Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.

Before joining ReachForce I was a sales guy with no marketing department.  Knowing how important and effective marketing strategy can be, I set out to try and do my own lead generation. I can remember investing days and days of work on this one project.  As a sales guy, I had a particular interest in automated lead generation (that’s right, sales guys are typically lazy) and had been studying it for months.  I finally grasped the concept of doing it right, I thought.

So, having never been blessed with the spiritual gifts of patience or discernment, I decided my next step was to find and buy a list of 1,200 names to send my message to.  The plan was to do an email blast with an offer to download a new report.

The report looked great – guaranteed to attract plenty of hot prospects, turn them into customers, and make me look like the Dalai Lama.  The email was perfectly crafted, engaging, and sure to catch the eye.  I told my wife to get ready for the commissions to start pouring in.

So, with palms sweating and my reputation at my company completely mortgaged (side note – companies don’t like spending money on things they don’t understand), the time had come for launch.  Three…two…one…CLICK.

Within 15 minutes my mailbox was full!  The response was unbelievable…from “System Administrator, Address Unknown.”  The list of 1200 contacts turned out to be about 60% accurate, at best.

I believe whole-heartedly that a company’s biggest asset are customers and happy ones are even better. I’ll even take that a step further, though.  A sales and marketing person’s biggest asset is a database of FUTURE customers (prospects).

** WARNING – Here comes the ReachForce promotion.  Your prospect database should be 100% accurate, up-to-date, properly targeted, and relevant to your business.  Each name you have listed should be the right person inside the right company.  You’re thinking “in a perfect world…”

If you’re not a ReachForce customer and you’re reading this, here’s a few interesting data points to consider:

• Industry listed (rented) deliver less than a 3% response rate
• Sales people can spend up to 1/3 of their time hunting down the right buyers in a prospect company
• According to Gartner, 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months.
• 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

If you’re interested in cleaning up the data you already have, check out this post on Dirty Data.  If you’re interested in hearing how ReachForce can help, please contact me.

Sales people out there – please jump in here, tell your marketing counterparts to help you out and make sure they are marketing to the right people in the right companies so you can spend your time selling, not hunting.

Thinking about how to make the biggest splash with your next mega-launch? Think again. Emerging companies are getting smarter about how they “launch” and opting for a slower community building process that takes place over the course of months. Turns out it is not only less expensive but it proves to be more valuable over the long term.

The process involves getting out months ahead of your product availability and building relationships with key influencers, contributing relevant valuable content to your market and attracting a loyal following with a blog or community. We did something like this at BreakingPoint, although it happened in a far more condensed time frame, and it has indeed been very valuable for reaching our hyper-niche market.

There’s been lots of controversy on the topic of launching at Tech Crunch 50 vs. DEMO lately. Robert Scoble triggered a firestorm of commentary when he posted a blog series about how “companies launching at DEMO suck”. (Why is it that blog posts that include the word “suck” always generate so much buzz?) This triggered Paul May of BuzzStream to blog about the economics of launching a startup at TechCrunch 50 or Demo. According to Paul:

“The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin.  Let’s look at an example.  My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago.  In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach:

1. Devote 80 hours to prep time.  At $100 an hour, that’s $8K.
2. Speaking coach – $5K
3. Travel – three nights for three people – $6K
4. PR rep – $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer)
5. Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. – $3K to $5K”

Wow, that’s a hefty price tag for a startup—bootstrapped or funded. Years ago when I launched a startup at Demo, it was well worth that investment. Why? Those were the early Internet Boom days when startups had to shell out $30,000 to $50,000 per month in retainers to PR agencies. We netted 17 pieces of very high profile coverage from our Demo participation in major trade publications and even The Washington Post. It was such a success that I actually considered going this year with BreakingPoint.

Today, however, most of those publications are no longer around—at least in print. Buyers get their information in different ways and focusing your efforts on laser targeted database marketing combined with a strong push for building a community using social media are the keys to success for startups. If you have a B2C play, those events may make sense for you. But for us, I had to pass.

So, back to the topic at hand: launching your company online. There’s absolutely no reason to wait until you have a product to launch to get started. Why not start engaging with your customers now? Reach out and conduct a little market research. Build tight relationships and a nice following for your blog. Funnel your money into building a detailed, role-based database of your target market. Hire an intern to discover the top thought leaders and start building tight relationships by interacting with them in social media circles.  Start generating a slew of inbound links so that you will rank at the top of the search engines when you introduce your product or service. The possibilities are endless.

B2B marketing is all about driving sales, right?  The most effective teams know that alignment of marketing and sales is a requirement for productive lead generation and customer growth.

