Marketing’s number one job should be lead generation with measurable impact to top-line revenue, right? I bet that’s what most CEOs and Sales Executives would say. So why do other departments still think of us as the ones who order the t-shirts and go to cool events? And these are the nice comments made, ask a few sales guys what they think of marketing and I’m sure you’ll get a variety of not so nice answers.

According to the CMO Council, 38% of CMOs say that aligning and integrating sales and marketing is a top priority this year. But, only 30% have a clear process or program to make this priority a reality. I think the real question here is - why is it only a priority for 38%?

For Marketing to have a clear impact on revenue, they must be aligned with Sales. I believe there are three important factors for healthy Marketing and Sales alignment:

1. Marketing’s goals (and bonuses) are tied to the same goals as Sales – e.g. bookings and new customers acquired
2. Clear definition of a lead and when leads should be passed to Sales
3. A closed loop process that allows Sales teams to push leads not ready for Sales back to Marketing for ongoing nurture programs.

When Sales and Marketing share the same goals, they have to work together. Neither will be successful if they do not communicate openly and collaborate to reach their goals. The breakdown typically starts with the definition if a lead. With Sales constantly asking for more leads, it is no wonder that many Marketers are forced to get new contacts any way they can (website registrations, event attendees or just buying a list) and then just throw them over the wall to Sales. More is better, right? Not necessarily in this case. Instead, Marketers should warm all new contacts through an email, direct mail or webinar campaign to gauge their “sales readiness”. This enables Sales to focus on only the warm/hot leads while Marketing continues to educate those that aren’t ready to buy just yet. Through this process Marketing should also be able to weed out companies and contacts that are not a fit for the business allowing for more productivity and efficiency on your sales team.

The ideal scenario is to build a funnel together with Sales and define the stages of it and the specific hand-off point of a lead – a unified funnel is the ONLY approach to creating a win-win for the business.

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Contributed by Cody Young, ReachForce Consultant

I came across an interesting post by Jeff Liebl on Performance Insider blog. The post proposed the notion of have a third-party scoring system for leads similar to FICO scoring. The potential pitfalls expressed in Jeff’s write-up about buying leads from online sources are well founded. And while conversation about scoring lead data in a way similar to FICO is interesting, the real value I see is the more practical and tactical thoughts he provokes about lead data quality in general.

First and foremost, the concept of establishing FICO-like rules for scoring individual lead quality while lists are being bought and sold shouldn’t be an edict for marketers to sit and wait for. Market forces are already making it happen in the B2B space (at companies like ReachForce) – and yes, it is having real effect on price models and competition between lead source vendors.

The most important element of any marketing effort is specifying the target – and you can’t really do that effectively by just ‘buying a list.’ Today’s marketing must be managed by understanding how sales funnels work and how buyers buy.

This puts a very special responsibility in the hands of all marketers to view this as filling up on ‘funnel fuel’ –not ‘list buying.’ Sadly, Jeff’s spot-on reference to “numerous reports of fraudulent and bad-quality leads” is a disturbing indicator that too many are still in line with the wasteful standard that marketing’s job is to buy lists and busy themselves sending out emails and letters for 2% response rates.

Buying data to feed sales funnels can best be compared to buying fuel – and from sludgy-crude to jet fuel, a wide range of grades exist. That being said, it should not surprise anyone that as new sales and marketing automation engines expose better ways to find, keep and grow customers, jet fuel is going to win the race every time.

Once high quality funnel fuel is secured, predictive modeling does not have to be a complex, budget busting ordeal. A simple way to start is by ranking a single-value to measure each prospect in a simple, but highly relevant way. These are what Dr. Eric Siegel calls ‘predictors’ in his short but informative article entitled Predictive Analytics with Data Mining: How It Works.

He draws a simple example using “recency” as a predictor (based on how long it’s been since a customer’s last purchase) and assigns higher point values for more recent customers. This simple analysis drives a very obvious prediction (you can probably guess) that contacting the customers in order of recency – calling the high scores first and the low score last – will result in better response rates.

Expanding on this, other predictive indicators and rules can be introduced to formulate smarter and smarter models as you go. The next example is to combine two predictors into a formula: recency + personal income. And if one of the predictors is more important to you than the other (by rule) then its weight is adjusted accordingly – e.g. 2 x recency + personal income.

