After reading Leigh Anne’s post on Sales 2.0 for Dummies, by David Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Genius.com, this got me thinking…

I think David’s funnel left out a big piece of the active funnel – outbound marketing.  This part should be between the attract and interact parts of David’s funnel.  We’re calling this piece – Outbound Marketing 2.0.
If only 3% of people fill out forms and announce themselves, you’re either going to have a skinny funnel or have to do a TON of inbound marketing to drive enough activity to keep the top of the funnel full.  Here’s where the outbound marketing 2.0 comes in.

While keeping your inbound engine running, and pushing the hand raisers to the appropriate sales person or marketing program, there are economic factors that may also lend to considering new verticals (i.e healthcare has $$ to spend but the financial services industry is still struggling).  Also, don’t forget about where you’re already winning.  Take a look at your current funnel and see what’s moving and what’s not and ultimately, what your new customers look like.  And finally, 97% of visitors that are not announcing themselves,  with a robust analytics tool you can identify the companies visiting (shameless promotion ahead) and ReachForce can help you discover the right buying roles for your business.

From there, you’re ready to execute your outbound programs using a marketing or email automation solution.

Here’s what I think the top of the funnel should look like:

Earlier this week, we featured a post on Genius.com, which takes a unique, “Sales 2.0” approach to email marketing and marketing automation.  In fact, David Thompson, CEO and co-founder at Genius.com and former CMO at WebEx, helped launch the whole Sales 2.0 phenomenon, first by founding the Sales 2.0 conference and then by authoring Sales 2.0 for Dummies, the first book about Sales 2.0.  This past spring, David updated Sales 2.0 for Dummies in an executive edition that broadened the focus from Sales to look at Sales and Marketing alignment.

This eBook goes in-depth to define the new technology-based sales and marketing process to help shorten sales cycles, increase revenue and foster Marketing/Sales alignment.

Here’s a short excerpt to wet your whistle:
When Sales and Marketing are aligned, prospects move seamlessly from hearing about you in an online article to browsing your Web site or joining a Webinar to educate themselves to engaging with Sales when they are ready to learn more — and hopefully take the next step toward a purchase. Internally, when Sales and Marketing are aligned, they function like a professional NBA team, where players pass the ball (the Lead) back and forth, dribble down the court (qualifying and following up) until they make the basket (deal closed), and if they miss the basket, Marketing gets the rebound, and the process starts again (remarketing to prospects).

I love this basketball analogy.  I say it again and again. Marketing cannot just throw leads over the wall never to touch them again thinking, “now they are Sales’ problem.”  It has to be a closed loop process where Sales is able to return leads back to Marketing for further nurturing and Marketing is able to push back to Sales once the lead is sales-ready.

David also defines the new funnel:
The Sales 2.0 Funnel (see Figure below) updates traditional sales and marketing cycles by identifying each stage of the Sales 2.0 process and providing you with a sampling of new Web-based technologies that enable you to approach each step in a faster, more cost effective, and measurable way.

Sales 2.0 for Dummies really outlines all of the technologies needed to streamline the funnel and to effectively align Marketing and Sales.  The end of the eBook also gives you a checklist to see how well you have shifted to Sales 2.0 and to help you recognize areas for improvement.

Be sure to download your own copy of Sales 2.0 for Dummies to learn how to put the right technologies in place today to improve your marketing and sales results.

Lead – a simple word, very powerful impact to YOUR business.

Does it mean the same thing to both your Sales and Marketing teams? As it turns out, the crux of most sales and marketing quarrels (read: logjams) are tied to this one unique issue – how do you define a lead?

Does it mean the same thing to your management team?

My suggestion is that it may be time for a brown bag lunch to find out what your company thinks and getting on the same page on that simple definition.

Here’s a list of things commonly tagged as leads and typically end up in your marketing database and/or CRM:

• tradeshow scans
• contact form downloads
• contact list buys
• sales rolodex contacts
• customer referrals
• cold calling contact discovery
• partner programs
• target company CEO
• webinar registrations
• partner’s customers
• inbound call
• event attendee lists
• advertising responders
• competitor’s customers
• target company with no contact attached
• contact with no company attached
• contact with personal email address
• whitepaper/eBook form downloads

Are some of these better than others?  Are some of these prospects?  Are they all?  It depends.

Depends on what you have defined as a lead and as a prospect?  Does one come before the other?  Are they the same thing?  It depends.  Depends on how you have defined your marketing and sales funnel (pipeline) and what it takes to convert from one stage of the pipe to the next.

The key to every solid B2B lead generation engine is the agreed upon definition of a lead, a prospect and a suspect.

