The B2B Lead » B2B Marketing

Targeting the Right Decision Makers Makes All The Difference!

Bob Riazzi — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:59:01 +0000

We practice what we preach and recommend you practice it too! You need to build a profile of common denominators or qualifying criteria for companies in your target market “sweet spot.” The next step is to identify your decision making unit (DMU). The DMU consists of everyone involved in the buying decision of your product or service.

Start by building a profile that clearly identifies the different buyers you want to target in the DMU. Don’t be satisfied with just their titles. As we know, sometimes titles can be misleading. In fact, traditional title-based lists deliver a response rate that’s usually less than 3%. Determine the actual role that your contacts play in the buying cycle and in the organization. Backed by this functional, role-based information, you’ll be able to refine your data augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted marketing programs.

Next, pull a list of pre-existing contacts that correspond to your target accounts. With this list in hand, begin the process of de-duping, identifying missing fields such as addresses or contact details, and identifying gaps such as key buyers, roles and other relevant details.

After this process, you begin to get a better feel for what you have and what you need.

You should also make sure that you’re marketing to the entire DMU. As we know, B2B purchases are typically made by a group of people, each one with different concerns and requirements. DMU members can include end users, business managers, finance specialist, technology specialists, senior management, key influencers, procurement specialists, and so forth.

The number of people in a DMU can vary greatly according to the size of the company. Marketing Sherpa reports the following statistics for purchases of $25,000 or more:

Companies with 100 to 500 employees ― 6.8 people in the DMU
Companies with 501 to 1000 employees, 13.5 people in the DMU
Companies with over 1000 employees ― 21 people in DMU

By connecting with the entire DMU before the prospect moves into the sales funnel, you can accelerate the sales cycle and increase your chances of conversions.

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Targeting the Right Companies

Bob Riazzi — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:55:47 +0000

To accurately target the right companies in your in-house database, first use what you already have ― your CRM data and your website visitor logs

With your CRM data –

Profile your top-performing market segments. Where are you winning?
Identify your best target markets. What kinds of deals close the fastest?
Determine key qualifying company characteristics and buyer roles.

With your website visitor logs –

Look for visitor patterns. For example, do you see any companies from your key markets or vertical industries that you haven’t already targeted?
Are companies visiting that are already currently in your database? If so, are you recording these page visits?
Your online marketing and PPC advertising is driving lookers, so track these visitors as well. Just because they don’t announce themselves doesn’t mean they aren’t potential leads.

This analysis will help you determine where to find your target market “sweet spot.” You should also follow these other steps as you find the right targets.

Mark all records that are included in your current target market. You don’t necessarily want to delete the data you aren’t using, but you need the ability to pull your target market data easily. It may be as simple as a field for industry or industry segment or as complex as a series of tags that indicate parcels within your target market.

As you fill in gaps and build out contact data for new roles, consider other segmenting options. Maybe segmenting based on employee size isn’t the way to go, can you use annual revenue as an indicator of opportunity size or maybe geography if you are targeting for a site specific event. Do this while you’re updating as well. This will help you better target your message at these prospects.

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Understanding the Problem of Dirty Data

Bob Riazzi — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:24:46 +0000

Dirty data costs companies billions every year in wasted resources and lost productivity. This is true whether the data is purchased, gathered via download offers or stored in a company’s internal database.

This problem is driven by several factors. Today’s mobile workforce is changing jobs faster than ever before. According to Gartner, 30 million of the 138 million workers in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. Now add that to the number of businesses that move or get acquired every month. It’s easy to see how they dirty data piles up and piles up fast.

To make matters even worse, feeding dirty contact data into a marketing automation or CRM system has a multiplier effect. This can quickly derail success by:

Delivering multiple wrong messages to the wrong person or persons.
Annoying customers and prospects with redundant messages.
Losing credibility due to botched attempts at personalized communications.
Failing to leverage multi-modal marketing capabilities.
Misinterpreting campaign success metrics.
Creating sales inefficiencies.

