Event budgets are typically pretty spongy. They are usually handed out in lump amounts with very little success measures put in place around these events. Here are a few ideas to drive real leads from event spend.
Make sure each person attending the event has goals assigned to them. Some examples include– X # of people scanned, X # of demos, X # of conversations had outside of the company booth, # of business cards collected. Use a little budget for prizes for the winners.
Assign someone or a group of people to visit every other company participating in the event. You obviously have something in common, you are at the same event. Challenge team members to get other companies to drive traffic your way. Again, give away prizes to the company that sends the most people your way. Good use of $$ here, not only are you getting a chance to meet people who may not have stopped by to see you, you are also starting a new relationship with your forwarding friend.
Ask each person that stops by your booth about the person responsible for using/buying your product or service. Give away another prize here to the team member that gets not only a name but also contact information and a referral from the person attending the show.
If you have partners attending a show, put together a program that encourages people to visit your partner’s booth and vice versa.
Once you return from an event and are getting ready to hand the warm and hot leads over to sales, STOP. Remember if you are passing a lead on there should be some additional information that goes along with the lead. Information that deems it Sales-ready. For these leads, use a little event budget and incent the Sales team to push these leads and to keep you posted on their progress. Everyone likes to be rewarded, a little piece of your event budget for prizes and everyone wins.
Leads that aren’t Sales ready, divide those into 2 groups – those that you have the right decision makers name and possible contact info. These people are ready for a very targeted marketing program. For those that you only have the information of the person that stopped by and visited you at the show, invest in contact discovery for these. It’s worth the extra dollars to be able to turn otherwise dead event data into an actionable lead. These newly discovered leads will then be ready for your targeted marketing programs.
Don’t forget to keep up with your spend. You’ll need this to calculate your ROI. You’ll also want to use this info. to measure the new tactics you are trying out.
Tag event leads in your CRM system. This information will be used for follow up, for continued marketing with relevant messaging, and most importantly it’s needed to measure ROI of the event.
Got any more creative event spend ideas? Please share.
As a student of Geoffrey Moore’s best-selling books Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend a VIP reception with Moore at the TEXCHANGE June meeting. I was particularly excited by the topic of Moore’s presentation “Provocation-Based Selling” because of my long history of launching tech startups.
Moore has made the study of disruptive technologies the focus of his books and research. His insights on marketing and selling breakthrough products have shaped my strategies for so many companies and I’m sure his new insights on selling disruptive products in a down economy will be no different.
Moore set the stage for his presentation by making the important point that when you are selling disruptive technologies there is no budget allocation for your product. Prospective customers may love your product, but when there is no money available for discretionary spending, you have to help the buyer create budget before you can sell them.
He advocates a combination of referral marketing and provocation-based selling to help startups break into markets that are structured to favor incumbents. You have to use referral marketing to get the meeting with the Line of business (LOB) executive who has the authority to move budget around. And, then, use provocation-based selling to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about the impact of “not doing” something about it.
On the Referral marketing front, Moore advises companies to directly target the company, learn about the LOB executive, then seek out a common connection to get referred for a meeting. For me, services such as ReachForce have helped me map out the LOB execs in an organization, but I augmented it with products like LinkedIn and Facebook to find common connections.
Often, your business partners will be the key to getting a referral. Building out a referral program for these partners has always been an excellent way to motivate them to make the introduction or even take you along on a sales call. Of course, it’s always helpful if you can provide those business partners with a compelling reason to put you in front of their buyers. For example, maybe you could offer training or educational materials on a topic that helps them sell more products as well.
Once you’ve nailed that all important meeting, Moore advises that you sell them on the fact that they have a serious problem and determine what type of buyer they are:
conservatives: convince them you can save them money
pragmatics: give them the symptoms you believe they might have in their company of a serious problem your product solves
visionary: show how your product will set them apart and open up tremendous new opportunities to pursue
Then, ask them to make a commitment that if you show them that your solution can benefit them, they will take the action to make budget available. Press them for a commitment. If you’re not convinced, then disqualify them.
