I was catching up on some reading and came across a new article in BtoB from Rich Karpinski, B-to-b followers flock to Twitter.  It is a great article especially if you are new to Twitter or wanting to know more about how businesses are using Twitter to connect with prospects and customers.

Since we are all about tips on The B2B Lead, here is some practical advice from the article for marketers getting started on Twitter:

• In your Twitter bio, clearly spell out what business you are in, who is posting to the account and even what you hope to get out of it. That creates transparency and the underpinnings of trust.
• Find people to follow. They’ll likely follow you back, broadening and enriching your conversation.
• To start, sit back and watch conversations unfold. As your comfort level grows, be proactive by participating in and starting conversations related to your business.
• Be generous: Offer more than you get back and always try to be responsive to peers and customers.

Finding the right people to follow can be challenging.  Karpinski offers this advice:
Locating other b-to-b marketers and companies that “tweet” has become easier, too. Ad network Federated Media late last month launched (with Microsoft Corp. as sponsor) ExecTweets.com, an aggregation of executives using Twitter, and the Social Brand Index offers an index of Twitter accounts organized by category. One also can find lists of b-to-b marketing-focused Twitter users with a Google search.

I was happy to see one of the smartest B2B marketers I know, Jon Miller from Marketo, quoted in the article:
“B-to-b buyers are still people, and in the end, they buy from people and not companies,” said Jon Miller (@jonmiller2), VP-marketing at b-to-b software vendor Marketo (@marketo), who uses Twitter personally and as part of his company’s marketing strategy. “If you can build a relationship with a prospective buyer using Twitter before they are actively looking, you built your brand more effectively than you could with much more expensive options. The trick is to know who to follow and who to focus on for that relationship-building.”

But Miller doesn’t think Twitter is the be-all and end-all. “Tweets don’t yet show up in Google search results, and links can’t influence your SEO rankings,” he said, adding, “I think other tools like blogs still work better as the content publishing mechanism, versus [using Twitter more as] a content promotion tool.”

How are you engaging with customers and prospects on Twitter?  Want to connect with us on Twitter?  Check us out at:

@ReachForce
@suaadsait
@ahawthorne
@lawallace

Yesterday on The B2B Lead, we talked about how marketing’s job has changed over the last couple of years from generating general awareness to tracking leads from cold to close.  Gone are the days of dumping lists of random names into the top of the funnel for sales to sort out.  Well, guess what, it turns out they weren’t sorting them out.

According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.   Of the remaining 21%, 70% are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.   Furthermore, 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

There’s a lot of talk about leaky funnels and marketing’s role in driving more leads to close but is this really possible if leads aren’t truly leaking out, they’re being rejected and kicked out by sales?

This makes me wonder.  Can better targeted lead generation programs be the answer to everyone’s woes?
I think so.

Here’s a few tips to think about before launching that next great program:

• Before you kick off the next quarter, make sure marketing and sales TOGETHER define what a lead is.  Marketing leads are different than sales leads.  Be certain everyone on both teams understands this and how you’re handling the 2 groups.

• Ask the sales team what is working for them.  Where are they winning? Who are the critical decision makers inside of these companies?  Make sure you are targeting the right companies and the right buyers inside.

• What programs deliver the best leads?  And not just the best leads but leads that convert to customers.  Does this align with what sales says?

• Don’t forget to take a look at who is already visiting you. This can be a goldmine.  Target your outreach efforts back at those visiting, don’t just sit and wait for them to come back and announce themselves.

• For those that are disqualified by sales for BANT reasons, make sure sales is able to pass those leads back for more nurturing.  Budgets and project timelines change all the time.  Because they don’t need you now doesn’t mean they won’t ever (just make sure you have the right buyer engaged, marketing to the right company with the wrong buyer won’t get you very far).

At ReachForce, marketing and sales are 1 team.  We know one can’t be successful without the other.

Do you think you have mastered the basics of Twitter and want to take it to the next level?  I was amazed that there are 8 analytics tools out there just for Twitter.  Here is a great blog post from Social Media Today on 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams.  I am not sure that they all have great B2B applications, but interesting stuff to check out.

Our marketing team recently put together a quick survey to see what their peers are doing these days. In fact, if you haven’t taken the survey, please do. We’ll be sure to share the results with you.