We’ve had sales pipeline metrics in place forever, I sometimes wonder why we as Marketers got to skate along all this time with no accountability…that’s a post for another day maybe…

With today’s sales force automation and marketing automation solutions, we as Marketers are now able to prove our worth with every campaign or program we launch.

Here’s a few metrics we here at ReachForce track to ensure we are driving valuable sales activity and customer growth.

• # of net new companies from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of net new contacts (right role, not just anyone) from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of contacts being touched with a marketing message each week; net new contacts vs. those in nurture programs (and of course, we track opens and click throughs)
• # of inbound requests
• # of people hitting a landing page, then jumping to corporate site for product/service info.  (we do newsletter and search engine advertising driving people to best practice content accessible via a landing page)
• # of people originating at The B2B Lead (ReachForce blog) and jumping to the ReachForce corporate site (product pages, solution pages)
• # of new sales meetings set from marketing lead generation programs
• # of marketing leads moved to the qualification stage of our sales pipeline
• # of marketing leads moving to a proposal, and of course closing

Once a new customer is onboard I then go back and identify what activities were involved in moving this lead to being a new customer so I can be sure to do more of it.

Now of course there is a list of metrics similar to this for each initiative you take on.  It’s always important to outline goals and expectations of each program so that you are sure to spend your time and resources on the best producing programs.

Do you measure anything not on this list?  If so, please share.

Dirty data—whether purchased, gathered via download offers or aged and stored in your internal database—costs companies billions every year in wasted resources and lost productivity.

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.

Feeding dirty contact data into a marketing automation or CRM system has a multiplier effect that can derail success by:

• Delivering the wrong message to the wrong person
• 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 more Sales inefficiencies

Even with so much at stake, tackling data cleanup issues is a daunting proposition. 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. It is often too difficult to know where to begin.

Before you undertake any data cleaning, segmentation, or augmentation initiative, be sure to map out your plan. Here’s an outline to get you started.

Targeting the Right Companies–
Use what you already have access to first – your CRM data and your web site visitor logs

• 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.
• Website visitor logs/Unknown visitor logs
  • Look for visitor patterns – ex. are there lots of healthcare companies visiting you that you haven’t directly targeted?
  • Are companies visiting already currently in your database, if so, are you recording these page visits?
  • Your online marketing and PPC advertising is driving lookers, 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”.

Once you’ve built a profile of common denominators or qualifying criteria for your target market “sweet spot,” now you’re ready to identify your decision making unit. The decision making consists of everyone involved in the buying decision of your product or service.

Start with a decision making unit profile to identify the types of buyers involved in the buying process and the roles of these buyers both in the buying cycle and their role within the organization. It is vital to understand the responsibilities for each of your buyers. With this information, you will be able to refine your data augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted marketing programs.

Now that you have your buying unit profiled, pull a list of pre-existing contacts that correspond to your Target Accounts so you can 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 your de-duping process, you now know what you have and what you need to fill in. When filling in the gaps, remember to look for role-based contact resources, like ReachForce. Shameless promotion I know…but remember the title-based lists we’re all used to using are still delivering a less than 3% response rate. Isn’t it worth the risk of trying something new?

A few extra data hygiene tips from our Marketing Ops Guru, Lauren, here at ReachForce –

• 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 want to be able to pull your new target market data easily. You’ll be thankful you did this, I promise.
• Add a ‘born on’ date field to the record and once you’ve refreshed it, add the date, everyone touching the record will be happy you did this.
• As you are filling in gaps and building out contact data for new roles, consider other segmenting options. While you’re updating you should go ahead and do this too. This will enable you to laser target your message at these prospects.

I’m at the SiriusDecisions Summit this week and feeling really energized about all of the great ideas I’m planning to implement when I get back home. Of all of the great presentations today, Tony Jaros (of SiriusDecisions) presentation, ‘The Demand Ecosystem: Progress and Problems’ really stood out, so I thought I’d share. These ideas could have stood out to me because they really reinforced our beliefs at ReachForce. It was nice to hear someone else validate what we’ve been saying all along. If you’re not a ReachForce customer, feel free to call us after reading below. We can help.

• “The Power of your database is what you OWN, not what you RENT.” We at ReachForce couldn’t agree more. We believe B2B marketers are tired of the poor results rented lists deliver. Where did all of these names come from anyway? And how long ago were they collected? ReachForce contact databases are built custom for your business and are yours to keep for continued marketing.
• “Targeting is a function of probability, not possibility.” If we do our homework on the front end by identifying the right companies and the right buying roles within these companies we are increasing the response probability. By not targeting, we are only able to say there is a possibility we may get some responses. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t bet my job on possibilities.
• If you are marketing to the CXOs, you are more than likely not targeting the right people. “Typically CXOs enter the buying process at the end of the sales process.” Everyone knows that the possibility of getting a CXO to actually respond to a marketing program or pick up the phone to talk to sales guy (they’ve never heard of) is very slim, right?

