This is a presentation on lead nurturing we created for a webinar a while back. We think it’s kinda neato. Sorta spiffy. Swell, even.
That said, there’s no audio. Just slides. If there’s enough interest, we’ll record an audio track and add it to the preso. Cast your vote via email [info at falconrygroup dot com] or in the comment section. Democracy – don’tcha just love it??
I think leads are important.
[I know. Shocking.]
In fact I think the topic of leads is important enough to warrant at least 10-15 uninterrupted minutes of a CEO’s time each week.
As the owner of two small businesses, I know that’s expensive time. Leads are worth it.
In each of my next three posts, I offer a new reason why.
Why Leads Matter, Reason #1: Leads mark the key moment in time when previously invisible and anonymous people trust your brand enough to voluntarily “de-cloak.”
Why do they de-cloak? Do they do it because they’re ready to buy?
Sometimes they are. But at this point, probably not. They may buy later, if they still trust your brand and value your products. Right now, they just want information you have that (they believe) will be useful to them. So they volunteer information they have that (you believe) will be useful to you. And they would like this exchange to be frictionless.
What does “frictionless” mean to your leads in this context? It means that when they “buy” your product information with their contact information, they get what they pay for. Nothing less, and nothing more. If you promise people who fill out your registration form a free buyer’s comparison guide, give them a good one, and promptly. But don’t follow that up with an encore of three promotional emails per week until death-or-the-unsubscribe-link-do-you-part. And don’t tell your sales team to call blitz that group of people. Doing that may yield a few sales (that you might’ve won anyway), but it will leave a poor impression on the 90%-plus of your leads who don’t return your sales reps’ calls.
This kind of silent damage to your brand usually goes unreported. Your leads are too busy and polite to complain about it. But it only takes one disgruntled ex-lead to, in a fit of keyboard rage, flame your brand to 5000 Twitter followers, and their 5000 followers, and so on…. The choices only get worse from there, e.g., cease-and-desist letters, public mea culpas that distract your staff, etc…
Let’s not use the lead management process to mass produce disgruntled ex-leads. A poorly designed process won’t mass-produce revenue. In fact it might mass-reduce revenue. Instead, let’s help buyers get information with minimal friction, and then optimize the process to book more new customers.
When we remove friction we make room for trust. Trust, as you may have noticed, is a bit of a scarce resource these days. But real trust, which can only be earned and never bought, is a powerful thing. Trust attracts new visitors to your web site. Trust converts visitors to leads and leads to customers. And over time, trust makes customers into loyal fans who refer their peers and help you attract more visitors to your web site, and so on….
Image credit: Graur Razvan Ionut
I’m pleased to share with TLOTL readers the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models. This collection of 14 one-page funnel visualizations was created by sales and marketing leaders who are active on the Focus network. If you spend any time following thought leaders in this space, you’ll recognize most if not all of the other contributors. I’m truly honored to be sharing pixel space with this distinguished group!
You can download the guide here (PDF).
Below I’ve included some additional links and context:
Ardath Albee, CEO and B2B Marketing Strategist at Marketing Interactions
Michael Brenner, Director of Online/Social Media at SAP North America
Michael Damphousse, CEO/CMO of Green Leads LLC
Christopher Doran, VP of Marketing at Manticore Technology
Barbra Gago, Social Media Manager of Cloud9 Analytics
Steve Gershik, CEO of 28Marketing
Sue Hay, CEO of BeWhys Marketing Inc.
Matt Heinz, Principal at Heinz Marketing LLC
Carlos Hidalgo, President of The Annuitas Group
Jon Miller, Vice President of Marketing at Marketo
Adam Needles, VP of Demand Generation Strategy at Left Brain Marketing
Matt West, Director of Marketing at Genius.com
Steve Woods, Chief Technology Officer of Eloqua
I sent my picture to Focus at the end of August, right around the time my daughter attended her first few days of kindergarten. At the time, it occurred to me that I was participating in a kind of show-and-tell for grownups. Just like the objects that kids describe to their classmates, each funnel concept in this guide tells us a story. And the story isn’t just about the funnel as a business process. It’s also about how the storyteller thinks and solves problems.