Once you are able to score your database this way (or just parts of it for starters) using predictors that best fit your needs, the ability to target and finesse top scoring leads with highly relevant and personalized communication is enhanced – thus, increasing the probability that you can drive a prospect’s behavior and not just predict it (as with FICO scores).

A lot of the better marketers I know like this approach because it is not that complex and is the least costly, most deliberate way to drive sales revenue. After all, it really just keys on another formula that comes to mind: 2 x quality funnel fuel + targeted and personalized communications = high response.

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Note the perspective in this blog bite assumes the following: Lead generation is about delivering high quality targeted opportunities to sales to accelerate revenue.

I have spent several years people complain about the following:
Sales: Marketing does not know what they are doing, their leads are bad
Marketing: Sales is not smart enough to follow-up on our leads

The crux of the problem, in my view is the definition of a lead and metrics that are used to measure marketing success. My opinion 2 things you should consider:

1. Get WRITTEN down buy-in from sales on definition of a lead
2. Compensate marketing not on generating volume of leads but the number of leads that sales “accepts” – based on #1 (compensation tied to revenue is ALSO key)

So what is a lead?
I like this framework- one to start with then adapt for your business:

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I’ve just begun working on Part II of the Funnelnomics book I co-wrote with ReachForce CEO, Suaad Sait. The new section is on B2B market micro-segmentation. Specifically, I want to detail the possibilities and a process for using automated pipeline analysis to slice your target market into smaller and smaller markets with common interests/needs. Then use marketing automation to deliver more relevant messages to those markets to drive Marketing ROI. Sort of like Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (http://www.longtail.com/) for B2B Marketing. (Still not totally sure this analogy applies, but you get the point, I hope.)

In a recent post on The B2B Lead (Get Real-time Insight into Your Marketing and Sales Funnel) I wrote about how I am using ReachForce’s new salesforce.com add-on to get real-time insight into my funnel or pipeline. Initially, I used it to spot our top vertical markets and then identify other companies that met our target market criteria. Now, I’m experimenting with using it to conduct some experiments in micro-segmentation. So, I want to see how I can use it to…

1. See which campaigns are producing high velocity leads—those leads that move through the funnel fastest and invest more marketing dollars in those campaigns.
2. Drill into the pipeline to identify trends in certain geographies and then identify additional opportunities within those geographies.
3. Identify bottlenecks—stages of the funnel where leads from a particular campaign are stuck so that I can move those leads along with tailored communications or timed offers.
4. And, last—perhaps—but not least, I recently realized that I can now spot gaps or “problem spots” in the funnel so I can actually tell Sales reps in a particular territory that they don’t have enough leads to meet their revenue number. Imagine that! Marketing telling Sales that they don’t have enough leads.

I’m absolutely fascinated by the possibilities of using automation to deliver more targeted/relevant campaigns to smaller and smaller markets. This would improve your response rates since the message and the offer would be more relevant to the market. It should also enable you to dramatically improve the efficiency and velocity of the funnel (ie. my funnelnomics). You could conceivably manage your funnel almost like a manufacturing process squeezing out inefficiencies as they became obvious. Plus, the reduced costs required to deliver more targeted messages—instead of spraying them to a broad audience—should ensure Marketing ROI will be higher.

So, these immediate rewards are pretty obvious. But what about the longer term effects of smarter, more relevant Marketing techniques on the practice of Marketing as a whole? Is it possible that this approach will take some of the heat off of today’s B2B Marketers who are criticized for being self-important Spammers who spray their messages out to target markets without bothering to understand what is appropriate for the buyer? I mean this video (B2B Marketing WTF: The Breakup) says it all, doesn’t it?

It remains to be seen if taking this type of approach can help Marketers penetrate the Teflon-like resistance of most buyers toward traditional marketing efforts. But Facebook, for one, is already unveiling its own version. Should be a good barometer to watch to see how actual users are reacting to this newly introduct ad targeting concept http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/22/facebook-experiments-with-ads-targeting-peoples-interests/.

It seems to me that if the content B2B Marketers deliver is truly relevant, it could become welcome content. However, if the ad platform enforces a sort of intimacy—yet the “content” still resembles advertising—it puts everyone in a very uncomfortable position.
Esther Dyson made a great point about this at the Defrag conference when she proposed that Marketers give users disclosure messages that are personalized http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6892 . She said that she wasn’t sure about personal rights, just that individuals have the right to demand to be made happy by whatever service they use.