As I was getting ready to start building out a few landing pages for some newsletter advertising I decided to Google landing page best practices. As expected, lots of both organic and paid options came up. I noticed Marketo had an ad out there, so I clicked on it. I’ve seen their stuff before and was very impressed, so I thought I’d start here with my landing page inquiry. After a few clicks I got to an eBook – “Building Effective Landing Pages”. This eBook had some great tips that were B2B Lead worthy so I wanted to share and give Marketo a shout out too. You can get this great eBook as well as others at http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/best-practices.php. For now, here’s a few tips that really stood out:
1. Focus on a single call to action, such as a download or a demo. Distractions kill conversions.
This is really important; offering too much information muddies the waters. You want your call-to-action to stand out. Remember we are not trying to complete a sale via an email program. We are educating our prospects and highlighting pain points in bite size chunks. Warming leads up to better qualify them for Sales.
2. Content – Give it to them straight.
Make it clear and to the point, but give your prospect a reason to give you his information.
Setup the problem
Talk about the solution (your offer)
Deliver the goods (such as a white paper, video demo or webinar registration)
And use bullet points - they are easier to read
Emails seem to be most effective when they are 2-3 short paragraphs with a link to a landing page/offer as close to the top as possible. Remember a lot of people view emails in a preview pane. This may be your only opportunity to present your message, so make sure you get straight to the point.
3. Call to Action – Forms – Remember not to ask too many questions up front.
You don’t need everything they first time a prospect engages with you. Remember you are building a relationship. Collect more information as the prospect continues on the journey with you.
4. Confirmation/ Thank Yous - It’s just plain good manners to say thank you. Do you have something else they might be interested in? Make another offer.
I think this might be one of the most important tips on the list. Saying Thank You never goes out of style. And, I agree with Marketo, put another offer out there, see if they bite. Taking you up on a second offer could be a sign of a cold lead moving to warm.
5. Page URLs - The name of the page, along with the rest of the URL path, is weighed fairly heavily. You can use 1024 characters, so you don’t have to be stingy. And use dashes between words, not underscores – search engines like that better.
Marketo example: www.marketo.com/building-effective-landing-pages.html
Don’t forget your Google juice with every landing page you build. Remember to use your PPC keywords here too.
Social Media is one of the hottest topics in B2B Marketing right now. I interviewed a variety of marketers at MarketingProfs B2B Forum. Check out this video to see what marketers from Marketo, HubSpot, Manticore, Enspire Learning and IDC have to say. See how they answered the following questions:
Do you participate in social media both personally and professionally?
How do you think social media is changing B2B PR strategies?
In the first half of the B2B Lead blog series on 12 Ways to Turn 300 Webinar Attendees Into 3,000+, I shared 6 tips for getting the most out of your webinar. I recommended that you start by getting into the right mindset. It is important to realize that webinars are just another part of “the conversation” you are having with your customers and the community as a whole. Think about using them as a way to keep the relationship alive, build a community of followers, to spark group discussions or change the way people think about an issue.
In today’s post covering tips 7-12, I’m going way out on a limb to suggest some other cutting-edge practices that a new generation of B2B marketers are using.
7. Turn your webinar into a twebinar –a webinar and Twitter mash-up where conversations take place in real-time before, during and after the webinar, on Twitter. Twitter is a great way to spread the word before the day of the webinar, and an even better way to facilitate Q&A or capture suggestions during and afterward.
8. Don’t wait to reach out and engage with registered attendees. Contact those who registered early to offer more information and continue the conversation. Some ideas for this include sharing a white paper on a relevant topic, distributing event materials or research findings. Bulldog Solutions claims that this will enable you to engage with 10 % of the registrants before the webinar takes place.
