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.
Tips for Follow-up on B2B Content Offers - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #244
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Here at ReachForce we use a lot of best practice type content offers as part of our multi-touch outbound marketing programs. I’ve heard my sales team say more than a couple of times that they don’t seem to get a lot of traction with people from the content downloads. Even with prompt follow up, nothing.
After giving it some thought, I came to the conclusion that either people downloading content are in an education phase and aren’t ready to speak to a sales rep. or that these people consume information in a way that does not involve interaction…yet. Neither of these conclusions provided a solution though.
Then I ran across this blog post, Forgettable Follow-up on B2B Content Offers, from Ardath Albee at The Customer Collective. This one is a MUST read for all sales and marketing teams. Here are some of the highlights:
Here are some examples of how B2B follow-up becomes forgettable:
Example:
[Company] Hello, This is Sam from [Company]. I noticed you downloaded our paper on whiz bang issue 57 and I’m interested in helping learn more about how we can help solve your problem.
[Prospect] I’m just researching.
[Company] Well, do you have a project planned that we can discuss?
[Prospect] No, I’m just doing some research. [I knew I shouldn't have answered the phone.]
[Company] Okay, I’m going to send you some product information so you’ll have it on file for when you need it.
[Prospect] Thanks. You have a nice day. [click, buzz, delete]
Example:
Email follow-up message - Thank you for requesting the [Recognizable Name] white paper. As you may know, [Our Company] is a leader in [whiz bang whatever] and we sponsored the white paper. I’d look forward to learning what initiatives you’re working on to see if [Our Solution] is a fit. I’d like to schedule a fifteen minute call to discuss your goals in [whiz bang whatever]. Please let me know when is a convenient time to talk.
This is such a waste of time. Approaches like these do absolutely nothing to elevate your company’s trust level or credibility. Instead, you’re seen as self-serving and, ultimately, forgettable.
Now you need to give them a reason for continued involvement. Here are some ideas on how to improve the response to your follow-up:
- Have a business reason for the follow-up. Just touching base isn’t good enough.
- Have an additional offer ready that builds on their expressed interest. An exclusive report, an article not publicly available, an invitation to a webinar on a related topic, etc.
- Know exactly what they downloaded and be specific to help them make the connection. People are busy. They download a lot of things. Expecting them to remember yours when you call/email out of the blue is just silly. If your follow-up is in relation to content you sponsored, they likely downloaded it because of the source, not you. So have something compelling to say if you want their interest to transfer to you.
- Follow-up promptly. Waiting a month means you’re likely forgotten and someone else now has their attention.
DO NOT:
- Ask them to educate you.
- Put them on the spot.
- Be ignorant of the interaction that prompted the follow-up.
- Push product information on them. Lead with “blah, blah, blah” about your company
- Use buzz words and jargon in the description of your company.
- Forget to use a value proposition for the communication that’s all about them, not you. The key is to get the prospect to take another step with you because you’ve got something valuable to say or share that they need to know.
After reading Ardath’s post (which I again recommend reading the entire thing, there are more examples and tips) I immediately forwarded it to my sales team and I’m joining their weekly meeting today to make sure everyone “gets it”.
We write new content for many reasons but our #1 reason is to support lead generation programs that convert leads. Hopefully this helps and we see more content download leads in our opportunity funnel.
Time for Summer School – Learn How to Move Leads Through the Funnel Faster
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009June is a big month. School is coming to an end, it’s the beginning of summer and vacation season is in full swing. For many businesses, June marks the end of the first half of the year and a slow couple of upcoming months.
With all of the summer distractions lead generation teams must have a plan to stand out in the crowd and be able to demonstrate value clearly and quickly. To help you jumpstart your thinking about your marketing and sales aligned programs and initiatives we’ve got 2 upcoming events you won’t want to miss.
June 4th, 3pm EDT – Join ReachForce and MathMarketing for a webinar to learn 3 strategies to better align Marketing and Sales teams to create a funnel that delivers.