If you’re reading this and you’re unsure if your sales team would define a lead the same way you would, STOP what you are doing right now.  Set up time for your marketing and sales team to get together and define each stage of the buying process and what a lead (or prospect or suspect) looks like at each stage along the way to becoming a customer.  Remember, this will more than likely cut down on the quantity of leads but the quality will make up for the difference.

Once these definitions have been defined for your company, decide as a team how contacts are going to be touched in each stage and by whom.

Interested in how others define leads and prospects?  Check these out…

Lead and Prospect -  Two words we hear a lot in marketing and sales roles so I decided to ask around and see how other people define a lead and a prospect.  Here’s what they said…

Dean Cruse, Internet/enterprise software VP of Marketing @deancruse:
Prospects are people who have shown some interest in your product or service, either by responding to a campaign, finding you through an inbound link, organic search, etc. They could also be subscribers to your blog, followers to your Twitter account, etc. who have an interest in your company’s point of view, or the market you serve. They could also be existing customers for one/some of your products who could be prospects for additional products. Prospects have opted-in to your message – until then they are just contacts on a list.

Leads can also come in from one of the above sources. Prospects can also be nurtured into leads through a variety of content-related programs (blogs, whitepapers, newsletters, events, articles, …). A lead is a person that has been qualified to a point where a sales person can take it over to work. Sales and marketing must agree on the definition of a qualified lead and it will vary based on the business.

Brande Bradshaw, Strategic Enterprise Sales Executive @bcoltb:
A lead is not yet a prospect.  Leads are people who you have some information on, you think they could potentially be a good fit, needs nurturing, someone you are cold calling and emailing with relevant information to get a meeting.

A prospect on the other hand is someone you’ve had a meeting or initial conversation with and this person can be categorized as a good fit.  Still needs nurturing and some coaching but they are engaged and moving through the sales process.

Mike Pilcher, SaaS VP Sales and Marketing @mike pilcher:
A lead is an individual contact with a person at a company who has the potential to purchase, or influence the purchase of your product. Usually in-bound focus.

A prospect is a company that has multiple stakeholders (hopefully represented by multiple leads) with the potential to purchase your product. Usually outbound focus.

In both cases a “lead” and a “prospect” are proxies for deeper definitions that change with your business cycle. Any definition needs to be company-specific incorporating concepts such as sales cycle, budget, existing customer, new product, product value, etc. @jonmiller2

Jon Miller, SaaS VP Marketing @jonmiller2:

This webcast from Marketo (presented by Jon) is actually what got me thinking about this.  Check out Marketo’s definition of each and be sure to watch all of this 45 webcast; it is PACKED with great information.  It’s worth your time, I promise.

Interesting…Which one do you agree with?  Or what do they mean to you?  And would your marketing and/or sales counterpart have the same definition?  Please share your thoughts!

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?

Written by Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua and the author of the recent book Digital Body Language.

Amy was kind enough to ask me to write a post to the B2B Lead audience to answer a question that frequently comes up.  What is the relationship between Demand Generation/Marketing Automation, such as what we provide at Eloqua, and Targeted Contact Discovery, such as ReachForce’s service.

It’s a great question, and the answer touches on a number of areas.

The key relationship is the critical importance of understanding your target audience.  The cost of raw, untargeted data continues to drop.  With various social or data scraping services in the market today, the cost of a raw name, even a name with title information attached, has been reduced to pennies.

However, this has led to a market dynamic where untargeted marketing messages are prevalent, and the ability to precisely target the right buyer with the right message at the right time is the most important differentiator.

Role-based contact discovery is a crucial step in understanding who is a potential buyer of your product or services.  Going beyond title to discover actual functional role allows you to precisely identify the individual who would, when the time is right, progress through a buying cycle and purchase your product or services.

And this is where demand generation, such as the platform we provide at Eloqua, comes in.

The key synergy is that by using a demand generation platform to understand the digital body language of our buyers, we can identify the critical second piece of the equation – where each buyer is in their buying cycle.  By understanding the stages of a buying process for your product or service, and then using scoring to map each potential buyer to the stage of the buying process he or she is at, you can see whether they are at the education and awareness stage, are discovering potential vendors, or are validating a vendor as their final choice.

With a clear understanding of the “who” (based on role-based discovery) and the “how interested” (based on reading their digital body language), targeting the right message to the right person at the right time becomes possible.

However, there is another crucial link.  Even though the differentiated value of understanding role, vs just title, is clear to most marketers, the difference may be lost on the CFO.  Demand generation processes allow you to paint a much clearer picture of the value of one name over another.