Prior to submitting my picture, I had white-boarded it twice before for two different prospects. The first prospect said she really appreciated my (impromptu) illustration, as it helped her think differently about her problem. We haven’t done a deal yet, but had we not had that meeting, I probably wouldn’t have drawn my picture.
The second time I drew it was in a meeting with a prospect who – a few weeks prior — had asked me to send him a “brief, high level write-up on how we’d work together.” I wrote out my proposal in text form, and, per his request, kept it really brief – barely over 1 page in length. But as brief as my proposal was, when I met with my prospect, I could see that I had made excessive use of that obscure, incomprehensible, buzzword-laden dialect: consultantese. Even in sanitized form, I’m embarrassed to share that original proposal verbatim. But I ran it through a word cloud generator (thank you Wordle) to show what I mean.
Consultantese
Pretty messy isn’t it? The proposal wasn’t much easier to follow.
Once I drew a simple picture on my prospect’s whiteboard, our conversation became simpler, and we ultimately started working together.
No matter how long I work in this business, I still forget sometimes that consultantese has no place in my sales process. Plain English is better. And a simple picture is even better still, especially if it’s something my kindergartner might understand.
A slight detour for today’s post. Let’s pay a brief visit to the land of B2C retail fitness, to see if any insights apply to B2B sales and marketing.
One regular “client” of my consulting practice is the Pilates and personal training business my wife Heather and I have owned for the past 3.5 years. I have no formal training in Pilates or personal training, and to be honest, until this year, my physique more closely resembled the guy in the classic “BEFORE” photo than the slimmer “AFTER” version. For this reason and others, I’ve typically worked more behind the scenes in that business, handling finance, operations, and marketing, supporting our staff and Heather as they support their clients.
Heather wears several hats too, including the very important Head of Sales hat. This is a challenging and rewarding job for her. She helps people make and manage investments in their health. According to HealthyPeople.gov, a service of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, only about 23 percent of adults in the United States report regular physical activity for 20 minutes or longer 3 or more days per week. Heather’s trying to engage the subset of that population who:
So yes, Heather has a challenging and rewarding job. Her business is highly relationship-driven. I know, I know, everyone’s business is relationship-driven, but hers really is. She’s learned, and taught me, a ton about how these relationships get started and grow. And as good as she has become at listening to prospects, educating them, and building their trust, the old adage is as true for her as it is for any sales person: you can’t win ‘em all. For any number of reasons, some within and some beyond her control, not everyone she meets will become a client. But every potential client, whether she meets them or not, will ultimately make some kind of decision, conscious or otherwise. That decision may be about whether to become a client, or it may be about whether to visit the website, pick up the phone, or ask a current or past client about their experience. And this brings us back to the theme of this post: every lead converts.
To explore what I mean by this, let’s apply the sentence in the broadest sense possible.
For simplicity, let’s define “every lead” as every person that engages Heather’s business. Not just the people who call her to ask about studio services or rates, or come in for an introductory session, or consider a membership package, but everyone. Any person who ever:
Simplified Conversion Model
And now let’s define “convert” just as broadly. Not just the conversion of qualified prospects into clients, or of leads into qualified prospects, or even of traffic (foot, phone, or web) into leads. Let’s define conversion as any change in a person’s opinion of her business — no matter how strong or subtle, how temporary or permanent, or how grounded in fact or fiction — based on currently available information available.
And now, let’s go one step further and give a B2B-sounding name to this entire cycle of people gathering information and developing their opinions. Let’s call it: the considered purchase process.
Back here in the B2B world, we are trained to be efficient, mechanical, and sometimes even a bit mercenary about demand generation. And the military-industrial language we use to describe our trade – e.g., driving conversion, filling the pipeline, growing revenue (exponentially), launching multi-channel integrated campaigns, etc. – reflects the intense expectations of management that we take the beach deliver results.
But as we focus our energy on the relative few who ultimately decide to buy, it’s helpful to remember that every person’s opinion of our company changes as they interact with us. We may be leaving money or value on the table when we ignore those who don’t take our prescribed next step. Or worse, we may be creating headwinds for future sales efforts by handling these people in a careless way. Every lead converts, in either a good way or a not-good way. And unless you’re selling to a market of infinite size where no one ever bothers to share their impressions of your business, each one of those conversions matters.
