conversation. Unfortunately, that’s the impression many marketers are making today as they trawl blogs, dropping self-serving comments and then disappearing. Communities are much more welcoming to people who have something interesting to say, are authentic, and take a genuine interest in the people around them.
When you’re engaged with one or more of market communities, lead generation programs start to define themselves. You'll know which community hotspots are attracting traffic and what content is relevant. A lead gen campaign for a bike company at MySpace, for example, might focus on leveraging a big personality like Lance Armstrong to attract friends and drive links. A campaign at Mountain Bike Review Forum, with 60,000 dedicated cyclists, would be more product focused, maybe organizing a demo ride. The program you put together should be designed to fit the community, and you'll only know how to do that if you're engaged.
At any existing community where you want to generate leads, it’s important to understand and respect any policies about commercial campaigns on their networks. Some communities will have opportunities for sponsorship, or co-branded content, while others may have specific prohibitions against direct response marketing. If you're just interested in testing the waters to see how a community--particularly a large community--might perform in a broader campaign, you can often buy banner ads or adword campaigns that focus on particular sites so you can test the interest in program concepts.
When you are well oriented to your market community, campaign execution will look surprisingly familiar. It's still important as ever to have a compelling offer, a clear message, and to test everything you can to continually improve effectiveness. The difference today is that you need to be much more transparent, honest and accountable in the ways you engage your market. Prospects aren't just individual "targets" to pick off like sitting ducks. They're members of a community where word travels fast.
Next time, we’ll look at some specific types of social media lead generation programs. In the meantime, I’ve written a Marketing Brief detailing 12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media. It’s free and only requires registration. Wait a minute. Am I trying to generate leads on this social media site? You bet.
July 23, 2007
It’s All About User Participation
Last week I attended a breakfast seminar at the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) Northern California chapter in San Francisco.
My partner, Jeff Thompson, is a board member so how could I refuse? Plus the topic was intriguing enough– “Expert Panel Shares Internet Secrets to Grow Your Business.”
Panelists were: John Girard, CEO of Clickability, Chris Peterson, CEO of Chautauquacom, Celeste Bishop, President of Bishop Market Resources, Cal Lai, CEO of Sitoa, Redge martin, President of Clars, and moderator Rebecca Morgan. All of them use Web 2.0 technologies/tools to improve user participation for their businesses.
Some of the best examples of active user participation and user ownership of content are: Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Yelp, and Angieslist. These sites provide 100% user generated, free content. Cal describes this as the “nodes” having the power not the central “host”. That makes sense for consumer websites but what about for businesses? I share here the anecdotes that I personally found very interesting.
LogiTech uses Lithium to power a user-owned bulletin board. Since using Lithium LogiTech is much more involved in the conversation that is already happening “out there” about them. It’s resulted in a dozen new product features and much more effective user support.
Sprint/NexTel uses Lithium as well. To Sprint’s credit, they don’t attempt to manage the user participation but rather understand and embrace it. One user even wrote “Sprint/Nextel has got to be one of the worst companies for customer service.” And no one at Sprint deleted the message. Talk about user power.
Salesforce.com uses Lithium too for its community development and nurturing programs. Their ecosystem of customers, partners, consultants, and integrators actively talks about implementations. Like most discussion boards it has threads on support, product features, and company gossip. But Salesforce.com has gone beyond that by setting up a special forum for exchanging ideas, and for submitting inputs to their product managers on new product feature development. Salesforce.com so trusts this community that puts out its product roadmap in its idea exchange.
Cisco hosts a discussion group called “NetPros.” You’ll see that commenters are peers rated and self-policed. I’m certain that Cisco tees up topics of popular interest but the content is 100% owned by the community. Can you imagine a better place to get product support, gather input on future product development, and identify the thought leaders? And can you imagine how much more impact this forum has on potential customers than traditional advertising?
Home Depot. Did you know you can buy computers and wireless routers at Home Depot? What? Why? Turns out the contractors make up a substantial percentage of Home Depot’s business. And contractors are basically small business owners. Cal of Sitoa helped HomeDepot sell more products/services to these contractors. In fact, PC related products now make up 5% of HomeDepot’s online business. HomeDepot has changed how contractors see HomeDepot; they aren’t just a place to buy construction related supplies but rather a place to support their business growth. HomeDepot is capturing greater share of wallet by being a more valuable partner to contractors which starts by listening to them.
Webex decided to cut way back on advertising and invest more in facilitating online user and developer communities. Remember those annoying spam messages from Webex marketing? Webex has virtually done away with such blasts in favor of tuning into user conversations happening independent of them. Evidently, their cost per lead is half what it was and the quality per lead has gone way up.
