This is the final post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 5 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads, Role vs. Title, Predictable vs. Spray and Pray and Nurture vs. Capture

A survey of B2B Marketing organizations by SiriusDecisions determined that the marketing departments of high performing companies significantly influenced or contributed at least 30% of the opportunities in the pipeline.

With Deliberate Marketing, virtually any marketing organization can achieve similar or even better results.  Not to toot my own horn, but here at ReachForce, Marketing contributes over 80% of new customers.

Deliberate Marketing focuses B2B Marketers on business objectives like adding opportunities to the pipeline, increasing revenues, acquiring new customers, and maximizing the return on marketing programs.

No longer is marketing worried about meeting or exceeding a 2% response rate. Deliberate Marketers value lead quality over lead quantity and they are motivated to move qualified buyers through the pipeline as efficiently and quickly as possible.

If you want to learn more about Deliberate Marketing and how to increase qualified buyers in the sales funnel, check out our new eBook, Funnelnomics I: Deliberate Marketing.

This 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.

We 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?

Does your sales team ignore the majority of leads marketing passes on?  Marketers must develop a more intimate understanding of their target customer and the market that customer serves to generate qualified buyers that Sales won’t ignore. Marketers must align their efforts with the Sales organization and streamline the Marketing and Sales funnel to accelerate the rate at which leads move through their funnel.

Deliberate Marketing is a proven strategy for putting more qualified buyers directly into the Marketing and Sales funnel to generate faster ROI. It is especially effective in the B2B Marketing space which is characterized by defined target markets, long sales cycles and complex buyer-seller relationships. Over the next few weeks, I will be covering The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing in hopes of helping B2B Marketers start off the new year with a new approach to drive more successes.

Principle #1: Intention vs. Attention

Do you know if your marketing programs are gathering intention or attention?  Intention means you have hit the right audience with the right message and they have responded to your call to action.  Attention means they looked at your message but they may not have been your buyer and there was no call to action. By focusing on intention vs. attention, you may have fewer leads to pass onto sales but those leads will be more qualified.

Deliberate Marketing involves researching your customers in order to build insight into their pain points and the medium through which they respond best to marketing messages. This research enables Marketers to deliver laser-focused messages and programs that convert buyer interest to buyer intent. It is not about spreading high level marketing messages to a broad audience via advertising or public relations hoping to garner attention for a product or company.

Rather, Deliberate Marketing is focused on converting a targeted segment of prospects into qualified buyers with an interest in purchasing a product or service. This involves knowing far more about your target audience than any list buy, database or telemarketing firm can ever provide.

This week The Funnelholic had a great tip for marketers getting ready to go into 2009, and we wanted to pass it on to The B2B Lead readers.

“Do ‘ride-alongs’ with sales as you consider your marketing plans.”  So often we are busy putting programs and campaigns in place without even asking sales (our customer) if it’s what they need to move leads to opportunities and opportunities to customers.  “If you really want to add value as a marketer, you have to identify the ‘have-to-have’s’ for your customers, the sales team. The best way to do it, is to see for yourself.”

He then goes on to list a couple of great ideas on saddling up with your sales team to help do your job better and drive more measurable results.

Check it out and thanks to The Funnelholic for the great tips.

Last year, 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.

A prospect raises their hand and fills out a contact form for a salesperson to contact them.  Woohoo, a marketer’s dream, but do you know how quickly your sales team responds or if they respond at all?  Insidesales.com conducted a ResponseAudit to test every exhibiting company at Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s user group conference, to see how quickly they would respond to a web lead.  The top three companies were winners in the ResponseAwards.  I can happily say that ReachForce received 2nd place by responding in 3 minutes and 12 seconds.

The sales rep who responded, Chase Nall, was with us at Dreamforce and received the award in person:

Here are some interesting stats from the ResponseAudit:

“39.5% of the Dreamforce Sponsors responded by phone with the average response time by phone of 44 hours, 31 minutes, and 8 seconds. Of companies that responded by phone the average phone attempts was 1.14 times.  53.2% of the Dreamforce Sponsors responded by email, with the average response time by email of 13 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds. Of companies that responded email the average email attempts was 1.45.”

I found the most amazing statistic was that over 37% of companies never responded at all.  I cannot imagine as a marketer how I would feel if I worked at one of those companies.  We work so hard to get prospects to raise their hand, and for no one to follow-up when one is delivered on a silver platter would be seriously demoralizing.

