The B2B Lead » Marketing and Sales Alignment

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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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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The “Oh $#%@!” Day in Marketing: Countdown 1 Month!

Leigh Anne Reynolds — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:31:46 +0000

In 2007, we at ReachForce declared January 15th the “Oh $#%@!” Day in Marketing.

Here’s why:

Are you prepared to deliver sales-ready leads in January? December is typically a slower month for B2B Marketing teams, since most organizations slow down current marketing programs and instead spend their time preparing for the next year. Then, you leave for the holidays happy to have completed the painful process of planning and budgeting for the next year’s activities. But once the holiday haze clears, it’s January and everyone is ready to kick off the New Year with new customer wins. Your sales team wants to know, “Where are my leads? I’ve got a number to hit.”

The “Oh $#%@!” moment…

If you wait until you get back from the holidays to begin developing your marketing programs, when are you going to have leads to pass to sales? End of January? Beginning of February? Can your sales team land those deals by the end of Q1?

Instead, start developing your 2009 programs now and be ready to execute your first week back. Remember to go back and look at where you’ve been before getting started. With the economy on a roller coaster, we’re all being forced to do more with less. It’s more important than ever to analyze and target your lead generation initiatives at the right buyers in YOUR target market. I promise your sales team will thank you.

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Tracking Lead Source in Salesforce – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #269

Lauren Kincke — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:21:23 +0000

If you read our post about metrics Marketing should care about and you use Salesforce here are some easy to follow instructions for putting lead source tracking into place.

Lead Source (the field with the big red arrow next to it), is a standard field in Salesforce, so it’s easy enough to locate and use, the important thing is to put your own custom sources into the pick-list and to use them.

To add custom values to the pick-list, you’ll need administrative privileges.
Click on ‘Setup,’ then under ‘App Setup’ you’ll want to click on Leads.
Next select ‘Fields’ and you’ll get a listing of all of the fields in your CRM. Click next to ‘Lead Source’ on the ‘Edit’ link.
Once you are in the edit interface, you’ll be able to add items to the pick-list by selecting ‘New.’
From there you’ll be given an easy, step-by-step way to insert a new value into the list.

As you can see, we have a variety of different lead sources, you’ll want to make sure your list matches the places that you gather leads from. Now when you import leads you can select to attribute them to one of these values, thus helping you better track where things come from.

Now you’ll be able to run reports on these fields, luckily, lead source is a standard field on the Contact record in Salesforce as well and it’s mapped so that the lead source transfers over to the Contact record when you convert Leads.

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What Happens After the Campaign? – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #268

Amy Hawthorne — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:38:30 +0000

As B2B Marketers we spend a lot of time, effort and resources on creating lead generation programs that drive prospect conversions. But what happens next?

As we become more sophisticated marketers with more promising tools, we are now not only filling the top of the sales funnel but we are also helping move prospects through the sales funnel; one buying stage at a time.

We know it takes multiple interactions to turn a lead into a prospect and usually these interactions involve both Sales and Marketing. This means both teams need to be armed and ready for the next follow up.

Here’s a checklist to go through to make sure you are set up for success before launching that next program.

Do your sales and marketing teams know what to follow up with in response to different types of inquiries? If someone reaches out to you about Product A, your follow up should include more information about Product A that opens the door for a discussion.

Are you emailing pdfs with your follow up emails? Remember attachments can get hung up in spam filters. Consider putting your docs out on the web and link to them. This also enables you to track who’s visiting this page.

Are you prepared to capture all inquiries in a database or CRM for ongoing nurturing and qualification efforts? It’s key that this information is stored in a place that both sales and marketing can access. Marketing needs to know when and what kinds of nurturing campaigns to push these people through and sales needs to know what marketing programs prospects are interacting with.

Have you agreed with sales on what a qualified lead looks like? This is 101, right?

Do you have a process in place for distributing qualified leads to sales contacts as they are identified? Getting in touch in a timely manner is key. Make sure everyone is clear how leads are being routed.