What we’re seeing so far is a lot of people wondering how others are using social media as part their marketing mix and how they are measuring these different activities. Since the world of social media is still new to most of us, I thought I’d share with you how we are incorporating it here at ReachForce.

We are using traditional programs to fuel our direct marketing efforts – newsletters, email marketing, customer campaigns and thought leadership content programs, knowing that prospects engage in different ways. We are also reaching them through the new social media tools available to us today.

Here’s how we’re doing it today:

• We’re making sure our Twitter following knows when we have a new blog post
• We’re very active on The B2B Lead. We’re now at over 200 tips for B2B Marketing and Sales teams
• We’re also out there reading other B2B Marketing blogs and commenting on them
• We’re answering questions in LinkedIn and if we have a tip about the topic on our blog, we’re pointing them back
• We’ve recently updated our company email signatures to include our blog and twitter accounts

While I’m not sure how to measure specifics on any of this, what I am sure of is that by adding social media to our mix of lead generation tactics we’re seeing:

• A dramatic increase in inbound leads
• More traffic on our blog and hundreds of people a month jumping from our blog to reachforce.com for thought leadership content
• More pick up and recognition from industry thought leaders

Have you found other ways to track your social media efforts back to lead generation?

By now, we are all tired of hearing how the world is coming to an end.  The financial markets are down, companies are struggling and people are losing their jobs every time we turn around – times are hard and we’re all suffering.  But quite frankly, we’re tired of talking about it.  So instead, this month we’re focused on all around best practices that we should all be applying in any economy.

Optimizing your marketing mix for success – are you doing it?  If so, how’s it working for you?

As marketers, we have a lot of options for reaching our audience.  We use some for overall awareness and others for one-to-one contact with our customers, prospects, media contacts, etc.  And in most cases, we are building programs using a variety of tactics to get our desired outcomes.  Here at ReachForce, we categorize tactics into two buckets – air wars and ground attacks.

Air wars are things like PR, social media, and SEO.  All necessary but can be difficult to measure real ROI.  Ground attacks are direct one-to-one initiatives, things like email programs, webinars, and targeted live events.  You have to have both to get the results you really want.

We’re going to be exploring the following questions over the next few weeks on The B2B Lead, be sure to check back in.

• So how do you decide what combination of activities is driving the most value for your business and your audience?
• Are you just spinning the wheel of luck and hoping it lands on new customers?
• How are you measuring your programs for success?
• When do you decide a tactic isn’t working and you need to cut it out of the mix?
• How often are you adding new tools and tactics that help you drive ROI from your efforts?
• Is there a specific combination of activities that work with specific audiences?

This is the final post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 5 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title, Predictable vs. Spray and Pray and Nurture vs. Capture

A survey of B2B Marketing organizations by SiriusDecisions determined that the marketing departments of high performing companies significantly influenced or contributed at least 30% of the opportunities in the pipeline.

With Deliberate Marketing, virtually any marketing organization can achieve similar or even better results.  Not to toot my own horn, but here at ReachForce, Marketing contributes over 80% of new customers.

Deliberate Marketing focuses B2B Marketers on business objectives like adding opportunities to the pipeline, increasing revenues, acquiring new customers, and maximizing the return on marketing programs.

No longer is marketing worried about meeting or exceeding a 2% response rate. Deliberate Marketers value lead quality over lead quantity and they are motivated to move qualified buyers through the pipeline as efficiently and quickly as possible.

If you want to learn more about Deliberate Marketing and how to increase qualified buyers in the sales funnel, check out our new eBook, Funnelnomics I: Deliberate Marketing.

This is the fifth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 4 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title and Predictable vs. Spray and Pray.

Deliberate Marketing doesn’t involve capturing any and all leads, then tossing them over the fence to sales. Deliberate Marketing is about engaging with prospects, understanding their needs and scoring them based on their interests and behavior to determine their stage in the buying cycle. It’s about nurturing them with targeted communications and offers until they are ready to engage with sales.

A prospect that downloads a whitepaper probably needs to be further nurtured by marketing before being passed on to sales, whereas a prospect that requests a 30-day trial can be immediately handed off to sales.  This is different for each business; be sure to have an agreement with sales on when leads should be handed over.

