Written by Cody Young, ReachForce Customer Success Manager

Lead Scoring appears to be the newest tactic Marketers are using to better identify warm to hot leads for Sales. Marketing vendors like Marketo and Eloqua are promoting lead rating and lead scoring as a means to increase sales effectiveness and accelerate typical sales cycles. Both are measuring a contact’s interaction behaviors with marketing activities. But should a contact really be considered a hot lead if they open a few emails and visit your website a time or two? I think our Sales team might disagree here.

At ReachForce, we are doing a little lead scoring of our own. Instead of analyzing prospect behaviors, we are going directly to them and asking them to participate in a survey. By gathering qualifying information directly from the prospect, our customers are able to better target their messaging at these new prospects. By enabling them to get to the right buyers, in the right companies, with the right message, they are seeing increased marketing results and sales conversions.

Here are few tips we share with our customers when we’re building out a lead scoring survey.

Lead Scoring surveys can quickly:

1. Qualify a company as a user of a certain technology or application – This type of question is to confirm if a prospect organization uses something that either compliments or competes with the survey sponsor’s offering.
2. Find out respondent status: decision maker, a part of a decision making team or a secondary influencer – This type of question is useful when setting the stage for a sales call or marketing campaign so messaging can be made as relevant and personalized as possible.
3. Find out how well the top 2‐3 product or service “key values” are recognized by each respondent – A “key value” is something that makes an offering better, unique or uncommonly relevant to the prospect. This type of question is used to find out if they will “get” your value proposition, or if education or special messaging is required.
4. Measure how important key values are to each respondent – This follow up to Q3 is used to find out how important the respondent thinks the sponsor’s key values are. Combined scores to this set of questions are used to determine degree of interest and help make sales and marketing messaging relevant and personal when following up on the lead.
5. Determine budget – This type of question is used to pinpoint how much the respondents’ organization spends (and by implication would expect to spend next time) on offerings similar to what the sponsor sells. Paying close attention to scores that are too low help sales and marketing teams prioritize.
6. Confirm plan – This type of question helps find out when or how often the respondent is in the market for what the survey sponsor is selling. Questions like this can also be centered on finding trigger events (audits, budget planning, corporate initiatives) that create sales opportunity.
7. Establish time line or “window of sales opportunity” – By combining the responses to “Confirm plan” and this type of question, the result is normally a reliable indication of when the respondent’s organization will begin the buying cycle for what the survey sponsor is selling.

The lead score you end up with for each prospect should help you to determine if the prospect can be immediately handed off to sales or put into a marketing campaign for further nurturing.

As I went back to Chapters 1 and 2, I immediately remembered what stood out most for me. Page 4. I hadn’t read Differentiate or Die, Survival In Our Era of Killer Competition by Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin. So this was all new stuff for me.

The summary started with out with some very interesting numbers on grocery store SKUs, interesting but not really applicable to my B2B Marketing job. I got to the next page (page 4) and this sentence jumped out at me. “Those that don’t stand out will get lost in the pack.”

I went on to read…”Indeed, companies must address differentiation in three key ways:

• If you ignore your uniqueness and try to be everything to everybody, you quickly undermine what makes you different.
• If you ignore changes in the market, your difference can become less important.
• If you stay in the shadow of the larger competitors and never establish your “differentness,” you will always be weak.”

Differentiate ourselves and highlight our uniqueness, we all get that I’m sure. But how? Here’s an example of how we “went different” to stand out. ReachForce business cards not only have the typical contact info. on them but they also include a few points that describe that person’s ROLE at ReachForce. This helped reinforce our role vs. title messaging and was a great conversation starter when meeting new people and exchanging cards.

Anyone have other cool “stand out” stories to share with the group? Or anything else from the first 2 book summaries that stood out for you?

We’re pleased to announce that The B2B Lead has been included as B2B Marketing and Sales Tips in Guy Kawasaki’s new Alltop Marketing site http://marketing.alltop.com/.

What is Alltop? The site’s mission is to “help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on a particular topic.” The RSS feeds are grouped into very handy collections – “aggregations.” You can also read the FAQ here.

As a follower of Kawasaki’s books and career (his philosophy on begging forgiveness shaped my career), I’m very honored that he’s included us.