Do you have a program in place to nurture or cultivate your not-yet-qualified leads? One and done doesn’t work in B2B so you need a plan for staying in touch. Different mediums with different offers is key here. Not everyone responds to the same things.

Do you know how often to contact prospects with nurture messages? The jury is still out here, monitor your nurture marketing unsubscribe rates and adjust as needed. Also be sure sales has a way to opt people out of further communications.

Do you know what offers to use to get them to further identify their needs and situation so you can determine if they are ready to buy today? Nurturing programs help build awareness, make sure you have the right kinds of offers in place to build on your prospect profile.

Do you have a program in place to measure and track the results of your various sales-lead generation, cultivation and sales follow-up programs? You need this. How else do you know what’s working and what isn’t?

And, in my opinion, the most important question – Do you know what new customers originated in marketing and what programs helped drive them to the finish line?

Being able to show real ROI from your marketing efforts is key. It drives so many “what’s next” decisions.

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Influence the Buying Process with Automated Marketing

Leigh Anne Reynolds — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:08:07 +0000

Engagement Systems is one of the newer players in the marketing automation space. We let them “speak for themselves” earlier this week, but I wanted to dive further to check out some of their content. So far they only have a few whitepapers and case studies, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their content. Their whitepaper, Influence the Buying Process with Automated Marketing, is a quick read packed with great tips. The whitepaper promises 10 tactics for improving revenue and ROI now. After the explantion of each tactic they offer a take-away (great idea for your next whitepaper or eBook). Here are the take-aways from the whitepaper:

Don’t let prospects fall through the cracks. Protect your marketing investment and maximize resources through better lead qualification and lead nurturing.
Unify sales and marketing in the pursuit of common goals.
Continue generating leads, but put greater emphasis on nurturing activities as well as retention and winback strategies to maximize customer lifetime revenue.
Make sure that you have all the materials in place to be the resource for information to support your buyer.
Map out the buying process and help prospects and customers navigate their way to a buying decision.
Automate the sales and marketing process by setting event and behavior triggers that utilize intelligent marketing automation to autoexecute marketing touches.
Deploy one-to-one communications for more meaningful dialogue with prospects and customers to shorten the buying process.
Commit to an ongoing learning process; employ a valuable exchange of information to align your product and service offerings with the changing needs and interests of each individual buyer.
Deploy multiple means of outreach to ensure that your message is received, and to move the customer towards a purchase position relative to their individual needs and interests.
Establish ongoing contact with customers to preserve satisfaction, increase up-selling and cross-selling, and decrease customer defections.

Be sure to read the entire whitepaper for the full story. It is definitely worth the read.

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B2B Marketing Metrics for Sales – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #260

Lauren Kincke — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:17:00 +0000

Does your sales team understand the metrics you’re measuring? Think about it this way, your sales team is focused on numbers, hitting the right number of activities each day/week, turning out the right amount of proposals to get good closed deals, and of course, the all important quota figure!

So when asked, you tell the sales team you measure click-throughs, website visits, opens, but it doesn’t mean anything to them….why you ask? Because just like all of the rest of us, they only care about what directly impacts them, yes you can make a case for the activity you’re measuring to impact them but it’s a story, it’s not a direct correlation.

What directly correlates to daily life of a sales person? The number of leads you’re putting in the top of the funnel. Let’s be more specific though, not just leads, QUALITY leads. First you’ve got to have a unified definition of a quality lead (is it someone who has shown interest through opening your emails, checking out your site or is it someone who has downloaded a few resources, attended some webinars and who fits a great profile of your ideal buyer?), get on the same page with sales – decide what that perfectly qualified and quality lead is because not everyone who fills out a web form or downloads a white paper fits that mold.