So how can a company address this problem? It’s not easy. Most marketers are overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in different states of completion. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years.

The best way to start cleaning data is by targeting the right companies, along with the decision makers who actually determine the buying process. Develop a profile of what your ideal customer would look like, working from there you should be able to weed out less-than ideal candidates or at least give some kind of prioritization to companies in your database.

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How to Get More From Your In-house Database

Bob Riazzi — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:20:24 +0000

To get more from your in-house data for lead generation, you need to keep it clean ― but that’s like hitting a moving target. With companies merging or going out of business and a workforce that is constantly changing, marketing databases get dirtier at an alarming rate.

In fact, 2.1% of data goes bad every month, according to MarketingSherpa. This means over 25% of contact data goes bad per year.

The only problem is knowing which 25%.

The good news is that marketers can dramatically improve their campaign results by using the right strategies to consistently update, clean and refresh their lead-generation database. According to SiriusDecisions, “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.”

Lately, we’ve been talking about the best ways to start with data cleanup, what to consider when marketing to your in-house database, important signs that your database might need help, and more.

Armed with this information, you should be in a better position to optimize your in-house database, reduce wasted efforts, improve conversions and get more revenue from your marketing dollar.

Do you have some great tips for starting the clean up process?

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Move your Sales and Marketing Database Out of the Slow Lane

Lauren Kincke — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:46:53 +0000

Aberdeen recently released a great report on leveraging customer data to better serve your marketing efforts. Here are some of the take-away points we thought were worth sharing:

If your database is in the slow lane:

Start by using data for activities that will have a positive impact on revenue. Demonstrate the value of your data to justify investment in its ongoing health.
Develop timelines and processes for cleaning your data. The importance of good data hygiene can’t be understated. If you clean it once and walk away it will get dirty again. Only constant attention will yield golden results.
Invest in tools to help analyze customer data. Data analysis and marketing automation technologies will help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

If your database is already on the right path but needs a boost to hit the fast lane:

Implement a formal data hygiene strategy. Create repeatable processes for de-duping, cleaning, and appending data as well as documenting best practices for users of your data.
Engage multiple departments for data analysis. Encourage collaboration between your sales, marketing, customer service, IT, and finance organizations.

Democratize all customer data. Centralize your database to measure and optimize the performance of your multichannel campaigns.

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Your Database: No Longer Your Enemy

Lauren Kincke — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:24:17 +0000

Like it or not, data fuels the engine of your business. Your sales teams need it to prospect, cross-sell and upsell. And your marketing teams need it to create viable campaigns so your sales team has a message to sell. With that in mind, what exactly are you doing with that ever growing pile of information? Do you have someone to keep it fresh, or does it sit untouched, unmaintained and just plain unloved?

No matter what, you need a plan for organizing the monolith that is your database. SiriusDecisions estimates that in a typical B2B company error rates are as high as 25%. That means that if you have a team of sales reps working with that data, 25% of their efforts are wasted. At the same time, it means that 25% of your marketing departments’ messages cannot get through and likely are falling on deaf ears. That’s pretty wasteful. In an economic climate like ours you have to be lean and mean. Wasting 25% of your sales efforts and marketing messages just isn’t in-line.

Ok, so the baby (your database) is ugly, but how do you fix it? Set up error reporting so that you empower your users to point out the problems (see Cleaning Up Your Marketing Database). Then assign some ownership, giving someone the responsibility to oversee, fix and police your database to ensure positive change. You have to have a continual focus on data quality, because constant improvement will lead to gains across the board. If you need proof, SiriusDecisions estimates that B2B companies that address the root cause of data errors can realize a 25% increase in converting inquiries to marketing-qualified leads.

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Is your database in a complete state of lawlessness?