The Macro Side of New Marketing Efficiencies
The Wall Street Journal on July 2 contained an excellent story about how economists view U.S. businesses' prospects for the coming months.
The story explains how businesses are facing higher energy, food, and labor costs while needing to hire more workers — all of which mutes general productivity.
The story says:
If they can't pull off a resurgence in productivity, businesses face a tough choice: Raise prices or live with reduced profit margins.
Judging from their outlook for corporate profits, the forecasters believe that many ... will choose to split the difference.
That means raising their prices some and living with lower profits, too. This is quite different from the most previous business climate where consistently rising productivity and tame inflation allowed for ongoing record profits.
However, there is another aspect to this somewhat bleak assessment.
The next business cycle will demand that many companies focus on efficient top-line growth so that they can maintain profits, even as productivity slackens.
Many businesses may be constrained in how they can grow revenues, perhaps because they only supply a static region or supply a shrinking customer base. Most businesses, however, can find new ways to sell their goods and services in more places — especially by better use of the Internet. That's because the Internet is and will continue to be a marketer's most powerful tool.
If the past business climate was about productivity as a means to profits, and the Internet was a benefit, then the next business cycle is about revenue growth and finding new markets as the means to fiscal health. And that means that the Internet becomes indispensable. The better you know how to leverage the Internet for your business the better off you will be as an individual — for your current employer or the next.
Interestingly, the need to find efficient ways to increase the market for goods and services comes just as advertising — a traditional way to grow revenues — is in transition. Many businesses are re-evaluating how they advertise, spurred on by Google, viral marketing on the Web, and better use of community outreach and online communication with customers, partners, and prospects.
In observing IT vendors in how they reach markets in novel ways, I now see four major thrusts (and a further diminishing role for traditional advertising). The four major go-to-market avenues are:
—Traditional inside efforts. This means creating a compelling web site, a great sales force (inside, outside, direct and channel), strong ecommerce applications, downloads and other online distribution means, and super customer support. This will not change.
—Traditional outside efforts. This means advertising through new and old media, marketing promotions and events, email and direct marketing, and PR/AR/IR. This section may well see resources shifted to the two newer categories ...
—Viral. This means creating content and conversation, blogs/podcasts/ videocasts, or reacting to content and conversation, such that online awareness is understanding is generated about your goods, services, and image, via the social networking effects on the Web. This is and should continue to grow significantly, probably funded by the pervious ad budgets.
—Search. Through all of a business's efforts, they should focus on making their values and knowledge easily accessed via Web, and more discretely searched through the keywords and phrases that best bind it to their users and communities. This will be the more effective way to grow the top line revenues for many companies for some time.
Again, look for traditional ad budgets to fuel this arena, too.
So if you are associated with a business they sees the landscape as the country's leading economists do, and you recognize you must grow both current and new markets — to spur more revenue and business volume — and that you must do it efficiently, do yourself a favor.
Right now pretend that you are a customer or prospect of what you sell.
Now, go to Google or another major web search engine. Search on some terms that might come to your mind as you begin a research or informational journey on what your business supplies. Focus on the problem that your online prospect will have, and the solution you bring to them. Does a search on one lead to the other? Does a question about to fix what you fix actually point to how to evaluate and/or acquire that fix? Right now, online?
It should. What you should see there in the top search results on the left, or organic side, are the fruits of all your marketing efforts:
—Your website, your product and service descriptions, pricing and how you beat the competition in value, the means to contact a sales rep, a click-through to purchase option, or more direct help.
—The freely available trustworthy informational assets on the problem-solution set that defines your business value, including conversations, media write-ups, third-party endorsements, interviews, and blogs ... anything that your communities generate about you.
This is how new revenues and market opportunities will be born most productively. When the going gets tough, a business's online marketing gets going.
Like many, you will also buy search-based advertising, based on those essential keywords, that create more ways for those seeking you out as a business to reach your website, product information, sales and support, and solutions. But when you want the most bang for the fewer bucks, the organic results pay best and longest. Invest in them now.
What's also interesting is that the investment, and — more importantly — the return on the investment you and your clients make in organic search results will remain strong in nearly any macro business environment. That's right, whether the business cycle is in profit growth mode, revenue growth mode, recession, depression, boom times or flat — your best ticket to keeping the accountants happy is bringing in leads and sales organically, via search-inspired research and inquiry.
So my prognosis is that the ways in which the Internet can assist companies have evolved well during the past 10 years, but the coming business climate — no matter what climate it is — is where Internet marketing will be needed the most. And the future, no matter what the world economy is up to, will also deliver the most value and power through the reach of the World Wide Web.