Funnel Leakage - We all have it. What are you doing about yours?
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009MarketingSherpa 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.
Repurposing Lead Generation Content You Already Have – Sales, This is a TIP for you too! - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #242
Monday, June 1st, 2009Creating new content on a regular basis is tough and very time consuming. Here at ReachForce with almost everything we create we create a plan on how we are going to make use of the content in as many places as possible. Things like converting eBooks or whitepapers into blog posts and vice versa or using surveys for lead information gathering as well as trend mapping.
Well, nurture marketers and sales teams out there here’s a GREAT idea! I got an email from an Account Executive at MarketBright (see his picture below) that simply invited me to visit the MarketBright blog. Then he went on to list a few of the most popular posts. I thought this was brilliant. He wasn’t trying to sell me anything, well maybe he was in the last paragraph but it was subtle. He was just letting me know they had a resource I may be interested in. No customization was needed, just a simple introduction and a list of the resources. Easy as pie.
Here’s what the email looked like –
Ok, I must admit I think the picture is a little cheesy. But it did make me giggle so I guess it worked, it caught my attention. But otherwise, his hook worked. Now I’m sure with the MarketBright email tracking, Jon was able to tell what I was interested in and now he knows what to follow up with next.
If you have a blog, steal some content from there. Big change your prospects missed it the first time it went out. If you don’t have a blog, pull out highlights from eBooks, whitepapers, webcasts, basically anything else you have and put together an email that links back to each of these.
I’m stealing this idea and going to do something like this for our pipeline nurturing program. No selling from me, just trying to be resourceful for our decision makers and help encourage further interaction. Jon, your email worked. You caught my attention and I acted. Thank you for the great idea.
Aligning Sales & Marketing Objectives – It’s NOT just March Madness - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #220
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Yesterday 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.
The Springboard Effect of Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #219
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years. With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.
Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel. Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.
Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.
Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:
- Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn. “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”
We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.
- Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”
- According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams. Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.
Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.
WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!
Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.
Dirty Data – Do You Care? - Marketing WTF?
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009I’m not a marketing or sales guy per se so please help me understand something here.
As the classic saying goes, “I know at least half of my data is bad…I just don’t know which half”.
Marketing Sherpa tells us that contact data degrades at a rate of 2.1% per month (and it’s probably gone up substantially given the current rate of job loss), it’s easy to see how this is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Having said all that, does it matter you could be sitting on piles of dirty data?
Contact data cleanup seems to experience a run-up of demand at the end of the year when marketers have just enough budget to burn on something small to mid-sized but not enough to do anything substantial with. Or at least this is what we saw. In fact, we cleaned up some of our own CRM data in December as well.
But come the turn of the new year and new budget, the psychology of “new” is the all the rage. Sales reps are innately in perpetual want for new leads, but as we say around here, it seems most marketing and sales teams would rather keep building new add-on rooms to their houses than spend the money to fix the basement that is flooded with sewage.
So what is the psychology behind using what you have vs. buying something new? Is it simply fueled by an unquenchable thirst for “new, new, new” (and the perception thereof)? Or do you have a more systematic approach to if and when you elect to use what you have vs. buy new stuff?
Is it the same mentality of buying something that is on sale even if you don’t really need it?
I just don’t get it.
5 Things to Consider When Marketing to your In-House Database - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #196
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
When times are tough we are forced to make use of what we already have. After many events, lead forms, list exchanges and sales rolodex’s you have probably built a nice size database of prospects. Before you get ready to launch your next program to your in-house database consider these things:
- Marketing Sherpa has said that 2.1% of data goes bad every month. (This stat is about 2 years old, with so many people losing their jobs over the last couple of months I bet this number has gone up, but for this, we are going to use the 2.1) This means each year almost 25% of your contact data gets dirty. Do you know which 25%?
Contact records stay fresh about as long as a gallon of milk. Well maybe a little bit longer but you get the idea. Here’s some other interesting stats (also about 2 years old) According to Gartner, more than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. In the same time, some 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Again, I bet these numbers are up too.
- Are you marketing to the entire DMU (decision making unit)? Do you have your entire DMU in your database?
B2B purchases are typically made by a group of people. Each one with different concerns and specifications. To accelerate sales cycles it pays to start the connections before your prospect moves into the sales funnel. DMUs can include – end users, business managers, finance specialist, technology specialists, senior management, key influencers, procurement specialists, etc.
Marketing Sherpa also says…For purchases of $25K or more -
100 – 500 employees 6.8 people in the DMU making buying decisions
501-1000 employees 13.5 people in the DMU making buying decisions
0ver 1000 employees 21 people in DMU making buying decisions - If you are trying to upsell or cross sell to your existing customer database, do you have the right buyers and their contact information?