We’ll also share a few surprising do’s and don’ts that debunk the classic understanding of the roles of Sales and Marketing. Things like: DON’T measure salespeople on proposals closed. Surprised? We were too.
Join us on June 4th at 3pm EDT to find out why successful companies DON’T use this as a metric and have increased growth as a result. Register Now
Then we’ll be in San Mateo on June 23rd -24th with Hugh Macfarlane, author of The Leaky Funnel, for a 2-day Funnel Academy. This 2-day in-person event will explore the following topics:
- Selecting a strategy based on the way your markets buy
- Aligning and allocating resources for multiple markets
- The buyer’s journey – understanding how buy and creating your strategy around your buyers
- How to build a model funnel and resolve disconnects
- How to plan campaigns that move buyers
Click here to learn more and to register.
For many businesses, the upcoming summer months can feel like they drag on forever. This summer use this time to set up for bigger success in 2009.
Sales Playbook Part 1 - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #240
Wednesday, May 27th, 20092009 is looking up and we’ve been very busy event planning, getting ready for a new webinar with Math Marketing (if you haven’t signed up, you can right here), and still working on our sales playbooks. Here’s where we’re at so far:
Current Issues Identified:
- The Sales team has too much information available to them and aren’t sure to how to use it
- Support materials not aligned with selling situations and buyer roles
- The sales process was not clearly defined causing missed opportunities
- New sales people need help with triggers that move prospects through the funnel
Next we assembled our playbook team and determined our mission to be:
Our sales playbook is going to ensure our sales team is armed and ready to have valuable conversations that help prospective buyers move through the sales funnel as fast and efficiently as possible.
Ok, now we are ready. We started with a list of questions and asked each sales person on the playbook team to think about some of their success stories and start by filling out the list of questions below.
Understanding the Buying Roles and their goals
- Who did you make initial contact with and how?
- Who else was involved in the buying decision?
- Who was the ultimate decision maker?
- What are they being measured on?
- What does success look like to them?
Understanding the pain
- What was their pain?
- What were they doing before connecting with ReachForce?
- What solutions were offered to solve their pain?
Understanding their environment
- What industry are they in?
- What do they sell? Average Selling Price?
- How long is their sales cycle?
Delivering Value
- What value proposition resonated with them? and Why?
- What were the buyer’s information needs at each stage of their problem-solving process?
- What tools and supporting materials were used and when?
- What would have been helpful during the sales process? Supporting materials needed? Presentation needed? Customer Case studies?
- What objections were overcome?
- Who else/What else were they considering?
And the ultimate question… Why did they choose ReachForce?
Next meeting is tomorrow. From here we plan to discuss key moves that converted the prospective buyers into customers and I’ll be busy trying to understand how to align our marketing support (what we have and what’s needed) with each trigger.
Stay tuned for next steps…
The New Rules of Sales Enablement – ReachForce Book Club
Thursday, May 21st, 2009I’m still working on my sales enablement playbook plans and Suaad, our CEO and fellow B2B Lead blogger, just happened to forward me a very timely new eBook, The New Rules of Sales Enablement, by Jeff Ernst, VP of Marketing at Kadient.
Jeff opens the eBook with some very interesting stats. Here’s just a few of them:
• Over 40% of salespeople fail to hit quota
• 30% of reps turn over each year
• 65% of a sales rep time is spent NOT selling
• 90% of marketing deliverables are not used by sales
WOW! This doesn’t look so good. He goes on to say that “buyers actually think that salespeople slow down their buying process.” I can see that and can see how the rules are changing on how we as marketers should be supporting our sales teams.
Now for the new rules –
Conversations, NOT Collateral – Our goal both in Marketing and Sales is to create conversations and not just to push a bunch of information at our prospects. Ernst goes on to say that most of the time this collateral isn’t aligned with selling situations and is disconnected from daily reality. I agree but haven’t been sure how to change this.