TechCrunch published an excellent mini-tutorial on how to develop and distribute press releases in a Web 2.0 world. Why should you care? After all, who reads press releases? Well, according to the Tech Crunch article, a recent Outsell study highlighted that over 51% of IT professionals reported that they get their news from press releases in Yahoo and Google news over trade journals!

Tech Crunch advises, and BreakingPoint just witnessed (with our May 9th announcement) that “the trick for this new breed of press releases is to write it as the article you want to read.” Because, if you’ve done a good job, very often that is exactly what will be published.

Here’s another gem: “When implemented with calls and links to action, and if they read in a way that’s compelling to people aka customers, you’ll find that they’re usually compelled to act.”

The TechCrunch post is a must-read. And, here are a few other tips on getting better press release pickup in last week’s blog post, Using Press Releases to Drive Web Traffic and Leads.

If you’re like me, you pour a lot of time and effort into wordsmithing press releases. It’s important to get the message just right. Then you go back and forth with executives and/or partners to make sure all parties are happy with the messages. It can take days or weeks and become frustrating.

Sadly, if you’re not taking advantage of new ways to publish your own content online, chances are nobody’s reading the results of all of that hard work. Or, so says David Meerman Scott. In his recent post entitled Top 10 PR tips, Scott’s #1 piece of advice is “The old ways to get noticed were to buy expensive advertising and beg the media to write about you and your products. The best way to get noticed today is to publish great content online.”

At BreakingPoint, we just completed a major agreement with a strategic partner. Of course, we wanted to get the broadest possible coverage for the news. And, we didn’t want to count on just the traditional methods for getting the word out. So, Kyle (www.engageinpr.com) and I sat down to brainstorm all of the ways we could get the word out about the news and build nice inbound links for SEO. All of the ways beyond traditional media, that is.

Here’s what we came up with. Did we miss anything?

1. Distribute the release via a wire service like MarketWire, Business Wire, PRWeb or PRNewswire.
2. Include video or audio interviews with the wire service post to get pickup on a wide variety of sites like Odeo.
3. Post a supporting video on YouTube.
4. Develop a chart or image that supports the release and post to Flickr.
5. Blog about it on your own blog and your partner’s blog.
6. Reach out to other bloggers to conduct a Q&A about the news.
7. Promote via StumbleUpon.
8. Create a Google AdWords or Yahoo campaign using the headline of the release – promote using traditional PPC ads and contextual advertising.
9. Send out the link to your LinkedIn or Facebook friends to help you spread the word.
10. Post your blog post to sites like Reddit, Digg, etc.
11. Include it in your RSS feeds – both press release and blog RSS feeds.
12. Send out a tweet to your Twitter following.
13. Hold a webinar to discuss the reasons behind the news.
14. Turn the release into an educational article and post it to www.scribd.com or www.ezinearticles.com.
15. Embed the headline and a link in your email signature.
16. Include it in your own newsletter or magazine.
17. Post it to your customer support site.
18. Send the release to relevant user groups or professional organizations.
19. Use a free press release posting service such as:

http://www.free-news-release.com/
http://www.freepressreleases.co.uk/
http://www.i-newswire.com/
http://www.prleap.com/
(I’ve never tried these but heard they are good for SEO. Anyone had success with them?)

20. Oh yeah, pitch it to the press.

If you are an avid reader of The B2B Lead, you know that we are all about targeted marketing, specifically targeted lead generation. And I have said before that having a targeted blog can support lead generation better because it is focused on a specific audience so targeted messaging will resonate better. I recently created a mission statement for The B2B Lead to help focus our blogs to topics most relevant to our customers and prospects as well as in line with our in house expertise. Our mission is to share B2B Marketing best practice ideas and tips with our customers and prospects – enabling them to drive the most ROI possible from their lead generation initiatives.

There are lots of good examples of good mission statements out there that have driven a company to success. Southwest began as the low cost airline; every decision they made came back to that mission. Herb Kelleher would not have implemented any new program unless it helped Southwest to be THE low cost airline. It seems to have worked. Southwest does have a new mission statement these days and is the driving factor that helps keep them successful even when most other airlines are failing.

Once I created the mission statement I was able to sit down and create a list of more focused topics. This helps keep our whole team of bloggers on task and hopefully will help us to create more relevant content to help our fellow B2B Marketers drive increased results from their lead generation initiatives.