Doing the things that get more leads to favorably convert, more of the time, helps us build healthier pipelines and more predictable revenue growth.
Regular readers of this blog, and people who have worked with me, know that I’m a proponent of a process-oriented, metrics-based, and technology-enabled approach to demand generation. And I typically encourage B2B vendors to take the long view in developing their demand generation funnel, treating it like a high-value business operating inside their business. I believe that a well-designed demand generation system shamelessly imitates the features of other “mission critical” processes at work in our daily lives, such as air travel, energy production, or the food supply chain. All of these processes generally work as advertised, and generally without interruption. And these processes deliver incredible value to all their stakeholders. It’s hard to imagine modern life without flight, fuel, and food.
It took time to build these modern marvels and it takes time — though thankfully not nearly as much — to build a predictable revenue engine. But time is not a luxury that every company has, or believes it has.
Some companies just want leads.
And they want the leads now and they want them to be qualified to speak to a salesperson. And they would only like to pay for those leads that are qualified.
Having worked on both the client- and agency-sides of the demand gen industry, I can appreciate both why this request is made, and why it’s rarely, if ever, fulfilled exactly according to the client’s wishes. Someday I may bang out a post explaining this disconnect in greater detail, and what might be done to address it. But for now, I offer you instead:
TLOTL’s Quick-n-Dirty Resource Guide for B2B Firms That Just Want Leads (version 1.0)
The following is a starter list of resources that B2B firms can engage if they want to partially or fully outsource lead generation.
1) Appointment Setting Firms – These companies typically have their own databases, telemarketing staff, automation tools, and methodologies for delivering clients the specific outcome of an appointment for their sales person. Usually they will guarantee the result of “a person who matches your target buyer profile, who works at a firm that is in your target list / segment, and who is willing to take a call and/or have a visit from your sales person (usually it’s a phone call).”
2) Traditional Telemarketing Firms – most of us have gone this route at least once in our careers. Many telemarketing firms will also offer appointments as an outcome, but there is usually a greater investment on the part of the vendor to train the telemarketing firm’s reps on how to effectively position the offering.
3) Business Media Firms – these companies typically own targeted web properties that contain content (e.g., whitepapers, webinars, analyst briefs, user-generated articles, etc) related to specific business topic areas such as CRM, Financial Services, Telecom or other markets. The content attracts potential buyers/influencers and entices them to register (e.g., complete a web form) for access to that content. The media firm then sells these leads to several B2B vendors, typically on a per-lead basis.
4) Targeted List Providers – When compared to buying a compiled list from a name-brand business data firm or a direct marketing list broker, working with targeted list providers is generally better value for money. These firms use sophisticated software and database tools to build rich lists of business buyers and influencers, going several layers deeper than the C-suite and line-of-business heads. Then they layer on additional services that confirm if a particular person on a particular list is (a) still employed by the company in the list record, or (b) is responsible for a certain business process or purchasing function.
5) Boutique Demand Gen Agencies – These are often “virtual” agencies where seasoned marketers with client-side experience manage the delivery of demand gen firms such as those described above. This happens to be one of the ways I work with my clients; essentially serving in dual roles as purchaser of lists and/or leads, and pre-sales process manager, ensuring that lead conversion and pipeline growth targets are achieved. An example would be where I work with a business media firm or a targeted list provider to generate a high-quality list of “hand-raisers” or verified contacts and feed them into a telemarketing or appointment-setting firm. I add value by managing the quality of the list generated on the front end, and by holding the lead qualification firms accountable for a given quantity of qualified leads, as per my client’s specifications. Note: Some of these agencies also serve in a marketing/sales operations role generating incremental leads through tighter integration of the the vendor’s web marketing (SEO, SEM, social media) and CRM functions.