NEW RULE: Sales enablement is about ensuring salespeople are able to have valuable conversations that help buyers advance through their buying process.
I couldn’t agree more. We have a good deal of content here at ReachForce and we very often wonder what actually gets used. My guess, not even half of it. We’re working on realigning that now as part of our playbook strategies.
Experience BEATS Expertise – 90% of the “stuff” that the folks in corporate give them they ignore.
NEW RULE: The most effective selling content, messages, and strategies are discovered from experience with buyers.
This one seems easy, sales people like all of us really, want to know what works not what people say will work.
PROVEN Plays – Old rule says “if we implement a new sales methodology, every salesperson will become an “A” player. Yeah right! We all know that doesn’t work. Even the best made plans don’t work for everyone.
NEW RULE: Any salesperson can improve performance by following sales playbooks that are proven to work in winning deals.
Practical tactics that work in specific situations, that’s what they are looking for.
Value OUT, NOT Data IN – the new rule says it all here.
NEW RULE: Adoption of sales enablement applications is driven by the value a salesperson gets out of it, not the data they key in.
I think we sometimes forget that the sales tools we put in place help with forecasting and activity metrics but don’t help the sales rep do their job better – driving more deals to close. Interesting thought here but definitely makes sense.
This is just the tip of the iceberg on the great ideas presented in this eBook. There’s no way I could cover everything you should know. Download your own copy now. It’s worth your time and effort to read this one.
Thanks to Jeff Ernst at Kadient for this great eBook. As a long time marketer who is always up for trying something new to drive more deals to close, I’m excited about the game changing sales enablement playbook we are getting started on TODAY at 4pm!
Game Changing Alert: Sales Enablement Playbooks - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #238
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009This past week I was fortunate enough to join a couple hundred of the smartest marketers at the annual SiriusDecisions event in Scottsdale, AZ. This is the second one I’ve been to and both times I come back feeling revived and optimistic of the new changes I plan to roll out based on what I learned. For those of you who weren’t able to attend, no worries, in my next couple of posts I’ll share with you the highlights.
This year I went hoping for something to help our marketing team better align with and drive more productive sales activity. I feel like we’re working harder than we ever have but maybe not as smart as we should be.
Here’s my first golden nugget from this year’s event– sales enablement strategies, sales playbooks to be more specific. Do you have them? If so, are they working for you? I’m not talking about your sales portal with every piece of collateral, PR and case study you’ve ever written. Instead, I’m talking about situation based scenarios that your sales team has run into before and won. How did they do it? What supportive materials did they need? Were there pieces missing?
Here’s 3 steps to help you started on your Sales playbooks, compliments of Alden Cushman, Research Director at SiriusDecisions. Remember, you’re not creating these alone. Get product marketing, field marketing and sales involved.
- Identify Situational Elements –things like Organization Size and Structure, Vertical/Sub-Vertical Industries, Geographic Characteristics, Individual Roles and Responsibilities
- Collect and Position Content, Knowledge
- Products/Solutions - Features, advantages, benefits
- Pricing - Competitive info, volume discount
- Partners - Channel Positioning OEMs, VARs
- Market Forces - Complete market landscape and trends
- Objection Handling - Sticking points and best responses
- Run a Controlled Pilot – here is Alden’s example
- Situational elements
- CIO in a hierarchical insurance company, in education phase, with budget and need for an easy to use but sophisticated business intelligence offering
- Relevant available content and knowledge
- Phase-based BI implementation case study (education, active buying and closing)
- Archived Webcast of the return on and merits of BI solutions
- Web-based demo of new SaaS-based BI solution
- SaaS-based BI product features and function spec sheet
- Order of potentially appropriate sales plays
- Email industry white paper
- Three days later, send phase-based case study (tailored to CXO audience)
- One day later, call to discover unique pain points, invite to upcoming Webcast
- Email after Webcast and set up call for Web-based demo with SME
- Set up face-to-face meeting, bring positioning and value literature
- Ask for RFP, respond with detailed proposal
I plan on getting started on our sales playbook really soon. I know this will be a big project that will take a lot of thought and a lot of support from our sales team and product marketing team but the end result will change our business. As we get started on this journey, I welcome any ideas or feedback you may have. Please share what you learned putting these together and don’t leave out the parts that didn’t work.
