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).

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for marketing automation software company Marketo.

There’s always been a lot of drama around how marketing can best contribute to and improve the sales cycle. In fact, one common way to measure the effectiveness of a new marketing initiative is by looking for improvements in the sales cycle. Businesses have always focused on the sales cycle, so that’s the way to go, right? Wrong!

Companies need to stop thinking only about the sales cycle and instead focus on what I call the “Revenue Cycle,” which starts from the day you first meet a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. The old model of a linear handoff from marketing to sales must give way to an intertwined model where both organizations jointly own prospect relationships and coordinate their activities. To use an analogy, imagine a fighter jet that first ran with just the left engine, then turned that engine off and lit up the right engine. That’s pretty inefficient compared to lighting both engines and going full speed!

Before defining the revenue cycle in more depth, it is worth examining why the traditional “sales cycle” is the wrong model for businesses to follow. The primary reason is that the sales cycle looks at only a portion of the complete revenue process, and this presents two main problems:

• Looking at sales alone as the predictor of revenue is misleading – with sales only, companies can’t manage and guide growth beyond the current or subsequent quarter. The Sales cycle can usually predict revenue in the short term, but because the sales forecast is based on what a specific account will do at a specific time, it becomes increasingly inaccurate for predicting future revenue. Asking the sales organization — which by definition is focused on revenue in the near term — to predict revenue in future quarters is typically highly misleading. For this, a company should look to the function that is inherently focused on the long term: the marketing organization.
•  Inefficiencies are killing productivity and marketing budgets – without the right processes in place, sales is less effective and companies are wasting marketing budgets. The traditional model of a sales cycle that begins when sales accepts a marketing lead or contacts a prospect directly results in waste and inefficiency. It means as much as 50% of sales time is spent on unproductive prospecting, while reps simultaneously ignore 80% of marketing leads. We’ve estimated that the resulting lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget costs companies at least $1 trillion a year. The sales cycle mentality also ignores the fact that throughout the customer lifecycle (before, during, and after sales interacts with a prospect or customer), marketing has been and will continue to touch the prospect with marketing messages via the website, campaigns, advertising, and PR.

So how do you start driving your business by managing the Revenue Cycle? The Revenue Cycle requires coordinating marketing and sales activities throughout the entire cycle to generate maximum impact. The key is to realize that marketing and sales bring different strengths to the process. Marketing brings a long-term view, sales brings an action-oriented view. Marketing is good at one-to-many communications, automated processes, and dealing with lots of data; sales is good at building personal relationships and leveraging the human touch.

The Revenue Cycle must start from the day a company first meets a prospect and continue through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. As marketing and sales coordinate their activities as part of a unified Revenue Cycle, companies will get better at lead scoring and properly identifying and prioritizing opportunities. That creates better quality leads that result in easier and better quality sales cycles, with more wins and ultimately more revenue. While there will still be a time when primary ownership of a lead shifts, the Revenue Cycle eliminates the “handoff” from marketing to sales. Instead, both functions should be engaged in the right way throughout the entire Revenue Cycle: lead nurturing campaigns can come on behalf of the sales rep, marketing messages and the website can continue to support the sales process once sales does engage, and sales leads that go cold can be recycled back to marketing. With marketing and sales acting as equally important drivers of revenue, companies can gain a picture of the complete revenue process, ensuring that leads are properly nurtured and do not fall out of the cycle midway and get lost.

Of course, truly replacing the sales cycle with a coordinated Revenue Cycle is easier said than done, but the benefits are clear: increased sales productivity, greater return on marketing spending, and better visibility into the long-term performance and health of the business. What company doesn’t want to be able to better predict revenue and grow their business? The shift won’t happen overnight, but the first step is changing our thinking and embracing the new model: the Revenue Cycle.

For more tips like this one, download ReachForce’s eBook on 10 Tips for Marketing and Sales Alignment co-sponsored by Marketo.

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.

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company Marketo.

I recently wrote about why sales and marketing can’t get along. Here are some practical tips to start bridging the gap!

1. Model the entire revenue cycle. As opposed to a standalone sales cycle, focus on an integrated revenue cycle that starts from the day you first meet a prospect and continues through the sale and beyond to the customer relationship. This helps each team understand what the other is doing, and how their actions help facilitate revenue.

2. Develop a common vocabulary. Part of an integrated revenue cycle is common definitions for each stage. When marketing sits down with sales and says, “what is the definition of a good sales lead, and how can we help?” the dynamic between the two departments changes. With the definition of sales-ready in hand, marketing can begin rebuilding trust by delivering leads that meet that definition. This common language and metrics is essential for communication between the functions.

3. Look for operational disconnects. Too often, sales energy and promotions are focused in a different direction than marketing’s most recent campaigns. In some cases, they can even be in conflict! In one example, the sales team had an incentive to sell a product that marketing was planning to discontinue in the next month. Make sure that initiatives and promotions are aligned by developing plans jointly and meeting monthly or at least quarterly.

