The number one responsibility of any B2B Marketer is to keep his or her company’s marketing and sales funnel full,
with leads converting quickly to drive profits. In other words, to keep the company’s lifeblood flowing.  The continuous battle to meet pipeline and revenue projections is frustrating when using traditional techniques.

There is a better, more deliberate and predictable approach to increasing the velocity and efficiency of the
marketing and sales funnel. Hence the term Funnelnomics—the practice of extracting the most value out of the
leads as they move through your funnel.

This is the first in a series of blog posts to present a proven method for improving your Funnelnomics by accelerating the conversion of qualified buyers into profitable customer relationships. It provides a framework for integrating your marketing lead generation programs with sales execution processes to drive growth and profitability.

Step 1: Mapping Your Marketing and Sales Funnel

The traditional sales-focused funnel is a relic of the past—a product of the rapid change that has taken place over the last six to eight years. It reflects the old practice of Marketers buying lists of names to fuel programs, expecting a 2% return and then turning over all leads—qualified or not—to Sales to convert into buyers.

Today’s marketing and sales funnel must be developed and managed by understanding both the sales process and by considering the way buyers move through the purchase process. It is vital for B2B Marketers to document the customer buy cycle including the critical parties involved, process and length of buy cycle.

According to industry analysts at SiriusDecisions, only 1% of B2B Marketers consider the customer buy-cycle when it comes to planning and executing marketing and communications programs.

Understanding the customer buy cycle is an important step in optimizing Funnelnomics—enabling Marketers to deliver targeted communications that move leads from one stage to the next in the funnel in the most cost-effective way possible.

Marketers must fully map the customer Decision Making Unit (DMU) including the title and role of each person in the decision-making process. Marketers also must understand the type of information they need (based on their individual pain points) and how they would like to receive it (i.e. direct mail, email, etc.) in order to move the decision maker to the next level of the funnel.

Once the customer buy cycle has been mapped, it is time to map the sales cycle. Product Marketing, Customer Service, Sales organizations, and Marketers together should:

• profile customers and define top customer characteristics
• define target audience characteristics including demographics (revenue, employees, industry) and psychographics (personae, likes, dislikes)
• define the sales cycle including phases and parties involved
• benchmark conversion rates to move to the next phase
• define decision drivers and triggers including customer needs, events, etc.
• secure agreement on qualification criteria for lead scoring
• gauge Sales and Inside Sales capacity for engaging with qualified buyers

This must be done in order to monitor and manage prospects as they move through the funnel to optimize marketing programs for continuous improvement.

As we run across cool companies that are trying to add value to today’s B2B sales and marketing teams  we want to be sure and share them with our B2B Lead readers.  Here’s another great idea…

Have you heard of Gist?  If not, you should check it out.  It might just be the tool your sales and telesales teams have been waiting on!

Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people (prospects) and companies.

Gist enables your sales team to build their ‘network’ from lists of contacts across a variety of sources from LinkedIn, salesforce.com, Outlook, Gmail (or any email service that supports IMAP), Facebook, Twitter  to any CSV file. Then, it sets up a Dashboard view of all the “news” going on within your network.  Once this is all set up your sales team can prioritize their contacts and outreach (or Gist can do it) based on companies/prospects/people you want to watch.

Something new is going up on the web every second of the day.  Can you imagine the efficiencies with just one dashboard of all of these relevant updates?

LinkedIn seems to be the most commonly used social network amongst most B2B Marketers. Or at least the one where people seem to be seeing real results.  Today we’re able to participate in groups with those we have things in common with, answer questions, and look up contacts/prospects and see how many connections away we are. To date there has been no real way for Marketers to collect leads in a systematic way. Well, it looks like this is changing.

Yesterday, LinkedIn CEO sent out a tweet saying he just downloaded his first whitepaper from LinkedIn.

This new feature doesn’t seem to be available to everyone yet but here’s what we do know:

• There will be a form to collect info. from those that download
• Looks like costs will range from $40 – $100 per lead
• LinkedIn users will not have to pay for whitepapers
• Whitepaper ads will can be targeted by title and industry
• Content is still king here. People are only going to download interesting content that provides value.
• Whitepaper titles are going to be even more important. It’s what’s going to catch your target’s eye.
• When someone downloads a form, they are basically opting in for follow up communications.
• In addition to the targeted advertising, there will be a whitepaper directory for LinkedIn members to search for relevant content.

Here’s another example of how B2B Marketers are able to mix their social media with direct lead generation. Once this is rolled out, I think we’ll give it a try. How about you?

We are starting a new series here on the B2B Lead to bring B2B marketers new and/or remarkable products/companies/ideas that could make your life easier or are just plain cool.

Our first entrant in a series of many to come on this theme is BatchBook CRM by BatchBlue Software.  Now I’m fully aware that there are more CRM systems out there than you can shake a stick at.  What sets BatchBook apart from the rest is this simple assessment (IMHO): if you were to start a company to provide a current, modern CRM system today, BatchBook is what it would look like.  It sports an extremely easy-to-use interface and provides all the features and functionality that the primary end-users of CRM systems (sales reps) actually use.  But what makes it cool is the unique social networking and tagging elements that, whereas all the other CRM vendors are scurrying to retrofit their systems with it, has been built in.   Tracking relationships between social network contacts and keeping tabs on the social chatterings thereof are just some of the interesting capabilities on this front.  Their tagging capability, SuperTags, enables users to capture and search on ad-hoc information, such as “talked to this guy at EventForce”.

It is probably best suited for companies fitting the “S” in “SMB” (which most of their customers are), but the pricing model is attractive and I think we will be seeing some interesting things from this company in the future.