9. Pick one core slide that is most intriguing or highlights your core content. Draft a few soundbites around the slide and excerpt the content for a Podcast. Embed the slide image and podcast in a press release or on your community site. Use this to market the archived or “on-demand” version of the webinar.
10. Don’t forget to promote your webinar series via all of the programs you are normally producing including: trade shows, press releases, PPC search engine ads, web pages including your home page, community, blog and customer support pages.
11. Continue the conversation on your blog by using it for Q&A. If your material is good, the Q&A segment can produce lots of great content. Take the conversation to your Community area to show prospects all of the materials they can find there. This will help you keep a loyal audience.
12. It’s officially the “Remix Era,” so take the materials you developed for the webinar, remix them and post where appropriate. Issue a press release with highlights embedded. Transcribe and post the content as a contributed article on Hub pages or Scribd. Syndicate the archived event on sites like On24.
I’m really interested to hear what you have found to be successful on the Webinar marketing front. Is a twebinar really effective? Do attendees really convert to blog readers? Can you effectively engage with registrants before they attend the Webinar? Chime in with your thoughts.
When I attended MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2008 in Boston last week, I took along my flipcam to ask leading marketers some leading questions. I plan to share my findings with you over my next few posts. I interviewed attendees and sponsors to find out their views on the conference and several B2B Marketing hot topics.
To start things off, I asked, “What was the best thing you have learned at MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2008?” Watch the short video below to see the answers and you might just learn something yourself.
I also interviewed several of the sponsors to find out what is the biggest pain point they solve for B2B Marketers. Here are the responses from Marketo, Manticore and HubSpot:
Although I didn’t get a chance to get to interview them all, other great sponsors included AG Salesworks, Eloqua, Business.com, Aquent, Boston Business Journal, Emma, The Kern Organization, Near Time, NowSpeed Marketing, UnisFair, VisitorTrack and Vtrenz.
Do you know your best customers? Can you easily identify your sweet spot-the vertical markets in which you sell the most or the fastest? Are there other business buyers in your sweet spot that you should be targeting? If you can’t answer these questions but wish you could, follow the five steps below to gain insight into your sales funnel.
Five Steps to Effective Laser-Targeted Lead Generation Using Sales Win Analysis
The following five-step process gives you a roadmap for fast and efficient Sales Wins Analysis. By following this path, you will be able to eliminate false starts and quickly identify top performing vertical markets so that you can execute laser focused programs that produce a higher response rate, more sales conversions and faster pipeline velocity.
Step 1: Review and categorize the opportunities in your Marketing and Sales pipeline.
Effective Sales Wins Analysis begins with a thorough review of your Marketing and Sales pipeline including open opportunities and closed deals from current and previous years. By analyzing both the size of the deals, as well as the velocity of those deals as they move through the pipeline, and categorizing those deals into distinct market sectors, you can begin to identify markets that are producing the most revenue for your organization. To get started, compile customer account data from your CRM system and build a data model that answers the following questions:
In which vertical market segments am I closing the most deals?
In which vertical market segments are deals closing the fastest?
What other vertical market segments share similar characteristics?
Step 2: Build a profile of your top accounts.
After identifying the most lucrative target markets for your product or service, you will want to discover additional prospect accounts in those markets with characteristics that are similar to your best buyers. These prospects will undoubtedly have the highest propensity to buy from you, so target your Lead Generation programs at this group first. Consider the following when building your profile:
Qualification Criteria: Profile your best customers to define a set of three to five common characteristics that will serve as qualifying criteria for identifying new prospects. Look at company revenues, locations, number of employees and other easy to find data. Do most of your customers fall into the Fortune 1000-size range? Are more deals closing faster in the Small and Medium-size business sector? Is the number of employees a critical success factor? Are there key trends you can identify in certain industries that are driving the need for your product? For example, you may find that you close more deals quickly with organizations that have revenue greater than $500,000,000 USD and global operations with a minimum of five locations. If so, use these as minimum qualification criteria for selecting your new prospects in your best vertical markets. Then make sure you capture this type of data for all new leads so that you can better qualify the leads you provide to Sales.