With Eloqua, you can rethink your marketing analysis around the full buying funnel.  By taking a top-down view of your marketing analysis, you can begin to get a clear picture of where each buyer is in their buying process.  As you do this, you can begin to push your analysis of the value of a name further down the buying funnel.  Determining, through using lead scoring, which source of names actually turns into Marketing Qualified Leads and revenue opportunities allows you to view the value of the incoming names more clearly.  If a targeted name costs more by a factor of 5, but converts into revenue opportunities at 10X the rate of untargeted names, it is clearly more valuable.  Demand generation allows you to prove that value further down the buying funnel.

A third critical link is in sales understanding.  Sales needs to engage with individual buyers in individual conversations.  The only way to do this is for them to understand the interests of each buyer.  Targeted discovery allows you to provide your sales team with insights into what the potential buyer’s role and major focus areas are, while Eloqua allows you to provide your sales team with insight into their area and level of interest through giving them insights into the buyer’s digital body language.

With these approaches in place, it is even possible to reverse the standard approach of seeking, through targeted lead discovery, folks in the right roles, followed by using lead nurturing to cultivate and generate interest.  Interest may already exist, and can be identified through seeing individuals from ideal target companies anonymously visiting your website. In this case, these companies, where interest has already been seen, can be passed automatically to Reachforce for targeted lead discovery.  This provides you with an immediate win, as you have a person in the right role, at a company that is already showing interest in your product or solution.

Together, targeted lead discovery through Reachforce and demand generation through Eloqua form a powerful combination that allows you to find the right person, at the right company, showing the right level of buying interest.  For your sales team, there can be no better lead than that.

MarketingSherpa is a great resource for studies and stats.  Even if you are not a member you can sign-up to receive their weekly newsletter and chart of the week.  This week’s MarketingSherpa chart of the week really peaked my interest.

We’ve been working with the folks at MathMarketing (Hugh Macfarlane, author of The Leaky Funnel) lately and have been having a lot of discussions about the marketing and sales funnel, the lead flow into the funnel and the leads that leak out. The ones leaking out have me wondering…

With the introduction of marketing and salesforce automation systems, B2B lead generation teams are able to better measure and analyze activities that drive leads into the funnel and ultimately to customer wins but what about those that fall out?  Where do all of these leads go?  And who’s in charge of keeping them in the mix?

How Organizations Manage the Pipeline from Lead to Sale

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart.

The 2 at the bottom of this chart further confirm that there’s still work to be done here and I’m not the only one wondering about leaked leads.  We work so hard for these leads and just because they aren’t ready to buy right now they are getting kicked out. We’re missing opportunities and most of us probably don’t even know it.

What are you doing about leads that have leaked?  Do you have a way to get them back into a nurturing cycle?  And most importantly, is the sales team providing information on why the lead was kicked out or back?

What’s working for you?  Please do share.

One of my favorite social media news sites, Mashable, had a great post a couple of weeks ago worthy of sharing with our readers.   Sharlyn Lauby, the post author and president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) put together a list of 10 things to consider when creating a social media policy.

Leigh Anne and I try to stay pretty active out in the new social world and we often get asked if we have a social media policy here at ReachForce.  We don’t have one, but as we continue to grow our team we might consider it in the future.

Sharlyn says, “Whether you’re writing your social media policy from the get-go, or letting it develop organically in reaction to situations as they arise, here are 10 things you should definitely consider. These 10 tips will help you steer clear of pitfalls and allow you to focus on what’s important: engaging the customer.”

1. Introduce the purpose of social media for your organization- focus on the things that employees CAN DO rather than what they can’t do.  it’s all about leveraging the positive to get people to engage and bring value to your social media efforts.
2. Be responsible for what you write – Your team needs to take responsibility for what they write, and exercise good judgment and common sense. You’d think this is obvious, but better safe than sorry, right?
3. Be authentic – Include your name and, when appropriate, your company name and your title. People want to interact with other people in the social world, not business (aka sales people).  Here at ReachForce, when we’re participating in the social world, instead of including our ReachForce URL, we include a link back here, to the The B2B Lead.  We figure it’s more comfortable and gives our audience and followers a better snapshot of who we are personally.
4. Consider your audience -When you’re out and about remember that your readers could include current customers, potential customers, as well as current/past/future employees, your boss, your board members, and of course your mom. Consider that before you publish and make sure you aren’t alienating any of those groups.
5. Exercise good judgment – Refrain from comments that can be interpreted as slurs, demeaning, inflammatory, etc.  You’d think this was obvious too but remember if it ends up on the internet someone will find it.
6. Understand the concept of community – The essence of community is the idea that it exists so that you can support others and they, in turn, can support you. You need to learn how to balance personal and professional information, and the important role that transparency plays in building a community.
7. Respect copyrights and fair use – This should be a no-brainer, but just in case: always give people proper credit for their work, and make sure you have the right to use something with attribution before you publish.  i.e. These tips come from Sharlyn Lauby via Mashable.
8. Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info - Transparency doesn’t give employees free rein to share just anything. Common sense here please, it could cost you your job.
   