4. Create a closed-loop reporting process. Marketing needs to have a way to follow-up with sales to see how well leads are performing. This can be a field in the CRM system, a regular call, or even an automated survey. Just make sure it’s easy for the rep to respond. It can be as basic as sending the rep an email two weeks after receiving a lead with the subject “Was lead ABC good?” This way, they can simply reply “Yes” or “No”, which they can easily do on their Blackberry or in a hotel room. Closing the loop like this can help tune lead generation efforts, and is an important way to take qualified prospects that are not yet sales ready and recycle them back into marketing for lead nurturing.

5. Share accountability between the teams. Marketing is a very measurable process, but the results are head to measure; it’s easy to measure Sales outcomes but Sales activity is hard to measure. As a result, compensation and rewards tend to be very different, which creates further problems. So be sure to review how each team is compensated and rewarded to ensure alignment. (One typical disconnect: marketing focuses on the number of new deals while sales is focused on the amount and size of the total pipeline.) The better your ability to measure marketing ROI, the easier it is to bridge this gap.

6. Foster respect and trust. Perhaps most importantly, in particular, building alignment between marketing and sales organizations starts with a common set of values and shared beliefs. If the two functions don’t fundamentally believe the other has the same set of goals in mind, it will be much more difficult to drive alignment. This is rooted in good and regular communication, but it can be challenging to repair years of miscommunication all at once. Start by focusing on small wins (for example, look for a particular rep who closed a big deal because of a marketing lead) and promote the result aggressively. By having a “victory parade” for small wins, you will begin the process of better communication and trust.

Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company, Marketo

The gap between marketing and sales teams has been around since the two functions were created and is usually just accepted as an irreparable inconvenience in many businesses. Sales thinks only they are worried about the quarter; Marketing thinks they are the only ones who think strategically. Sales wonder why they have to generate all their own leads; Marketing complains that sales ignores or criticizes everything they generate. Sales thinks marketing is lightweight and easy; Marketing thinks salespeople will say anything to get a deal.

It is time for this fighting to stop. As the spread of the internet and social media transform the B2B buying process, aligning the warring departments has never been more critical to driving revenue and growth. And stopping the fighting begins by understanding the real and significant differences between the two functions.

There are a number of factors on which marketing and sales differ, including timeframes, goals, and ways of showing value. While marketers look months and even years down the road as they seek to develop a brand and grow broad interest in their company, sales is laser-focused on hitting their numbers for the here and now. Each viewpoint meets a distinct and valid business need, but these contrasting views lead to conflicting perceptions of what contributes to the overall success of the business. It also means that marketing and sales tend to attract different skill sets and risk profiles, which exacerbates the “us versus them” mentality and makes it harder to appreciate the other’s disciplines.

The dissonance is further intensified by the feeling among marketers that they are treated as second-class citizens while sales gets the glory (and the incentive-based compensation). The value of a new sales win is immediately quantifiable as new revenue, but marketing is often seen as a cost center because its impact on revenue isn’t made explicit. (Marketers often exacerbate this by focusing too much on measuring activity instead of outcomes; while it’s easy to measure sales outcomes but hard to measure sales activity, the opposite is true in marketing.)

What to do about it?

Put simply, these difference means that Sales is from Mars, and Marketing is from Venus. Therefore, they key to closing the gap between marketing and sales is not to slam the two groups into one function under one leader, as some pundits advise. And it’s not to force marketers to behave more like salespeople, with aggressive quotas and huge variable compensation. Instead, the answer is to recognize that marketing and sales bring different strengths to the revenue process, and to find ways to get the best out of each function in a coordinated, efficient process.

In my next guest post, I’ll share my six keys to building a happy marriage between sales and marketing, so stay tuned!

It only makes sense that if we are able to get the right message to the right buyers in the right kinds of companies we will increase Marketing ROI and accelerate Sales cycles. So why don’t we actually do just that?

By segmenting our leads database into smaller groups with similar characteristics, we are able to create very targeted programs that enable us to highlight exact pain points and specific solutions for those points. These more focused groups also enable us to very direct with our content and offers. We no longer have to generalize or discuss issues from 10,000 ft up.

Also, consider this – wouldn’t you consider a responder to a very direct message a more qualified lead than one that bites on a general offer? Also, wouldn’t your Sales team prefer fewer, more qualified leads to buckets of names of people who you don’t know what they do on a day to day basis?

Here are a couple of different ways I segment our leads for targeted programs here at ReachForce.
We slice leads by:

• Geography
• Industry
• Prospect title
• Prospect role (i.e. end user, decision maker, key influencer, etc.)
• Special interest group (i.e. event attendees, customers of salesforce.com, etc)
• Company size
• Company revenue
• Product line offerings
• Customers’ competitors
• People who acted on a specific call to action
• People who downloaded Product/Service Info.
• People who took a demo
• People in the sales pipeline that are stuck

Can you think of any more?