Will micro-targeting make users happy? Will Facebook’s ad platform actually add value? Those are the real questions for Marketers to figure out. But I, for one, am excited by the possibilities. Stay tuned for more developments on the subject. Or, better yet, share your 2 cents.

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Google AdWords can be a B2B Marketer’s dream, when leveraged and implemented properly. Not only can AdWords programs produce leads quickly, but those leads move through the funnel quickly and they cost less than traditional marketing programs. Or at least it feels like they cost less when you can spec a CPC of .50 to $1.00 per lead.

But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg, say the Search Engine Marketing experts at Apogee Search Marketing. They report business-to-business marketers can expect to spend anywhere from $85 to $100 per lead for Google Search Engine Marketing efforts. At NetQoS, we have a very successful Google AdWords program, but our cost per qualified lead runs at least $60.

When you’re spending that kind of money to generate leads, you really need a program designed to help you convert the junk leads to real opportunities. In the B2B Marketing world, in particular, it is likely that a large percentage of the people responding to your AdWords ads are researchers who are supporting a buying committee. Often, it is an assistant, a competitor or a Seymore, one of those guys whose job is to ask “can I see more?” but never to purchase.

ReachForce’s Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook advises Marketers to resist the urge to turn these leads over to Sales your Sales funnel, slowing down Sales productivity. That’s actually a best case scenario. The more likely scenario- is that Sales is simply tagging these leads “unqualified” before ever picking up the phone leading to gaping leaks in your funnel. These leads are really only seeds—an early indication that corporate buyers are in need of a solution like yours and are in research mode. That’s why it is vital to investigate these seeds thoroughly before handing them over to Sales. Before you do, you should have answers to questions such as what is the buyer need, is budget allocated, who else in the organization is charged with investigating solutions, who is the decision-maker, and what is the timeframe for purchase.

Read more about this topic in the ReachForce Funnelnomics Marketing ebook or in their white paper entitled, Making the Invisible Visible - Accelerate SEM Leads To Revenue.

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It’s that time of year again. Time to pull out the spreadsheets and start the painful process of ’08 marketing planning and budgeting. For me, it’s actually not that painful. First of all, I know exactly how many leads it takes to produce the qualified leads that it takes to generate the meetings that it will take to produce a certain amount of revenue. So, with that handy benchmark, I can easily estimate the number of leads I’ll need to generate to meet our ’08 revenue objectives. I also have an average cost per lead in mind so I can calculate the costs, but finding the actual media or events that I need to make my leads goals is another challenge that I typically address with contact discovery services.

Anyway, back to budgeting. I have other business objectives, as well, including brand awareness and support company operations. Unfortunately, those areas are not as well defined, and they don’t come with a formula for success. So, it got me to thinking: how do most B2B Marketers actually create their budget and how often is that budget really reasonable for supporting business objectives? I ran across this very compelling entry by Allen Silveri at The B2B Blog. He writes:

“Start with a clean slate and focus on the important sales and profit drivers for the company now, next year, and the years beyond. First you need to truly understand company goals and the market reality. This requires open and frank conversations with the CEO and President on their vision and objectives (both short-term and long-term) for the company. Next involves in-depth discussions and alignment with sales management and the sales force to determine what the frontline troops are facing and the support they desire to quicken sales cycles and increase their productivity.

Talking to several other department heads for a cross-section perspective of the company situation and goals is also recommended.Now that you have consensus from key players about what your company wants to do, you need to hold that up to the light of inspection based on the reality of what the market understands and will accept. This market-up approach enables you to discover, confirm, and/or reconfirm market conditions that exist and will affect your industries/niches prospects and the customers you serve. All company goals must be tested from a market-up perspective.”

This all makes sense to me. Often, in the planning stages, we all consider our objectives and not what the market will support. It’s a good lesson to remember at this time of year.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t found any great tips on how to budget for activities like building brand awareness without a pricey ad spend. This year, we accomplished a great deal using viral marketing and it was extremely cost effective. Next year, I’ll likely leverage PR, RSS and more on the social media front. Those costs are relatively easy to predict, but you can’t always rely on a viral campaign to catch fire.