With a Deliberate Marketing approach, B2B Marketers can ensure their leads receive the proper follow-up and that buyers are not discarded simply because they are not ready to make a purchase immediately.  Feedback loops between marketing and sales are necessary so that any leads that are passed to sales too early can be sent back to marketing for continued nurturing.

This is the fourth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 3 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads and Role vs. Title.

Deliberate Marketing techniques make it possible for Marketers and Sales teams to predict the results of their efforts because they know their direct marketing programs are focused on the right buyers in the right type of company. Deliberate Marketers do not spray a rented list of contacts with a generic message hoping the right buyers will respond. Instead, they deliver a highly relevant message to a targeted audience.

Based on preparation and research, they know they are using the right messages and the right medium to deliver that message based on the buyer profile (or persona). They also know that they are delivering this message to buyers in companies with a similar combination of characteristics as their best customers so their propensity to purchase is higher.

With this approach, Marketers can rely on repeatable lead generation efforts to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to Sales.

As we kick off the New Year, we’re typically in an “out with the old, in with the new” mindset.  While that may be true for a lot of things, it doesn’t have to be the case for your marketing database. As we ponder in 2009 how to do more with less, think about what you can do with what you have.

Most Marketers are overwhelmed by a customer or prospect database with hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in myriad states of completeness. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years.

Did you know?

• More than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months – Gartner Group

• In that same 12 months, some 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

• “The Company that markets with a healthy data-cleansing routine can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an ‘average’ organization, based purely on data quality.” – Sirius Decisions

Dirty data, whether purchased or collected from download offers hampers your lead generation results and drives up costs.  So sticking with the same theme from my last couple of posts, doing more with what you already have, consider this.

Before throwing out your dirty data and buying new or taking on a massive database clean up initiative, think relevance.

What lead data do you have in your database that is relevant to your target markets and buying roles today?  From there you can put together a repair program.  Here’s a starting point for determining what relevant data you already have at your fingertips.

1. What businesses you need to target?  Industries?  Vertical markets?
2. Who in those businesses are involved in the buying decision for your product or services?
3. What are you going to do with the data? (Email campaign, direct mail, telemarketing)

Now it is time to repair that relevant data.  Start with what’s missing.  Here’s a list of things to consider:
If you are doing segmented email programs, do you have the right buying roles within your target markets?

• Do you have all of the email addresses you need for each role in the decision making unit?
  If you are doing a direct mail program, do you have accurate mailing addresses for everyone you are targeting?
• Are there more companies out there that are in your target market that you currently don’t have in your marketing database?  If so, find these and add them.
• Is there data older than 6 months in your database that needs refreshing?  Remember how many people are moving around and how many companies are merging or going out of business on a monthly basis.  Consider refreshing this data.  **This does not have to be a manual solution.

Thousands, tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of records in your database, there’s bound to be gold there, you just have to uncover it and dust it off.

Here are a few resources for you to consider as you ponder your marketing initiatives in 2009 and the value of your current data.

Is Dirty Data Sabotaging your Marketing Results?
Dirty Data: Even More Expensive Than you Thought
Understanding the Role of Role

This is the third post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first post on Intention vs. Attention and the second post on Qualified Buyers vs. Leads.

Deliberate Marketing programs do not rely simply on prospect titles for targeting potential buyers.

For example, a B2B Marketer purchases a list or accesses a contact database and pulls a list of 1,000 Communications Analysts. How can that marketer be certain that the contacts who match those titles are involved with Network Communications instead of Corporate Communications?

Titles are simply a label of rank, not an indication of the actual role the prospect plays in the organization or in the buying decision. Instead, Deliberate Marketing programs are focused on “roles,” defined by Webster’s as: a function or part performed. They target communications based on organizational role and level in the DMU as well as stage of the buying cycle.

The average B2B marketing response rate is less than 3%, and it’s getting lower every year. It’s easy to see why title-based lists perform so poorly.

Consider a Fortune 500 company with 90,000 employees.
All told, this company has 500 IT staff.
Of those 500, 150 have a title of Manager, Director, and higher.
Only a handful of those 150 is in the right role to buy your product.

But what’s a marketer to do? Using current list technology, you can only get as specific as target title. So you have to market to all 150 people with ‘hot titles’, jamming the inboxes of the majority with an unwanted, off-topic solicitation. It’s simply not a cost-effective model.