If you are selling a platform or have solutions that affect multiple groups within a company, there’s a chance you don’t have the right buyers for your new product or solution. Here’s an example: You sell a CRM platform and have recently added accounting and marketing modules. Marketing to the sales leader that bought the CRM piece probably isn’t your target audience for the new modules and won’t get you very far. Their needs are already met. And while they may be involved in the additional purchases they probably are not the ultimate buying decision maker for your upsell or cross sell.
- Do you have all of the relevant contact information needed to executive your marketing programs?
Example – You are planning a breakfast city tour and want to invite people in each region via email and also with a direct mail piece. Do you have everyone’s correct physical address for the actual events and the direct mail? Do you also have correct email addresses for the series of emails you plan to send reminding people about the event? Missing just once piece can hinder your results.
- Have you considered international privacy and SPAM laws?
While we’re all very familiar with our US CAN-SPAM laws, have you researched the other countries you are marketing to? Each countries laws are different, like for example Germany requires a double opt-in for email marketing.
Am I missing anything here? Remember the grass isn’t always greener with the unknowns. Work what you have, at some point you thought these people were worthy of holding on to.
The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing: Nurture vs. Capture - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #191
Monday, January 19th, 2009This 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.
Lead Nurturing inside the Sales Funnel - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #190
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009We recently just had our 2009 sales kick off here at ReachForce. This time we focused part of the day on nurturing prospects in the sales opportunity funnel. Typically once leads are flipped into the sales funnel it means hands off for marketing. Sales people take over all communications at this point.
Here, we use Salesforce for our CRM and Eloqua for our Marketing Automation. We are able to push marketing campaign activities directly into Salesforce but once a lead is converted, it can’t be converted back to a lead if the prospect goes quiet or isn’t quite ready to buy. Why not salesforce.com? Why not? You’re making it so hard for us to really build a closed loop system. Anyway…
To help our sales team stay in regular communication with their prospects in the opportunity funnel we’ve (marketing) put together a few things to help them. Here’s what our sales team is now armed with:
- A daily prospect intelligence report – a news feed with any public news from companies in our sales funnel. This gives our sales team a little more insight into the company they are selling in to and gives them a reason to follow up if they run across some applicable news. You can do this with Google Alerts too. Set one up for your biggest prospects and see what they have to say or what is being said about them.
- Best Practice email templates in Salesforce – we (marketing) put together a series of emails and added them to Salesforce so our sales team can access them when they need them. My recommendation here was to periodically send best practice or thought leadership pieces to prospects to stay top of mind. These are not sales oriented emails, these are adding value emails. But, they can be customized to fit each prospect’s specific situation. I’m really interested to see if and how they actually use these.
- Blog posts – The B2B Lead is all about giving our readers good B2B Marketing and Sales tips to help them in their day to day jobs. So as we are adding new posts we’re making sure we are sharing those with our sales team. They can then forward these along to prospects when applicable. Not everything is for everyone but who knows, that one tip they forward on might just get them to move. And, who doesn’t want tips that will help them be better at their job?
- Newsletter – we have a very popular opt-in newsletter, in fact, our subscription list grew by 50% over the last 8 or so months. Our newsletter isn’t ReachForce promotional, instead we pull our best tips from The B2B Lead and put them together in a newsletter format. For this, we’ve just added a check box to the Salesforce contact record and if the sales rep wants us to include them in this group, they just mark the box.
So here’s what we just rolled out, what are you doing to nurture prospects already in the sales funnel? And who owns this nurturing? Marketing? Sales? Both?
Book Club Wrap-Up - ReachForce Book Club
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008Hope you enjoyed this quarter’s Book Club series. Just in case you missed an eBook or whitepaper we read and discussed, below are the links to them and what we had to say about each of them.
- HubSpots’s Get Found Online
- What we had to say…
- David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Viral Marketing
- What we had to say…
- ConnectDirect’s How to Choose your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers
- What we had to say…
Happy Reading. We look forward to sharing even more B2B Marketing and Sales tips with you in 2009.
The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing: Qualified Buyers vs. Leads - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #183
Monday, December 22nd, 2008This is the second post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first post on Intention vs. Attention.
Sales teams are always clamoring for more leads but smart marketers know that what they really need to deliver are qualified buyers. A lead status is often applied to anyone who fills out a form on your website or stops by your trade show booth. Rather than tossing that list of names over to sales, marketers must nurture those leads and weed out the good from the bad, those with budget and need from those still in the education phase.
Deliberate Marketing ensures marketers can extract the most value from their marketing programs based on using the most cost-effective method to move prospects and buyers through the funnel. It is not focused on simply filling the marketing and sales funnel with contacts and expecting sales to follow-up on any lead that downloads a whitepaper.
Deliberate Marketing is about profiling the best possible buyers, recruiting more buyers that are just like them, and then executing the most effective techniques possible to move the prospect through each stage of the funnel.