Two notable omissions from the list of resources above:
1) Traditional advertising agencies – In the context of considered purchases in B2B markets, I’m not aware of a traditional ad agency that wouldn’t ultimately leverage one or more of the above resources to generate qualified leads. To be sure, these firms add a lot of value in the areas of marketing strategy, branding, and positioning. I’m not against the Mad Men set – they are brilliant masters of their craft. But if you’re trying to get sales-ready leads to your sales team, and you buy through an ad agency, you’ll likely be paying a significant markup without commensurate added value.
2) Internal lead qualification team – For some companies, it makes sense to have internal pre-sales resources putting the final “qualified” stamp on a lead, even with all of the value that these external firms can add to the process. Soon I will be publishing a write up on when internal lead qualification team does and doesn’t makes sense. Stay tuned!
If you’re responsible for generating lead quantities in the thousands (or tens of thousands), in support of a sales team with revenue targets in the millions (or tens of millions), you probably already have a fairly well-developed analytical side. And work in the lead generation field provides an endless buffet of left brain delights like data mining, segmentation, A/B testing, campaign optimization, etc…. But in all of that analysis – as critical as it is to marketing success – it’s sometimes easy to forget that all those database records are real live people.
And if your plans involve generating leads at any significant scale, you will at some point (if you haven’t already) implement a marketing automation solution or service. Once you do that, you will have a very powerful weapon in your hand. But even a highly-skilled user of these platforms can do unintended harm if not guided by principles of an ideal customer experience, informed by a solid understanding of your nurture leads.
The leads in your nurturing process are unique in at least two ways:
a) In most cases, they’ve already “voted once” to engage your brand, either by completing a web form or otherwise making themselves known to you (e.g., trade show, chat, direct mail response, social media interaction, etc)
b) By definition, they are not yet ready to (seriously) talk to a salesperson.
These two attributes make these people different from any other buying constituency your marketing programs touch. Accordingly, your nurturing campaigns should reflect this difference. Considerable thought should be given to how you communicate to this group. Some of the factors to decide include:
transactional value: “First month free for a limited time! Call me!”
educational value: “I found this blog post that I thought you might like. Here’s the link.”
entertainment value: “While you consider my request for a meeting, I had my marketing team create this funny comic strip. Here’s a link. Enjoy!”
For many marketers, it helps to write out a brief defining how customers should be treated as they go through the nurturing process. Sales should contribute to the creation of this brief and it should be shared with anyone who creates content used in campaigns. Finely tuning these and other aspects of your nurturing program can not only make a big difference in conversion rates, it can strongly influence brand perception among those people who do NOT convert. And, at least in the short run, the non-converters will far outnumber the converters.
While marketing is ultimately tasked with delivering qualified leads to sales, it is also expected to represent the company effectively to the market writ large. These two objectives are complimentary. A well-designed nurturing program is mindful of the impression it leaves with all of the people it touches, which ultimately improves brand preference, and naturally attracts more buyers.
There are several ways lead nurturing can drive performance gains in your sales and marketing function. I’ll provide a few examples below as oversimplified and linear “cause -> effect” cases, with the obvious caveat that, in practice, there’s a fair amount of interplay between these causes and effects.
1) Improved service levels -> improved customer experience. Lead nurturing allows vendors to define a pre-determined program of follow up touches — which in most environments should include at least one phone call attempt — that guarantees each lead will receive the same baseline level of attention. These programs must be well-planned and executed. For example, the programs should factor in variables such as time zones, inside sales staffing levels, optimal email timing and deliverability, audience-appropriate copy treatment, relevant content and offers, 3rd party evidence, etc…. With these and other key factors addressed, vendors not only eliminate the rarely discussed but very real issue of leads “falling on the floor” but they also cost-effectively drive brand preference through a better customer experience than may be offered by their competition.
2) Improved pipeline intelligence -> better messaging and positioning. Most lead management platforms provide reporting and analytics capabilities that go beyond what is offered in pure play CRM platforms. These reporting tools especially reward those vendors who have enabled rich sets of lead profile data (e.g., lead source, campaign tracking codes, industry, annual revenue, employee counts, sales routing details, etc) to flow through their process. Not only do these enhanced data sets allow for more compelling lead scoring scenarios, they also bring valuable intelligence back to executives, sales, and marcom experts about the market segments are responding best to certain offers, promotions, content, or even individual sales people. Over time these diverse stakeholders can re-tool their approaches to mine the best segments for profitable pipeline and revenue growth.