If you have advice to share, I encourage you to post and share with the group. In the mean time, I’m back to budgeting for demand generation. We just started using the ReachForce Insight tool recently, so I will be interested to see how it will help me with the planning and budgeting process.

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Accountability 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:

1. Development of timeline and project plan.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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?

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ReachForce customer, Linda Roach of PlanView, writes to The B2B Lead Blog with a few tips for transforming your B2B Marketing Organization from “the group that generates the leads” to a performance-driven demand generation organization.

1. Organize your staff around integrated Marketing programs. Each member should have responsibilities for managing integrated Marketing Programs. That means each team member works together to stretch beyond their tactical focus to orchestrate multi-touch, multi-media programs designed to deliver messages to the customer in the right way at the right time.
2. Shelve low-yield marketing techniques. As you reorganize your team around integrated marketing programs, all of a sudden your Marketing Program managers are no longer willing to accept 2 to 3 percent response rates. The more you target your audience, the better your response rates will be and the greater yield you can expect from Marketing programs. Funnel the budget that you’ve allocated for list rentals or email blasts toward a more cost-effective and targeted contact discovery campaign instead.
3. Integrate your communications with the Customer Buy Cycle. Are you communicating with customers and prospects at the right time with the right approach? Or, are you generating leads through a barrage of emails and handing them off to Sales? Marketers today must realize that some prospects that respond to programs are not always ready to talk to Sales. They may be in the Education phase and simply looking for resources. So, why waste the time of your valuable Sales resources and risk turning off your prospects with a premature Sales call? Make sure you are nurturing buyers with multi touch programs designed to programmatically usher them through the funnel.

Share your tips with readers of The B2B Lead Blog.

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Here on The B2B Lead Blog, we are obsessed with great B2B Marketing copy. Here are a few new tips for crafting high impact copy:

• Get to the point quickly. Start with pain points, goals, or the most important reason that the reader should care. Put yourself in the buyers’ shoes. Why would you spend money or spend valuable time to read the document? To get to the real pain, ask “why” three times.
• Remember your audience - what do they care about? Lead with the most important value proposition, what’s most likely to sell first.
• Provide a full explanation of the concept, but remember: less is more. Do not use too many words to say something. Do not say the same thing several different ways before getting to the point.
• The reader should be able to scan the headline and subheads throughout the piece and get the basic story. Each subhead should tell a significant piece of the story. Make ample use of bulleted lists for readability.
• Effectively use call out boxes or highlighted quotes.
• Ensure there is clear linkage from one concept to the next, and one paragraph to the next.
• Use short punchy sentences and bulleted lists that are easy to read quickly.
• Repeat brand names and key messages to reinforce branding.
• Don’t use buzzwords or hype.
• Tie the theme of the headline to the copy. Weave the headline into the copy to reinforce.
• Use action words. Speak to customer needs with benefit-oriented statements. Avoid overly cute or cliché language.
• Always include a compelling call to action and a fast, easy way to contact you.

Share your ideas about what makes great B2B Marketing copy with readers of The B2B Lead Blog.

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Today’s The B2B Lead blog tip is “know thy customer.” Sounds painfully obvious, right? Certainly you should understand your customer’s role in the organization, their needs and pain points, their preferred communication style, how they buy, and then target your messages and delivery mechanisms to meet those needs.

Yet, today, 50% of B2B Marketers rely on Sales to drive the customer interaction. Could this be why B2B Marketers continue to rely on the old spray and pray approach to lead generation?

If you’d like to improve your Marketing Campaign metrics, try taking a Deliberate Marketing approach: build and leverage in-depth customer insight to convert leads into qualified buyers and drive greater revenue. This is the single most effective way to optimize your Funnelnomics. Here are six deliberate marketing tactics to consider. You can read about these in detail in Funnelnomics - Accelerate Your Marketing & Sales Funnel to Drive Growth & Profitability (http://www.reachforce.com/funnelnomics/)

• Are you creating attention or buyer intention?
• Are you targeting prospect based on their title or their role in the decision making unit?
• Are you creating leads or sales ready qualified buyers?
• Are you executing typical spray and pray initiatives or predictable marketing programs?
• Are you capturing leads or nurturing buyers through the sales pipeline?
• Are you measuring responses or ROI?

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