Continuing your relationship with your current customers is always a challenge. In today’s online world there are many more options for B2B Marketers to stay connected to their customers like through social networks and online communities. At ReachForce, we decided to mix a little old school with some new school and start a book club with a twist. Instead of meeting at a local coffee shop to discuss the book, we will be discussing it here on The B2B Lead. If you are a ReachForce customer, you should expect to receive our first book soon, if not already. If you are not a customer, click here for an online discount.

Our first book is The Marketing Gurus – Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of all Time. It is a “best of” collection of Marketing books from the past 15 years. Each week, Leigh Anne and I will share our perspectives to get the conversation started but will rely on you to join in to share your thoughts, opinions and ideas. We will begin the conversation next week in order to give everyone a little time to get started. Next week we’ll be reading and chatting about chapters 1 & 2.

Happy reading!

When I was in college (far too many years ago) we learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing. Of course, in just the last few years, we’ve seen a major shift in thinking about the 3rd P – promotion. We no longer accept the notion that 2% returns on direct mail or 0% responses from print advertising are smart Marketing. Instead, we are laser targeting our messages to audiences and using social marketing to build a following of like minded customers.

With increasing interest in the power of communities, we now have the 6 C’s of Social Influence Marketing thanks to Dave Friedman, president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish. In today’s post, I’ve shared some of Friedman’s very timely advice on making social marketing and communities work.

You see, I’ve had some very interesting discussions of late on how to design and “position” a community. It boils down to “can you really design and position a community or will the community itself determine what it becomes?” We’ve decided to let the BreakingPoint community define itself. Stay tuned for the big launch announcement and see how this works for us.

In the mean time, here is what Friedman has to say courtesy of Chief Marketer Report.

1.Content: Access to valuable tools and content is a key factor in a consumer’s decision to interact with a brand. Regardless of their goals, brands need to think about customizing bite-sized, portable content or experiences for their most prominent target segments—content that their “friends” would be proud to display, share, or support.

Sound familiar? This was the focus of The B2B Lead – snack size educational nuggets.

2.Customization: Users crave the ability to customize, post and share content. On social networks like MySpace or Facebook, users define themselves through their personalized profile pages and the elements that they choose to display. Marketers need to empower consumers to express themselves.

3.Community: The adage “build it and they will come” is not applicable here. To build community within social media campaigns, brands need to achieve several things: Give users a reason to interact with your brand frequently by providing unique content, value or engagement. Let your content travel by distributing it across widgets and other mechanisms beyond your Web site.

Get the rest of the 6 Cs Or, check out Joseph Jaffe’s version at www.jaffejuice.com.

So, I’ve been asked to speak at the upcoming MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum. The topic – “Webinars in a Web 2.0 World.” At first, I thought: Wow, how do you make Webinars interesting to a marketing audience today with social media and viral marketing all the rage?

I mean, there hasn’t been much innovation happening with Webinars. They seem to be moderately effective at driving revenue but actual attendance rates have been dropping overall with the emergence of more immediate forms of education such as Video tutorials and podcasts. However, they are more effective, in my experience, than simply relying on a Podcast or a pre-recorded tutorial. Not actually sure why that would be the case?

And, then I thought about how we were using Webinars as a community building tool at NetQoS. Perhaps the attendees haven’t thought about webinars as a community building opportunity? In my experience, it seems that most Marketers are using a “hit and run” approach to Webinars. They pour tons of money into recruiting an audience and paying Webex to broadcast the event. Then, they grumble when only 40% of the registrants actually show up. And, finally, they turn over the attendee list to Sales for followup.

What a waste! If you are going to pour so much time and effort into attracting an audience of like-minds to attend your event, why not funnel those potential prospects into a Community where they can find educational content in a variety of formats and begin to build a relationship with them? That’s the only real way to make Webinars pay off in the long run.

I’ll be sharing the techniques we used at NetQoS to do just that at the MarketingProfs conference. The event will also focus on topics like B2B lead generation, conversion, retention, ROI and measurement, new technologies, integrated marketing – and much more. If that interests you, I recommend you sign up to attend. They are even throwing in a new research report on “BtoB Sales Lead Generation: Integration of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Media. Register and it is yours for free.

See ya in Boston in June.