Marketing and Sales Tip #24 - Just Shut Up and Tell Me What I Need to Know
Friday, September 28th, 2007Back to our favorite topic – writing—or, in this instance, writing for the Web. Ragan Communications recently posted 25 tips for busy Web site managers . In it they provided this very intriguing benchmark:
If you expect to get your content read today, you need to keep it very short. Memorize this table:
If you write. . . You’ve lost. . .
100 words 25% of your readers
300 words 40% of your readers
500 words 60% of your readers
1,000 words 80% of your readers
There are, of course, the other writing advisors who counsel that you need to provide all of the information a buyer needs to make a purchase right there on the page? Isn’t there a happy medium? This is the Web, after all. What do you think? How long should web copy be?
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #23 - Implement Lead Scoring for Better Marketing ROI
Thursday, September 27th, 2007One of the more popular sessions at Dreamforce last week was a case study on Lead Scoring presented by Eloqua’s Innovative Marketer blogger, Steve Gershik. The study averaged results reported by 10 companies six months before implementing lead scoring and six months afterward:
Leads Provided to Sales
- 6months before lead scoring - 1372
- 6 months after lead scoring- 1058
Opportunity Win Ratio
- 6 months before lead scoring - 31.3%
- 6 months after lead scoring - 40.9%
Revenue/Deal
- 6 months before lead scoring - $39,100
- 6 months after lead scoring - $45,900
Total Revenue
- 6 months before lead scoring - $16.8MM
- 6 months after lead scoring - $19.8MM
This shows what most B2B Marketers already know: lead scoring will result in passing fewer leads to Sales, but with higher quality leads Sales will have higher win rates and close more deals faster.
A little bragging here: At the same event, my company—NetQoS—took home the Eloqua Markies Award for our success in the area of Lead Scoring. We were given the Marketer’s Choice award for a solution to a problem that many wished they had – too many leads from a very success viral campaign and a Networkers trade show.
Using Eloqua, we automated lead processing to prioritize business opportunities buried within more than 6000 raw leads. This reduced the processing time of just the 3500 tradeshow leads from two-and-a-half weeks (in 2006) to just three days (in 2007). Just 2 months after the event, we’ve already closed revenue.
Here’s a few tips we can share on processing and scoring your leads:
- Use self-qualifying questions to gather and score explicit data-the information the prospect provides using your Web forms (ie. company size, title, job function, etc.).
- Take scoring to another level by using behavioral or implicit data you collect by observing lead behavior (ie. email clicks, visits to web pages, keyword searches, referral pages).
- Test adequately before deploying.
- Monitor and optimize at least quarterly.
Marketing and Sales Tip #22 - Forget Everything You Know About B2B Web Site Design
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007Our beloved advisor, Marketing Sherpa, has released a lengthy study on B2B Web Site Home Page design. The researchers used eye-tracking and multi-site testing techniques to provide numerous lessons that most of us don’t have the budget to discover on our own. I highly recommend purchasing it and putting the lessons into action. Not convinced? Here are a few highlights from the study and some surprises:
- Don’t copy the big guys or your competitors when it comes to Web site layout. Always design with your user in mind.
- Here’s a big surprise (but it makes total sense when you think about it) - Having a sticky homepage is no longer the right goal. In the Sherpa tests, homepages with shorter average visit times generated more sales. Think of it as a table of contents – show people how to get to the information they need quickly.
- Fewer columns are better as people prefer to read down a list, similar to search engine results. However, you must beware of overly wide columns—do not use more than 65 characters of type across a line).
- Always use bullets, they receive much of the eye’s attention.
Marketing and Sales Tip # 21 - Optimize Your Video for SEO Results
Friday, September 21st, 2007While prepping for my upcoming presentation on Viral Marketing for the Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit, I ran across this excellent posting on http://seo-space.blogspot.com/2007/09/14-best-practices-and-tips-for-video.html. Here are three of the 14 best practices listed in the article:
- Make sure that your video clips are relevant and informative - For starters, ensure that your video provides useful and informative information. Videos that demonstrate step by step procedures are great, videos that express an opinion about a specific topic can be useful too. Videos that have nothing to do with your brand or service offering or are general or vague in nature will just confuse your audience.
- SEO Video Optimization Fundamental Tip #1: Give your video a Catchy Title - Video can be used to bring visitors to your site. One way to get users to view your video is to give it a catchy title that contains a related key phrase that is relevant to your product, service or brand.
- Use Video as a Portal to other Content on Your Site - Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and provide links back to related content and other videos on your site.
According to B2B Magazine, currently only 1% of the videos on YouTube are posted by businesses. But I can tell you from experience that viral video is a great tool for B2B Marketers for both brand awareness and demand generation. After I present the details at the B2B Summit, I’ll post a summary on how NetQoS executed a viral video campaign that generated over 66,000 YouTube views and more than $400,000 in opportunities.
Marketing and Sales Tip # 20 - Get Real-time Insight into Your Marketing and Sales Funnel
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007The folks at ReachForce have produced some terrific white papers and an ebook on the importance of Marketing and Sales funnel analysis. Now, the company is moving beyond just “talk” with a new software-as-a-service product that helps B2B Marketers analyze Sales wins to identify top market segments and target their campaigns at those segments. They are calling it ReachForce Insight, because it integrates with Salesforce.com to provide Marketers, like myself, with instant insight into the flow of “deals” through the Marketing and Sales funnel or pipeline.