The Customer Buy Cycle: Next, map the buy cycle for your best customers to identify and describe the roles and responsibilities for the decision-maker, economic buyer, end-user, and other key players in the buying process. The number of roles depends upon the number of people typically involved in the buying process. You’ll want to understand their roles both in the buying cycle and within the organization. Make sure you phone screen a sample of these targets to understand the responsibilities for each of your buyers. This will give you the insight to produce high impact Marketing messages and a strong call to action for your multi-modal Marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Identify additional target accounts in your top markets.
You now have a blueprint of the best possible prospects for your business. Apply that blueprint to the universe of buying organizations in your top vertical markets to hand pick the best possible targets for your Direct Marketing campaigns. While these companies have not yet purchased from you, they share many of the same characteristics of your best customers, and therefore will likely have a higher propensity to purchase your products or services.
Step 4: Conduct Contact Discovery to identify the right buyers in your target accounts.
With your target Accounts list compiled, you’ll need to identify prospects in the right roles within these companies. Make sure you verify more than just contact information and titles. To ensure you are getting to the right buyers as quickly as possible, identify your prospective buyers by their role in the organization and more importantly the buying process. Survey a sample of your contacts on their pain points, decision drivers, triggers, and trusted information sources. Gather as much information as you need to capture your prospects’ attention and communicate your value to them.
Step 5: Execute a multi-modal marketing campaign to deliver the right message to the right buyers.
Multi-modal Direct Marketing involves a carefully executed campaign that delivers targeted messages to buyers using their preferred means of communication. Not all buyers like to receive product information in precisely the same way, so it’s best to tailor your messages based on your buyers’ preferences. In fact, a recent Marketing Sherpa research project surveying 3000 IT buyers and vendors demonstrated that B2B Decision-makers or Executive-level buyers prefer to learn more about products via Webinars, whereas Contributors or End-users prefer white papers. Map out and execute your multi-modal campaign focusing on key vertical pain points with messages that appeal to each of your target roles. Start with an offer that requires a low commitment to respond like a white paper download and work your way up to a more involved call to action such as a product demo.
Ongoing Marketing and Sales Pipeline Monitoring
With this five-step process for Sales Win analysis, you’ll be able to laser-target your Lead Generation programs to produce more impressive Marketing metrics, align your demand generation programs with Sales, and improve your funnel efficiency by driving greater revenue faster. Keep in mind, however, that just as customers and markets evolve, your Marketing programs must transform accordingly. This is why it is important to conduct Sales Wins Analysis at least quarterly so that you can monitor your pipeline closely to uncover new opportunities and spot trends. Maintaining visibility into your Marketing and Sales funnel will give you the insight you need to boost Marketing results and revenue.
All of this sound a bit daunting? No worries, check out our Insight Lite product on the salesforce.com AppExchange:
Or Schedule a Demonstration of ReachForce Insight Pro version and analyze not only your customer win data but also in funnel opportunities for trends.
This week’s Marketing Profs B2B Forum has been an enlightening experience. Not only have I picked up a few great social media ideas and techniques (thank you Erickson Barnett), but I’ve started to shift the way I think about the role of traditional Marketing techniques in our Web 2.0 world. In this case, I’m referring to Webinars–that old staple of lead generation for B2B Marketers.
So, as I prepared for my presentation on Webinars in a Web 2.0 world, I came up with a list of tips for producing and promoting webinars or really any form of educational content. Thought I’d share them with you in a 2 part post. Here are the first 6 tips. Feel free to chime in with any others that I missed.
Start by getting into the right mindset to make the most of your webinar. It is important to realize that webinars are just another part of “the conversation” you are having with your customers and the community as a whole. So stop thinking about marketing them like an event. Think about using them as a way to keep the relationship alive, build a community of followers, to spark group discussions or change the way people think about an issue.