For those that did respond, the average response time was still very slow.  “Recent lead response management research from MIT shows the odds of making contact with a Web-based inquiry increases 100 times if attempted within five minutes.”  We made the five minute cut, would your sales team?  Maybe it is time for an audit of your own.

To learn more about Insidesales.com and the ResponseAudit check this out.

Here’s another one of those bad news, good news posts about marketing in a bad economy. The bad news is about as cliché as it gets: it’s tougher than ever to get prospects’ attention and close deals today. The good news, however, is a bit of a surprise: clever B2B Marketers and Salespeople have a tremendous opportunity to beat the competition by capitalizing on trigger events that will undoubtedly be a side effect of our struggling economy.

Breaking it down: with all of the turmoil in the markets today, companies are going to be looking for new ways to become more efficient, save money and expand globally. Basically, we are about to see lots and lots of changes such as mergers and acquisitions, facilities consolidation, technology acquisitions, career moves, etc.—in other words–“trigger events.” This is where smart Marketers can fuel their Sales pipeline.

We all know great Marketing and Sales programs are about timing–being there when the prospect needs a product or service. But, how do you know when one of these events has happened or who to contact once the event is announced? How can you move beyond an ad-hoc program of reading about trigger events and chasing down the right buyer?

Enter the perfect storm:  combine today’s economic turbulence with the growing popularity of social media tools, search functionality, and web analytics, and you have the perfect conditions for a powerful trigger-based marketing program.

Let me explain. There is now more information online than ever before. You have RSS feeds with immediate updates of corporate news such as mergers, funding, new hires, etc. You have professionals who go online (to Google and other forums) to search for purchasing data. You have automated intelligence tools such as CI Radar (which also includes a trigger-based Sales module) and other free search tools such as Google Alerts and Tweetscan. You can also combine all of these market intelligence tools into an automated feed of market intelligence to identify companies and buyers who are searching for products and services.

Most marketers also have an unbelievable wealth of information produced by web analytics tools such as Eloqua or Clicky. Yes, visits to your web-site can also be considered a trigger-event.

All of this market insight can be gathered and fed into a role-based contact gathering program to give your sales team fast access to actionable leads from companies in active purchasing mode. In many cases, through role-based qualifying, you can provide Sales with the actual buyers.   For more information on that, check out ReachForce’s Funnelnomics.

With the right combination of automated either free or paid market intelligence tools, social media programs, conversation monitoring, and role-based data programs, you can weather today’s terrible economic conditions.  Would like to hear more about how your company is fairing today.

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.

With economic times the way they are today, it is more important than ever that Marketing and Sales teams be aligned. Together you must decide and figure out what activities make the most impact to the top line of the business. Focus on all types of initiatives
1.    To retain, cross-sell and up sell current customers
2.    New customer acquisition programs
3.    Channel partner marketing opportunities

We recently rolled out an ebook, 10 Tips for Marketing and Sales Alignment, with our partner Marketo. These 10 tips are just a few ideas on how Marketing and Sales can play on the same team to generate qualified leads and drive revenue.

Here’s a few more tips to think about as you are building out your Q4 Marketing and Sales plans.

1.    Marketing and Sales teams should have shared goals

• Bookings and new customer wins are jointly owned by marketing and sales, and marketing bonuses are directly tied to the joint success.
• Revenue alignment and continued success programs for current customers ensure happier customers.  And we all know it’s more expensive to find a new customer than it is to keep your current ones happy.
• Shared goals means shared success -  when sales wins, marketing wins…and when marketing wins, sales wins … and overall the business WINS!

2.    Do Reality Based Planning

• Use TRUE funnel conversion metrics to set marketing lead generation targets.
• Understand and plan based on sales team behavior – how many leads can they work at time, how many calls does it take each sales team member to identify a hot or qualified lead, etc.

3.    Don’t forget those stuck in the funnel

• Deals get stuck in the middle stages of the funnel.  Let marketing help by trying to engage with the prospect through best practice content offers, event invites, or new media outlets.

4.    Don’t forget them when the deal is done

• Engage in current customer marketing programs.  Use a newsletter, blog or customer community to stay front of mind for cross-selling, up-selling and renewal opportunities.
• Case studies and references are powerful sales tools, but marketing needs help with the set up and creation of these.

5.    Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

• Share what’s working and what’s not – closed loop marketing is essential here
• Marketing should be involved in new sales rep training
• Celebrate WINS together

Organizations talk a lot about aligning their marketing and sales teams but many never put plans into action.  By implementing the five steps above and adhering to the plan, Marketing and Sales teams can align for shared success.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback (successes and other tips you want to share).