In the interests of full disclosure, I am an advisor for the company, in addition to being a long-term customer. One of the perks associated with this role is that I get early access and input into new products. I’ve been beta testing the product for about a month now and (as I said in the quote included in the press release) I’ve found this product to be an important tool for aligning my Marketing programs with Sales.
I used it initially to identify the vertical markets in which Sales is closing the most deals, and then to build a list of other companies in those markets who are not currently my customers. I then selected the “Add Contacts” button in the product to initiate a contact discovery project to cleanse and augment that list. Less than a week later, I had my list and am using it for a very targeted multi-modal campaign.
The jury is still out on whether these leads and this campaign will perform better than other types of campaigns. Both our Sales and Marketing groups are keeping a close eye on them as we hope to use ReachForce to keep a steady lead flow in the pipeline, to ramp up new territories quickly, and to replace some other more costly, less-effective campaigns.
And, kudos to ReachForce. It’s nice to see a company walk the walk, instead of talking the talk.
How to Alienate Even the Most Loyal Customers
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007To be fair, this has nothing to do with B2B Marketing but it is a cautionary tale applicable to anyone in the business of customer loyalty. Steve Jobs recently slashed the price of iPhones by from $599 to $399 only 2 months after loyal customers waited in long lines to buy a phone. This prompted an outcry and loads of negative publicity. Kudos to Jobs, however, for taking this step to make it right:
Marketing WTF? - I See Dead People – In My Database
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007Every B2B Marketer has struggled with the problem of bad data. As it turns out, even companies in the business of selling database technology have the same issues. One such company’s Marketing Programs group attempted a direct mail database cleanup project using the old Return to Sender trick. They were quickly inundated with stacks of returned direct mailers. In fact, they had so many returned that they had to hire a team of temps to remove all of the bad records from their marketing database. They even found one stamped “Recipient Deceased”.
Talk about hitting the wrong target market.
When Sales Guys Try to Market
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007OK readers of The B2B Lead, we know you all have one of these stories so send ‘em my way. There’s nothing we enjoy more than a good laugh at bad Marketing ideas submitted by Sales. Just to be fair, we’d also like to hear how Marketers have derailed Sales Deals with poorly timed promotions.
This just in from a colleague: Brace yourself–I got an email from Sales asking for a campaign to promote the “visibility” our product using get this: if you aren’t using Product X you’re “legally blind.” Maybe we could include a pair of dark sunglasses? WTF!!?!!!
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #19 – B2B Marketing Dashboard Must-Haves
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007Accountability is the new black for B2B Marketers these days. And, there’s nothing more powerful than a Web-based dashboard with gauges that are “in the green” and trend lines that are “up and to the right” to give you instant credibility. It certainly helps you secure approval for that $30,000 t-shirt order.
For the small to mid-sized company with tight budgets and resources, however, Marketing performance measurement presents unique challenges. Unlike larger enterprises, these organizations often lack the budget and resources to conduct sophisticated analysis and tracking. Yet, with a proven roadmap and Software as a Service offerings such as Salesforce.com, it is possible for Marketing and Sales to work together to produce impressive dashboards to monitor key performance indicators including the efficiency and velocity of leads as they move through the Marketing and Sales funnel.
As part of a CMO Council Marketing Performance Measurement certification course, I documented a multi-phased approach to building an effective Marketing Dashboard. Here’s an example of Phase 1:
Establishing Marketing Campaign KPI:
- Development of timeline and project plan.
- Marketing department meetings to determine goals and define measures of success. This includes both top KPI for real-time reporting and other metrics for detailed Campaign analysis and twice yearly reporting.
- Meetings with CRM business analyst to determine availability of data that was needed to determine measure of success and capabilities of CRM system for displaying this data.
- Interviews with functional stakeholders to ensure agreement and buy-in for top Marketing Campaign KPI. These stakeholders were from the Sales and Marketing department as well as executive management including:
- Vice President/Director of Marketing
- Vice President of Sales
- Director of Inside Sales
- Product Marketing
- Business Analysts
- Marketing Communications Department
We will discuss more on Phase 2 of this project later. But first, what are we missing here? Do you have an example of how you secured agreement on core Marketing Dashboard elements and KPI that improved Marketing Performance Measurement for your organization?
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #18 - Avoid being called a SPAMer
Monday, September 10th, 2007Be Compliant
- Make sure your entire physical address is at the bottom of your marketing emails
- Make sure you offer your recipients a way to unsubscribe from your mailing list
- Ensure HTML content complies with standards
Preserve your Reputation
- Stagger your mailings
- Choose subject lines carefully
- Carefully track unsubscribes, bouncebacks and opt-ins
- Make it easy for the recipient to get in touch with you
- Use email service provider for more automation
Be Careful when Creating Content
- Make sure your not using a spam buzz word – check here
- Use capitalization sparingly
- Minimize use of “click here” or “click below”
- Watch your punctuation
- Use simple HTML, No Javascript
- Use web-safe colors only
- Reduce use of large fonts and characters
- Avoid “remove” in unsubscribe language
- Keep file size under 70K