The important thing is to directly correlate what you’re doing with what your sales team is doing – how many leads did you fill the pipe with this week and then track them through the pipeline. How many of those leads generated the right kind of activity to create a closed deal? Bring this full circle for a minute, if you can track how many leads you put in the pipeline that generate activity during each phase of the pipe and then close, pretty impressive stuff to the C-level folks!

Now for tracking this stuff:

In your CRM, use a lead source field – map it to the contact through the process (for all of your salesforce.com users, we’ll have some instructions soon).
Keep tabs on where these leads came, from…not just that marketing delivered them but that you purchased them from ReachForce, got them from an event/trade show, they were a web form, etc. That way you can see what sources generate the most successful leads and you can replicate that success.
Don’t just look at this information once and then toss it – keep track of it historically, the more information you’re armed with the better off you’ll be.

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Why Sales Throws Marketing Under the Bus…

Lauren Kincke — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:20:51 +0000

Gotta say, when Amy asked if I’d read this whitepaper from Silverpop I was instantly intrigued. Maybe it’s the fact that sitting as the Sales/Marketing Ops person I have sat directly under that bus a few times (as we all have regardless of which side you come from), or maybe it’s the tongue in cheek humor scattered throughout the copy but for once I was entertained and informed by a whitepaper!

While the whitepaper is peppered with humor it also touches on a few key items that cause the friction between marketing and some steps for resolving those items.

Problem: Sales is frustrated when marketing hands off weak leads.
Solution: The key to this isn’t exactly what it sounds like, instead of placing blame, get on the same page about what constitutes a lead, get sales and marketing on the same page so that everyone knows what a lead is and execute on passing leads over accordingly. Unfortunately, if we’re all speaking different languages in terms of what a lead (contact, prospect, etc.) is then it’s just a distraction.
Problem: Marketing sees Sales as only griping about Marketing (therefore causing the split between them)
Solution: Sales needs to talk to marketing – if the leads being sent over are good 1/3 of the time, tell marketing what was wrong with the other 2/3’s. Don’t keep marketing in the dark, let them know how leads are progressing through the pipeline and what leads progress better (therefore better helping to define what kind of leads Marketing should focus on getting to Sales). Don’t take all the credit – yes you guys close the sale but materials, programs, webinars, the website, events all of those things were put together by marketing to help you close that deal – give them a little credit too!

These are just a few of the items mentioned by Silverpop, but they are enough to get the wheels turning for you. I highly recommend taking a little time to read the entire whitepaper, it’s insightful and truly reaches the heart of the problem, aligning Marketing and Sales is all about communication.
I’ll close with my favorite quote from the whitepaper:

Sales asks: How many marketers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Sales answers: 15.

One to ignore the request from sales for more light,
One to develop a creative brief on why light is important,
Seven to shoot the YouTube video about screwing in light bulbs,
One to evaluate the amount of light offered by competitors and draft a competitive analysis,
Two to create the product slick,
One to determine competitive pricing for the service and set the cost well above that,
One to buy a 150-watt bulb for a 60-watt lamp,
And one to put just the right “spin” on the process.

Sorry – gotta love a whitepaper with a personality

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Lead Scoring…Baby Steps – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #256

Lauren Kincke — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:26:34 +0000

It’s the topic of discussion for so many webinars, whitepapers and blog posts (even here), but do you actually do lead scoring? Until very recently, we hadn’t figured out a way to incorporate all of the various technology tools (Eloqua for Marketing Automation, HubSpot for its unique Internet Marketing tracking/features and Salesforce.com for Sales Automation) we use into one comprehensive score. So the question is, how do you close the loop with that many systems interacting?