Sales - Here is How to “Work” Your Data, Love Marketing
Monday, May 4th, 2009Dear Sales,
Now that we’re on the same page about the data, let’s talk specifics on how to make this happen.
- You know that we work hard to segment the data before it goes into campaigns, so first, get to know how we segment things. Talk to us, find out why we do things the way we do and who gets batched together. Seeing the world the way we do will help you better understand why certain types of contacts are getting certain messages and will help you better reach out to and tailor your messages to those contacts. We are open to your ideas too. You know your prospects better than we do. Help us to help you.
- Get to know the companies in your database, ask for help from Sales Operations or export a report of your prospects. Spend time learning about each company on your list, what do they do, who do they sell to, what events do they attend, make yourself an expert on them so that when you talk to them they feel like you really do know them and their pain points. Make notes in the record so that you don’t lose track of this valuable information.
- Do you use mail merge fields in your emails or letters? If so, then really spend some time cleaning up the names of prospects and their companies. Make sure people aren’t listed like this: “John NO LONGER THERE Smith” or “Jane SHE IS A REAL JERK Doe” – there is a notes section in your CRM, use it!
- If you’re using salesforce.com, set up views that capture activity, for instance, if your marketing automation tool integrates and marks activity on prospect records, set up a view where you can see that kind of activity. Keep tabs on what people are doing so that you can reach out to those active prospects.
These are just ideas, but the idea is that if you are truly in the ‘weeds’ of the data, you’ll get a good handle on what you own, who you’re calling and hopefully begin seeing some great results!
Love,
Marketing
Dear Sales, Love Marketing
Friday, May 1st, 2009Dear Sales,
We’ve had a long and storied relationship. When we work well together, we’re pretty amazing, when we fight, it’s ugly but overall we make a great team. I feel like we’ve worked through our differences well and that we see eye to eye more often than not, but we really need to talk about one thing…the one thing that bonds us for life but keeps pulling us apart…our data.
I know, I know, it’s no one’s fault. But that’s the problem. I supply the data, I nurture the data and then I send it to you so you can make it flourish. What happens to the data once I send it to you though? Some of it gets the proper care, it blossoms into an opportunity and then low and behold we win! Some of it isn’t really ready and gets nurtured some more, some wither and die on the vine, and some of it, well, it sits and it gets lost in the oblivion of it’s home, our CRM system.
So Sales, here is my proposition to you, let’s work together to cultivate our leads, I will continue to feed you nurtured sales ready leads that suit your need and I ask that in return, you help me keep everything straight. We must communicate, it’s required for our relationship to work. Get to know the data (your leads), really learn about your companies and our targets and then, tell me what’s not working (and better yet, what is!).
How do you do this you ask, well we’ll work together and make it happen!
Love,
Marketing
Targeting Someone Other Than the Cs and VPs - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #229
Monday, April 27th, 2009By now you know that there is more than one person involved in a B2B buying decision. The DMU (decision making unit) typically consists of the end user, key influencers, management, a financial buyer and others that have their hands in the decision to buy or not to buy.
It’s pretty easy to find the management decision makers with just a little research, but what about the others? Here’s a few tips to help you identify and build out lead generation programs for those other than the Cs and VPs.
- Where have you been winning? This is always a good place to start. Hopefully your sales team helped you out a little here and included notes about everyone they talked to in the buying process. If so, are you able to define their roles? If not, don’t despair, you’re not alone and this is not the end of the road for you.