9. Bring value – share relevant activities or news with your community, fellow bloggers and other social media followers.  Do your customers really care what you had for lunch?  I doubt it.
   
10. Productivity matters – But, your social media usage won’t get you very far if you don’t execute on the core competencies of your business. Remember that in order for your social media endeavors to be successful, you need to find the right balance between social media and other work.

Looking for a sample policy?  IBM has published their social media guidelines publicly for anyone to read. It’s a great policy, though rather long.

Lead Scoring is hot right now and for good reason. As marketers, we finally have the technology tools available to enable us to score and qualify leads before passing them off to sales.  What a lot of people are talking about is activity based or implicit lead scoring. This means scoring a lead based on the actions they are taking like downloading an eBook or attending a demo.  There is another side to lead scoring, explicit or attribute based lead scoring.  This is a way of scoring a lead based on things like title, geography or industry.

Here are some actions to consider for implicit lead scoring:

• content download
• email open/click-through
• website visit
  • number of pages visited
  • time on site
  • time spent on product pages
  • time spent on careers page
• event attendance
• viewed webinar
• viewed product demo

When you are scoring a lead based on their actions, remember that some actions will actually lower a lead’s score.  You might consider taking points off for those leads that are visiting your careers page.  Also remember to track inactivity.  A lead that was hot six months ago but has had no activity in the past six months should probably lose points and be downgraded from hot lead status until they re-engage.

Here are some attributes to consider for explicit lead scoring:

• title
• department
• industry
• budget
• propensity to purchase
• role in the decision making unit

If you don’t have all of this information about your leads you can gather it through your web lead forms or through surveys.  We have found internally that our sales team prefers to know more about a lead’s explicit attributes rather that their actions.

The best lead scoring programs will have both explicit and implicit components.  Talk to your sales team to find out what they value most.  They will also have insight into what types of leads convert.  Look back to see where your current customers came from.  Did they download a certain whitepaper?  Did they click through a specific email?  Did they attend a webinar?  Determine your ideal buyer profile.  Are they VP level?  What industry are they in?

Once you have your lead scoring program in place, don’t forget to educate your sales team on what that means.  Make sure they know how the lead attained the score.  Also be sure to allow sales to turn those leads back to you if inactivity warrants further nurturing.  No matter how well you research ahead of time to score the leads the most approriately this is still a learning process. Ask for feedback from your sales team to make sure you really are passing over hot leads and adjust your programs as necessary.  Happy scoring!

I am always looking for ideas on how to stand out in the crowd, so when I saw this idea on two different blogs, I had to share it.  In case you missed Dianna Huff or Drew McLellan sharing this interesting direct mail they received themselves, both were sent a FedEx package with chocolate covered grasshoppers inside.

The package said, “You’re a risk-taker, a dream-realizer. What’s left to do that you haven’t already done? Eat a grasshopper. They’re farm raised, covered in chocolate and rich in protein. So, not only will you be breaking boundaries, but you’ll be eating healthy, too.”  A note was attached with the real promotion, “Entrepreneurs can change the world. Join the movement now! grasshopper.com/idea”

According to a Fox News video, a company in Needham, MA sent the grasshoppers to 5,000 “of the most influential people in the U.S.” in the hopes that these people would then talk about the company and its campaign.

Drew and Dianna seemed to have different takes on the success of the campaign.

Drew loved the campaign – Bottom line — it worked.  3-D mailings may cost a little more money — but they deliver big results when they are done well.

The folks at Grasshopper.com decided to send out 5,000 of the attention-hopping packages to entrepreneurs, bloggers, celebrities, journalists and customers.  They spent 3 months assembling the list and made sure the packaging and cross promotion (Twitter, YouTube, bloggers, their website, etc.) were all in order.

This was a very well thought out and executed campaign.  Bravo to the Grasshopper gang.

While Dianna seems to have mixed thoughts – So, the company got me and lots of other people to write about its campaign — which according to the Fox News video, was the company’s objective.  But, it didn’t get me to buy — or even consider its service. Is the campaign a failure or success?

To me, 5,000 doesn’t seem to be a particularly targeted audience but it did seem to get the company the coverage they were looking for.  After all, I didn’t even get the chocolate covered grasshoppers, and I am writing about them.

Obviously this campaign worked best because the name of the company is Grasshopper but the idea of a bold direct mail piece is possible for anyone.  Something else to learn from the campaign is to not just focus direct mail on prospects.  You might get more bang for your buck with bloggers and thought leaders.

Photo credit: Drew’s Marketing Minute