Lauren Kincke — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:24:04 +0000

You have an HR handbook, departmental training materials, and documented procedures. But do you have standards and rules for your marketing and sales database? You should. Without some law and order, your database will start looking like the wild West of marketing and sales data. Here are some of our suggestions for putting these rules to paper:
1.    Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
a.    Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (e.g. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
b.    Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM/Marketing Automation system to work. For instance, if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses, outline what those rules are and how data has to be fomatted to fit within those rules.
c.    Requested information to make marketing, sales, customer support, or anyone else working in your database work better.

2. Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields identified above. (E.G. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, etc.)

3. Do a gap analysis. Understand who is in the target Decision Making Unit and make sure all relevant contacts are present that for your target accounts and prospects.

4. Make sure this data has an undisputed owner. Is it updated by a team member as a natural step in a key business process? Or can nearly anyone update it at any time? Depending on how you answer these questions, you may want to chat with the team or person that ‘owns’ the data. That way you can make sure that the way you choose to fill in the gaps suits their needs as well.

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Increasing Engagement in User Communities

Leigh Anne Reynolds — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:46:13 +0000

A lot of companies have created great online user communities filled with best practice content, forums and wikis. But depending on your customer base, it may be difficult to get them to take full advantage of the community. You might try sending weekly (or bi-weekly or monthly – up to you) digests a la LinkedIn Groups to increase engagement.

As a new user creates their account, let them opt-in to get email notifications. That way, as there is new activity on the forums or when a new whitepaper is posted, they will be the first to know.

A simple test to see if your buyers are the type to want content to come to their inbox it to check out your FeedBurner stats. Look at you email subscribers against your RSS subscribers. (If you have a blog and don’t use FeedBurner, shame on you – it is free and easy to set up). At ReachForce, we chose not to have the feed via email option because we use the blog to create our newsletter. When we looked at the number of newsletter subscribers versus RSS subscribers, we were astonished. We have 20 times more newsletter subscribers than RSS subscribers. Looks like our buyers prefer us sending content directly to their inboxes, do yours?

Don’t have a user community? Consider using LinkedIn as one. With the groups feature you can email the group up to once a week and post discussions and news. If your customers are already using LinkedIn (and my guess is they are), it will be easier to engage with them on a platform that they are already using.

A user community (whether hosted by you or LinkedIn) is not just a “if you build it, they will come” kind of thing. You have to have a plan of action to deliver new relevant content and start discussions. Remember it’s their community so take cues from your customers as to how they want you to interact with them.

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Funnelnomics: Four Steps to Accelerating Your Marketing and Sales Funnel – Step 1: Mapping Your Marketing and Sales Funnel

Bob Riazzi — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:54:02 +0000

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.

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Increase Open Rates for Follow-up Emails

Leigh Anne Reynolds — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:56:10 +0000

Coming back from a trade show, everyone is on a high. Your team tells you, “it was the best show EVER” and the sales team is ready to get all of those hot leads. As much as they may want you to, the last thing you should do is just hand over the scans list to sales and tell them to have at it. Setting up follow-up is key.

We do one big trade show a year, Dreamforce (salesforce.com’s user group conference). We limit collateral at the show (partly because most of it ends up being thrown away and partly to do our best to be a bit greener) and promise to follow-up with more info in an email.

Most everyone that scanned me sent a follow-up email within days of the show. Unfortunately almost all of them used the exact same subject line. Yes, I said exact same subject line – Dreamforce follow-up. At a show like Dreamforce with hundreds of exhibitors, that just really is not going to cut it to stand out in the crowd. When I looked back at our follow-up email from last year I was a little disappointed that we had used that same worn out subject line. I decided I wanted to try something new.

The subject line I ended up using this year is a little on the long side but much more descriptive. The subject line was: Dreamforce follow-up on data cleansing and contact discovery. Notice I chose to exclude our company name. I did this for two reasons, it was already in the from line and it is doubtful anyone remembers who we are or what we do.

But much more interesting were the results I saw. I grew our open rate from 16% to 36% as compared to the same follow-up email from the year before. See if you can increase your open rates by adding more relevancy in the subject line for trade show follow up emails.

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