- Profile your best customers – talk to your best customer implementation team, talk to the sales person that sold the deal and if possible interview a few customers to better understand who all was involved in the decision to buy.
- Once you have your roles defined, do you have these people in your leads database? Remember you are matching roles, not just titles. If so, tag them with a role identity. If you’re missing roles, call ReachForce, we can help you fill in the gaps. (Sorry for the shameless promotion…sometimes it just happens…)
- You’re finally ready to start marketing to these people. You are now able to build out very targeted programs focusing on key influencer and end user issues. Here’s an example –
- Nurture – not all buyers are ready to buy at the same time so be sure you are nurturing all of your prospects as well as those involved in a sales cycle. Here’s a few ideas for offers for your nurturing programs -
- Email analyst reports supporting the pain and possible solutions
- Email customer case studies
- Invite to webcasts
- Be sure to share any new content you roll out (whitepapers, eBooks, etc.)
For best results, I recommend you engage with your sales team before launching your newly segmented programs and ensure they are onboard to provide guidance and feedback throughout the process. To execute a healthy, ROI generating program it’s important to map out each step of the building process taking into consideration budget, timing and appropriate follow up. Here’s a template if you need help.
Marketing Campaign Tracking in salesforce.com - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #227
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke. Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems. She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient. She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.
As Sales and Marketing become better aligned, so do our tracking systems and metrics. For a while, we at ReachForce have struggled with the question of how best to track our campaigns, we wanted to know (for instance), how many emails it took to get someone to respond, what email was it that seemed to be the trigger? And the bigger piece to this puzzle, since we all know the Sales team doesn’t have the bandwidth to really track this information, how can we automate it?
Lucky for us, salesforce.com has a few cool features that we have found useful in tracking this type of things, the first is their Campaign Management tab.
Within the Campaign Management tab you can create a campaign, drop in the list of people who will be part of the campaign and as opportunities arise from that campaign, you can see exactly who they are. Along with the ability to watch as opportunities join the funnel as a result of your campaign, you can keep tabs on the cost of your campaign, its possible ROI and its actual ROI. Campaign Management gives you a full window into your programs. For a full run-down on the Campaign Management feature as well as new Marketing related features in salesforce.com, you should check out their Marketing Blog.
Outside of the Campaign Management feature, we use individualized Dashboards to track activity on specific events/campaigns. For instance, after Dreamforce (salesforce.com’s user group conference and our one big trade show) this past year, we tagged leads that we gathered as having attended Dreamforce, exhibited at Dreamforce, or having had a conversation with someone at our booth. To do this, we utilized a custom field we already had on our Lead and Contact records called “Marketing” – we populated all of the leads connected to Dreamforce with the right information (either a tag called “Dreamforce 08 Exhibitor”, “Dreamforce 08 Attendee” or “Dreamforce 08 Scan”). One quick caveat is that not only did all of our leads go through a rigorous scrubbing process (to determine whether the companies were a fit for us), but in instances where we knew we needed a different person (i.e. we hadn’t had enough conversation to verify that these persons played a role in the Decision-Making Unit or buying process) we submitted the company to a role-based contact discovery project so that we could gather the right person.
Once all of those people were tagged, we were able to track them through the pipeline based on knowing they attended/exhibited at or were scanned at Dreamforce. We built out a full dashboard tracking this information, it helps Marketing see the value in our investment at the event and helps Sales see the value of the data collected at the event and track to make sure that all of those leads get the proper follow-up.
On the Sales side we set up a view for all of our reps that showed their individual Dreamforce related leads. This made follow up clean and easy because our Sales people knew exactly who attended Dreamforce and whether they showed up at our booth (we imported certain information to indicate whether leads had been at the booth and who they had spoken with).
Salesforce.com continues to roll-out new features that better enable Marketers to track the progress of their campaigns once from lead to customer. As we test and use them, we will be certain to share our findings! Have you found an easy way to track things once they hit the pipeline? What tricks do you have for tracking your campaigns?