To regress a little bit, we have always had lead scoring on the list of to-do’s. It’s been on that list for easily the last three or four quarters, but each time it comes down to the wire either there’s not enough time or there is just so much for us to wrap together that it’s a little overwhelming. Honestly, it wasn’t a high priority this quarter, but our Sales team was looking for a way to prioritize the accounts they were working so we initially (accidentally) built an explicit lead scoring system. We set point values for things like:

Having key players in the decision making unit in our CRM and/or knowing that they exist
Knowing if the prospect markets to more than one vertical (and what space they play in)
What Marketing Automation system the prospect uses
What CRM the prospect uses
ASP (Average Sales Price)

Eventually this all gets tabulated into a score (and the information collected in creating the score), that score determines a few things. First, what kind of marketing messages the contacts within the account get and secondly, whether or not the rep even wants them followed up with. That second item is determined by a score in the negative range…we’ve got some accounts that our reps don’t want to work with for specific reasons and those automatically get a -100 added to their score so we can better differentiate them from the rest of the crowd.

Originally this was good for us, we felt that it was a start towards the lead scoring we wanted to have and that it would give our sales team the info they needed to better prioritize their follow up. Well it left something out…in focusing only on the accounts they were selling in to, we left out the leads they still need to follow up with in order to efficiently prospect for new business. So we went back to the drawing board.

Our next pass ended up being a more implicitly focused lead score. With the help of one of our more development minded co-workers, we were able to employ an Apex Trigger in salesforce.com that checks for activity on the lead records and gives a score according to the frequency and creator of the activity. To speak slightly more English (and less tech), if a lead has 3-5 activities from either HubSpot or Eloqua, meaning a form download, website activity or email open, created within a 3 month timeframe then they are ‘cold’ – if they have 3-5 activities within a 1 month timeframe then they are ‘warm’ and if they have 3-5 activities within a week they are ‘hot.’ Our basic idea being that within salesforce.com we set up views of cold-warm-hot leads and our reps can just follow up with those, instead of worrying about who is coming out of what nurture cycle behind the scenes. So the sales team essentially gets a window on who is actually raising their hand and only those who do so often enough to be considered interest in us and our products.

By no means have we completed this process but we’re definitely off to a start. Closing the loop between our various tools one score at a time…do you score your leads, if so, how?

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Keep Your Leads from Lying to You

Lauren Kincke — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:47:42 +0000

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, Are Your Leads Lying to You?, I want to dive a little further into David Taber’s article CRM Tips: When Leads Lie. There are some truly interesting statistics in this article, but the meat of the article is his call to focus on the creation of opportunities as a key indicator/metric rather than the creation of leads. Sitting at the cross-roads between Marketing and Sales I can echo his commentary that is a key indicator but I feel that it’s also a bit hasty to claim that it is the only meaningful metric.

Taber argues that by focusing on ‘sales-cycle starts’ (i.e. creation of opportunities) you get a true view of the over all process and communication between Sales and Marketing. His position is that by using opportunity creation as the key metric you will encourage better alignment between Marketing and Sales. While I think that he is on the right path, I feel like using only creation of opportunity as a metric fails to take into account the activity on all sides of the table that goes into feeding the creation of opportunities.

If one side fails to fulfill their end of the bargain, then you’ll end up with a lopsided equation and little to no opportunity creation. For example, if Marketing is not held to the standard of feeding ‘X’ amount of leads and then drumming up activity via an email campaign, webinar, etc. then there is nothing for Sales to use to stir up the opportunities. On the other side of the coin, if Marketing regularly adds leads, keeps the activity going and continues to feed the fires but Sales isn’t following up then opportunities won’t be created either. Both pieces of the puzzle are necessary to create opportunities and by looking away from the metrics that measure each of these activities, spotting upcoming problems (or finding the root to existing ones) is difficult at best.

Taber argues that an opportunity centric focus will create the collaboration necessary to convert leads to opportunities, while I agree that if all the pieces are in place it can happen I guess I’m just a bit of a cynic (or a big metrics nerd). I feel like it’s important to see the whole picture to ensure the process works all the way around. Keeping everyone accountable to key metrics (lead input, campaign activity, meeting setting and execution) that are relevant to their role in the cycle will allow better visibility across the process and will ensure that if something breaks you can easily identify where the problem was and fix it.

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