As we acquire new leads and market to them we quickly see leads move into smaller, more segmented groups. Some take the hook you’ve put out there and ask for more, there’s some that act interested but don’t commit to anything, and there’s those that are radio silent and give you no indication of real life.

Each group now needs a different kind of follow up. The first group is ready for another targeted marketing program offering them another opportunity to engage. And those that didn’t respond might be ready for a slower moving nurture program. Maybe your message missed with these people, a nurture program is a good place to test messaging. Or maybe you are targeting the wrong person and they don’t care what you have to say or what we you are offering. (You’re wasting your time with these people but you don’t know it yet. )

Here are a few tips to building and measuring segmented lead nurturing programs.

(If you’re lost, don’t worry there’s marketing automation folks like Vtrenz, Eloqua, Marketo and Manticore that can help you automate the execution of all of these different programs.)

1. Make sure Marketing and Sales have a clear understanding of what a lead is and what a sales-ready lead is. You have to start here. Marketing needs to know what they are looking for and Sales wants to know what they are getting.
2. Divide your marketing database into 2 initial groups, active leads (people who have responded or engaged in the past) and inactive leads (people that have never responded to any outreach communication from your company). If you are an Eloqua customer, they have a report that will give you this information. Understand if there are any patterns among those that are active, if so, be sure to consider this when building out your nurture programs. Remember the goal of nurturing is to move currently active leads to the top of the sales funnel and move inactive leads to an active status.
3. Measure and track movement in the nurturing cycles. As leads/prospects respond, use this data to determine next steps. You can confirm interest by reaching out to them again with a similar message and different offer or call to action. If they respond again, they might be ready for the next step in your nurturing cycle. If they don’t respond, continue to try different offers or messaging.
4. Develop a scoring system that enables you to determine when leads are sales ready. Assign different values to each kind of touch. For example, a conversation had by telemarketing that better qualifies a lead might get a score of 10 while an opened email might get a 3. Once a lead reaches a score agreed upon by Sales, then the lead is ready to be passed on.
5. Don’t forget about the ones that have moved on. Sometimes a prospect gives off all the right signals that they are ready to engage on a different level but once handed over to Sales they clam up. Make sure these people don’t get lost in the shuffle. It’s ok for a lead/prospect to move back and forth between Sales and Marketing.
6. Determine when it’s time to throw in the towel. There are people in every marketing database that continue to hang around for no reason. What are we holding on to here? Before completely throwing these people out, try and determine why they aren’t responding to you.

• Are they the right buyer for your product or service?
• How long ago was this lead created? Has the person possibly moved up or on?
• Are they not a good fit for your offering?

Remember – keeping your nurturing programs focused on the most suitable prospects will help to ensure the success of your program.

Event budgets are typically pretty spongy. They are usually handed out in lump amounts with very little success measures put in place around these events. Here are a few ideas to drive real leads from event spend.

• Make sure each person attending the event has goals assigned to them. Some examples include– X # of people scanned, X # of demos, X # of conversations had outside of the company booth, # of business cards collected. Use a little budget for prizes for the winners.
• Assign someone or a group of people to visit every other company participating in the event. You obviously have something in common, you are at the same event. Challenge team members to get other companies to drive traffic your way. Again, give away prizes to the company that sends the most people your way. Good use of $$ here, not only are you getting a chance to meet people who may not have stopped by to see you, you are also starting a new relationship with your forwarding friend.
• Ask each person that stops by your booth about the person responsible for using/buying your product or service. Give away another prize here to the team member that gets not only a name but also contact information and a referral from the person attending the show.
• If you have partners attending a show, put together a program that encourages people to visit your partner’s booth and vice versa.
• Once you return from an event and are getting ready to hand the warm and hot leads over to sales, STOP. Remember if you are passing a lead on there should be some additional information that goes along with the lead. Information that deems it Sales-ready. For these leads, use a little event budget and incent the Sales team to push these leads and to keep you posted on their progress. Everyone likes to be rewarded, a little piece of your event budget for prizes and everyone wins.
• Leads that aren’t Sales ready, divide those into 2 groups – those that you have the right decision makers name and possible contact info. These people are ready for a very targeted marketing program. For those that you only have the information of the person that stopped by and visited you at the show, invest in contact discovery for these. It’s worth the extra dollars to be able to turn otherwise dead event data into an actionable lead. These newly discovered leads will then be ready for your targeted marketing programs.
• Don’t forget to keep up with your spend. You’ll need this to calculate your ROI. You’ll also want to use this info. to measure the new tactics you are trying out.
• Tag event leads in your CRM system. This information will be used for follow up, for continued marketing with relevant messaging, and most importantly it’s needed to measure ROI of the event.

Got any more creative event spend ideas? Please share.