Attention Conservation Notice: This article discusses using Sales Win analysis to be able to create a profile of best customer accounts enabling you to identify matching companies that you are not currently marketing to. By narrowing the target market, lead generation programs can speak specifically to the buying audience, increasing response rates and ultimately ROI.

By laser targeting a narrow group of prospects, Marketers are able to deliver a message that resonates with their target audience and creates better leads for Sales. Spraying a large list of contacts with a generic message and praying that message will reach the right people has led to average response rates of less than 3%.

Instead of spraying and praying, consider building a database of targeted prospects based on where you are winning customers today. Identify these companies with customer wins analysis. Once you’ve identified this winning profile, start the search for other businesses that match that profile.

A good starting point is your in-house database of current customers and prospects. Find the companies that match your wining profile and start there.

Narrowing the focus allows Marketers to deliver a targeted message that has a better chance of resonating with your audience. Instead of cleansing an out-of-date, in-house database, review your sales pipeline and customer win data and to identify your top market segments and determine key qualifying characteristics. Look at the size of the open and closed deals, as well as the velocity of those deals as they move through the pipeline to answer the following questions:

• In which market segments am I closing the most deals?
• In which market segments are deals closing the fastest?
• What are the common characteristics of companies in those market segments?
• What other market segments share those common characteristics?

Relevancy is key here. The more relevant the data used to feed Marketing Programs or Automation systems (like Eloqua, Marketo, Loopfuse, Vtrenz, Aprimo, Market2Lead, Manticore, etc.) the better and more powerful the results will be.

With Sales wins analysis, you can also build a profile of your best customer accounts to develop qualifying criteria. Do you close more deals with Fortune 1000-size enterprises or are you moving more deals with Small and Medium-size businesses? Is the number of employees of an organization a critical success factor or is a global, distributed environment more important? Are there key trends you can identify in certain industries that are driving the need for your product?

Now that you’ve documented your top markets and qualifying criteria, you can use this information to discover other target accounts. While these companies have not yet purchased from you, they share many of the same characteristics of your best customers, and therefore will likely have a higher propensity to purchase your products or services.

Next, complete an enterprise buying profile to identify the roles of buyers involved in the buying process. Just as you identified the profile for targeting new companies, you need to have an understanding of the role and responsibilities of the buyer within those companies. You’ll want to understand their role both in the buying cycle and within the organization. It is vital to be aware of the responsibilities for each of your buyers and which organizational role typically corresponds with the role in the buying cycle. With this information, you will be able to refine your augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted Marketing Programs.

Creating your wins analysis can be done with a low-tech approach using a business analyst and a spreadsheet, but you may find that business analytics tools such as ReachForce Insight can save time and money and provide insight into pipeline changes in real-time. Once you see the results of wins analysis in action, you’ll want to monitor your pipeline closely to uncover new opportunities so it’s best to automate if possible.

Sales wins analysis is providing a new breed of B2B marketers with a more effective way to continue to build databases of accurate, consistent, and comprehensive role-based data used for multi-modal, segmented Marketing campaigns. By using sales wins analysis to understand best target markets and profiling their common characteristics, similar prospects can be identified in the same market segment, as well as additional market segments in which there are a higher propensity to sell more, faster.

I just read a great post by Robert Rosenthal on his Freaking Marketing blog titled It’s the Data, Stupid. In his post, Robert says:

But there’s really just one variable that consistently makes or breaks direct marketing campaigns, and that’s data.

When I was a kid in this business, a mentor shared this maxim: send a so-so presentation to a great list and you may turn a profit, but send a great presentation to a shit list and you’re automatically dead.

Someone else gets it! I have been saying this for years. I don’t know how many millions of dollars I have seen (and also have myself) wasted on brilliant marketing campaigns that saw abysmal results because no one spent any time on the data. As we have gotten more sophisticated with the delivery of our marketing messages from direct mail to email and now through integrated marketing campaigns, the data has never been more important.

If marketers are out there wondering why their expensive marketing automation tool has not delivered increased response rates, it is because they are still pouring in garbage data. Garbage in, garbage out. Targeting is key – more customers in segments where you are winning is as key as the person you are trying to reach. 100% accurate contact data for the RIGHT person is money! If these automation tools are your marketing engine (ones like Marketo, Vtrenz, Eloqua, LoopFuse, Vertical Response, Exact Target, Constant Contact, Aprimo, etc. to name a few) then you need to fuel it with high-octane data, not sludge.