Next, package the webinar to make promoting it more successful. You might consider breaking it into a series of webinars to be held every 6 weeks to keep your followers interested in what you have to say. Produce complimentary content such as white papers, assessments, tools, etc. that you can email to registrants.
When you draft the promotional copy, remember to write for your target personae. Use simple, but compelling language. Drive home the WIIFM (What’s In It for Me) message. NOTE: You should also use the right words in your copy. Use Google Trends to see which terms your audience is using to search. For example: the word “webcast” is searched for far more often than the word “webinar.”
Here’s another important tip for packaging your webinar. Post your slides prior to the day of the webinar so people will have a good idea of the content you will cover. Several years ago, I engaged in a survey with Webtorials to assess the effectiveness of podcasts vs. webinars and understand why – for my company—customers responded better to webinars. The key: the slides. Funny, how people love to hate PowerPoint, but when it came down to it, they really needed the slides for comprehension to assess whether they wanted to spend a precious 30 to 45 minutes listening in.
Use social media to trigger viral distribution of your invitation. Identify a list influencers, reach out and ask them to help you spread the word about your webinar. Use Twitter to tap the influencers with a large following and “direct message” them. Post to Facebook groups interested in the topic. And, share with your LinkedIn network. After all, you are offering a service to these folks – the opportunity for free education on a topic of interest.
Post your slides using slide sharing sites to get your content in front of people who are actively seeking content/education. If your slides are crafted well, you will trigger what the authors of Made to Stick call the “pain of knowledge gaps” which should entice the viewer to tune in to your webinar.
And, speaking of knowledge gaps, there’s more to come in the next post with 6 clever ways to get additional mileage out of the actual content you produce.
As I read this all I can say is I DON’T get this at all. Then who are these marketers aligned with? “Intermittent relations and interactions” – sounds like a dysfunctional relationship. Should we start “couples counseling” for sales and marketing teams? I am not saying that they should hold hands and sing kum-ba-yah just be aligned on the “ground attack marketing” that is being done specifically like – events, demand/lead generation, SEM, etc. Isn’t sales (or any other revenue generation organization) in their business the customer of these marketers? Most B2B companies spend 70% or more of their budgets on those initiatives.
How aligned are you with sales? Do you share more than 50% of the goals each quarter/year? Are your bonuses tied to new customer wins? Up-sold dollars to current customers? I am very curious (or just hopeful that is 80% non-alignment is way off).
Palo Alto, Calif.—The majority of marketers lag in their ability to closely align sales and marketing, according to a new study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council.
According to an online survey of 506 sales and marketing professionals, 55% of respondents said their companies have not yet implemented formal programs, systems or processes for unifying sales and marketing functions.
Fewer than 20% of respondents said their sales and marketing organizations are extremely collaborative, while more than half said the two groups had intermittent relations and interactions.
Also, about half of respondents said they had trouble finding customer account data, did not have enough information or had none at all.
The survey was conducted by the CMO Council and the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE).
—Kate Maddox
My biggest takeaway from this book was that the Japanese see everyone in the company as marketers and that often they do no even employ a marketing department. (Not to self: must find new career if moving to Japan) I think that this can be applied to any B2B company. I know here at ReachForce we have multiple departments working directly with customers and other than writing case studies, I have very little interaction with customers. We do obviously have current customer programs, as evidenced by this book club, but our sales, operations and customer success management teams are really on the front lines and know the most about what our customers and prospects think about us.
As marketers, we should use this to our advantage. We should empower those customer facing teams to know what we are doing in marketing and make sure they are well educated on any upcoming product launches. They can then in turn empower our customers with this information. These teams are also a useful source for gathering feedback. They can be especially helpful in determining new products and features. Developing personaes is very popular right now and they are the best source to tell you about your customers. Knowing as much information as possible about your customers will not only help you to further develop those relationships but to also help you find more prospects that match their profile.
Did you have any takeaways from this chapter or have any personal experience working with Japanese companies?