3) Improved spend management -> better marketing ROI. As a result of points 1 and 2, lead nurturing allows marketers to more closely examine where they are (and aren’t) getting leverage in their marketing mix so they can confidently optimize performance. In many cases, the successful implementation of a lead management process allows vendors to either reduce marketing spend, or to re-deploy it “down-funnel” where it can drive specific outcomes that may be more valuable to your sales team than raw demand generation. One application of this is combine lead nurturing with appointment-setting from firms such as Green Leads or AG Salesworks. Another option for funds re-deployment is a 3rd-party-managed study of the “stuck in the funnel” lead population – those prospects who have yet to purchase a solution or opt out of nurturing communications, but who are not moving forward in the buying process. Many companies offering products with a high consideration factor lack a full understanding of their prospects’ buying process. A focused study of these latent, in-market prospects can deliver valuable insights that may not be revealed through a traditional win/loss analysis conducted “after the fact.”
Early in my career, I worked in sales at Concur Technologies (now called simply “Concur“) and had the opportunity to learn from some great sales leaders. I specifically remember a 1/2 day training session led by Tim Fitzgerald, who was then VP of North American Sales at Concur.
With all due respect to Miller Heiman, Dale Carnegie, and others of their ilk, I have to say I received more practical, directly applicable knowledge out of those 4 hours with Tim than I learned in any seminar course I ever attended.
Over the span of my career, as I’ve participated in numerous sales presentations from both the buy and sell sides, I’ve often been reminded about how there’s no substitute for the fundamentals. And in sales, like in sports, fundamentals are unfortunately most noticeable when they are not being followed.
I was reminded of this topic today when I answered this question on Focus.com: “What are your tips for the optimal sales presentation?“ Here is the answer I gave, which is perhaps 5% drawn from the original Fitzgerald course content, and 100% confirmed by my experiences over the ensuing 13 years.
1. Arrive 20-30 minutes early. Use the time to overcome the inevitable conference room / projector / IT issues. And if none of those issue exist, get a pre-brief from your vendor-side contact on how to best run the meeting. And if you don’t get time with your contact, use the time to mentally prepare / relax / meditate before you enter the ring. In sales, most of your money is made by executing well at key moments, like presentations. Give yourself the opportunity to execute well.
2. Manage the clock. Re-confirm when the meeting starts that you still have the time allotted with all the key people that you thought you did. 5 out of 10 times, a key decision maker / influencer has a “hard stop” 15-30 minutes earlier than you expected. If you can accomplish your objectives in this compressed window of time, you can be more productive in your next meeting (assuming you get another one).
3. Manage your crew. Make sure anyone who may be supporting you in the meeting knows exactly what they are there to do/say and what they should NOT do/say. If anyone on your team is dialing into the meeting, they should:
(a) be in a quiet place
(b) be using a good phone
(c) not be distracted by anything else, and
(d) not have any chat windows or other screen pops come up during the meeting (Web conference scenario only).
I had a hands-down market-leading software vendor selling to my company a couple of years ago. The sales person was unfortunately not adept at managing his resources, and what should have been an easy win for him became a drawn out affair because his demo failed and his team was not prepared for the meeting. When our CEO came into the meeting, the disorganization was obvious, and there was no opportunity for the sales rep to show why his company was the clear market leader. Instead, a lot of doubt was created that I, as the vendor advocate, had to manage through over the next several weeks.
These are just a few of the little things that, if left unmanaged, can completely derail a sales presentation, and detract from the actual business of selling.
Craig Rosenberg (aka @funnelholic) and Chris Jablonski (aka @cjablonski) and yours truly have cranked up the Guttenberg printing press once again and collaborated on “26 Reasons Your Leads Aren’t Converting into Opportunities.”
For anyone who is just starting to spend their company’s money buying demand, this list is a very handy set of lessons learned from people who’ve seen — and yes, sometimes have been the cause of – 90% of the misfires you can expect to encounter.
Below are my contributions to the list, but do yourself a favor and read the full list on Craig’s blog.