We started ReachForce to solve this very problem. I hope more marketers will realize that with quality contacts at the top of the funnel, truly targeted lead generation is possible, ultimately resulting in increased revenue. I applaud salesforce.com for driving the SFA (sales force automation) aspect of it as it has created a greater awareness on measurement – now it’s time for us B2B marketers to do the same, starting with the data.

As some of you may have noticed, we at ReachForce were founded on the principals that B2B direct marketing was failing due to the poor quality of lists – it was and is egregious that we get less than 1% response rate from e-mail campaigns and that the list industry had not changed in 100 years and I quote are like “dinosaurs in a marketing 2.0 world”. Then, this week I see a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of the BtoB magazine and it alludes to the “L-word”.

The article titled “The List World – List managers unable to adapt and create new products and services that dig deeper into data are in danger of extinction” is a very interesting piece. Carol Krol, great job on this article, you absolutely GET IT!

Here are some of the points covered in the article:

1. The “List industry” is undergoing dramatic change and consolidation is underway – the OLD way of list marketing is dying
2. Database marketing is emerging (my view is that isn’t that what we all learned anyway?)
3. Data now constitutes 2 dimensions: Analytics and the leads databases (not lists)
4. Custom database development is what people want with more precision
5. E-mail marketing emerging as the # 1 way to target 1:1 messages to the right people
6. Nurturing contacts using e-mail marketing is also a driver to this trend
7. Database analytics and segmentation is becoming a natural extension in marketing departments

As I say every day, fellow B2B Marketers, let’s get together on a crusade to put an end to the 90+% waste in marketing spend – stopping the bleeding on lists is a good start, let’s think about targeted databases built on analytics and focused messages to the right person at the right target company.

It is interesting that we continue to see a proliferation of “marketing automation tools and technologies” emerge every month. Marketers have their choice from Eloqua, Aprimo, Marketo, Vtrenz, Market2Lead, Manticore and the open source option, Loopfuse. And while each has great benefits, I can’t help but think that no matter how much the engine (Marketing Automation System) is perfected, it will not run well if the fuel (the DATA) is sewage.

Are we still, in 2008, renting “sewage lists” and them pumping them though these marketing automation processes? Most list vendors sell or rent title-based B2B contact lists. The problem is that a person’s title is only an appellation of rank, it has very little to do with the person’s roles and responsibilities in an organization. Say the buyer of your product is typically a Director of IT. Someone comes to your site and accurately fills out a form that they are the Director of IT. Hooray, you got ‘em. But wait, at IBM there could be 150 directors of IT; how do you know this is the one responsible for network security and has budget authority?

Just yesterday, I was on a call with the VP of Marketing who had been at a few of the Marketing Automation vendors and she could not believe what ReachForce is doing. At several past positions she set up her own inside telemarketing team to do contact discovery because she knew that title-based lists produces abysmal response rates. While this tactic had success, it was cost prohibitive to scale, manage and build. In her case, she thought that there was no option but to do that as she did not want to use the sewage and be in 99% inaccuracy land.

Marketing Automation is a necessary tool for all marketers, but any one of these tools is only as good as the data put into it.

My point is that marketing automation is important but getting quality data or fuel to put into it is PRICELESS!!

Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a strategy for leveraging market research and a role-based database build to reduce costs and jumpstart expansion into new territories.

Expanding into new territories is always a challenge because it involves a slow and painful ramp up investment. First, you have to understand the unique needs of buyers in foreign territory and then you also need to build a presence. You won’t know what works and what doesn’t until you’ve jumped in and tested a few techniques and this takes time. Will Google Adwords pull in buyers or do you need to rely more heavily on face-to-face events?

Another issue, in recent months, has been the economy. With the decline of the US dollar, lead generation and promotional campaigns cost more than ever before. I was recently quoted a staggering $145 per lead from a white paper syndication service in the UK. Who knows how much those same leads are today, just a few months later.

So, what’s a B2B Marketer on a budget to do? With both time and money at stake, we chose to invest in a little upfront research and role-based database building. By investigating the pain points and decision drivers of the UK market and building out a complete role-based database of all of our target companies in that country, we were able to quickly provide a list of prospects for our in-country inside sales professionals.

With this database in hand, we were able to experiment with Google Adwords and other promotional activities to find the right mix. What worked? Well, calling on the new database, and exhibiting at live events worked best in 2007. Google AdWords helped us secure a few introductions. And, direct mail and email marketing did not yield much.

What has worked best for you in Europe or Asia-Pac?