This week we’re reading and talking about Connect Direct’s whitepaper – How to Choose Your Carrot: Effective Lead Generation Offers for High-Technology Marketers.  Author Howard Sewell opens with the 3 key elements of any campaign:

1. List
2. Offer
3. Creative

You know here at ReachForce we are all about data (lists) that fuels lead generation programs so it was great to see that at the top of the list.  He goes on to say that “creative still rules the roost” for most marketers.  I totally agree and don’t get how people spend so much time and effort on creative that will end up going to the wrong person.  But that’s another post all together…

Then there’s the offer – another piece many marketers have a hard time getting right.

“An offer is a reason to respond – the ‘carrot’ that gets the reader to take action.”

When deciding on your offer, remember to “Sell the Offer, not the Product”.  Howard goes on to say, “no matter how enticing your product or service sounds, you won’t generate leads unless people want what you’re offering”.  I totally agree.

Choosing the right offer – here comes the good stuff…

First, you must decide what the primary objective is for your campaign.  Is it to:

• Build awareness
• Build your in-house list
• Generate sales opportunities
• Drive prospects to a meeting immediately

For each of these, you’re offer would be different.  On page 4 of the whitepaper, check out Fig 1.  It is a great visual of different offers and what outcomes to expect with each.  The basic idea is the more you ask of someone, the more qualified they will be.  Doing a raffle for an iPod will drive responders but probably not the quality your sales team is looking for.

The remainder of the whitepaper goes on in detail about the pros and cons of different offers like free trials, webinars, whitepapers, surveys and sweepstakes.  If you haven’t already read this one, you want to.  “Select your offer carefully.  The choice between one offer and the next will have a dramatic effect on your response rate and the quality of the leads you generate.

About the Author
Howard J. Sewell is president and founder of Connect Direct. Prior to starting the company in
1990, he served as a marketing manager for software giant Oracle Corporation. Howard is a frequent speaker on direct marketing and regular contributor to print publications and online forums on topics that include lead generation, e-mail marketing, channel development and event promotion. He writes “Direct Connections,” a leading blog on best practices and strategies for B2B direct marketing.

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.

I’ve been talking to a lot of people these days about database hygiene. Many have asked for best practices amounting to a “get well, stay well” healthy data routine. We do have a great white paper on this subject, Is Dirty Data Sabotaging Your Marketing Results?

One step is to make sure that users of your CRM system have a handy/easy way to “flag” inaccurate contact records.

If you are a salesforce.com customer, here is a way to help in this area:
The instructions/advice below requires administrative privileges in salesforce.com.

FINDING DIRTY DATA/EXCEPTION REPORTING

1. A field must be designated for data quality/lead quality to be reported through.  For instance, here, we use our “Lead Status” field and have created custom values in the pick-list to accommodate the error reporting.  Example: Bounce Back (Email); Wrong Phone Number; Contact No Longer There, Company Closed/Acquired.

a) A pick-list type field is best for this because it standardizes the options for reporting.
b) We have found it useful to go beyond the simple “Bounce Back, Wrong Phone Number” type of justifications for a contact being wrong and include information such as Company Acquired/Closed (with a custom field allowing users to input the company it was acquired by), Company No Fit: No budget/need, Wrong Contact: Need higher level contact/lower level contact, etc.  Once you have a basic infrastructure for error reporting customizing the field to your organization’s needs is easy.

2. After the field is in place and has begun being used, create a custom report that pulls the data you wish to report on.  It is typically much easier to report on the exceptions (the wrong data) rather than the correct data.

• Go to the “Reports” tab, select “Create New Custom report”
• Choose “Leads”
• Use a tabular report format
• The columns we use are:
• Lead Owner
• First Name
• Last  Name
• Title
• Company/Account
• Lead Source
• Lead Status
• Created Date
• Created Month
• Street Address
• City
• State/Province
• Zip/Postal Code
• Country
• Phone
• Email
• Website
• RF Internal Project (*Custom field, created to denote what project each
• contact came from)
• Nothing needs to be summarized on the standard summary fields
• Any changes in the placement of columns is strictly based on personal preference

For report criteria the following is important:
a) View – choose All leads.  Date/Duration/Start & End Date – leave the standard “Create Date” and “Custom” settings but delete the date in the “Start Date” field – leaving it blank ensures all possible data is captured in the report.
b) Advanced Filters:

• Field – Lead Status (or whatever field you have elected to use to report the error data in)
• Operator – contains
• Value – Whatever error messaging you have input, for example “Bounce Back, Wrong Phone Number, Contact No Longer There.”  If you have used a pick-list to populate the field then you will be able to use the look up (looking glass icon next to “AND”) to select all relevant information.

Here at ReachForce, we run this report on a weekly basis, but companies with less sales reps or reps who make fewer calls won’t necessarily need to run the report that frequently, conversely companies with lots of reps or reps who burn up the phones will want to run an error report more often.

RE-IMPORTING NEW/CLEAN DATA

To avoid lead duplication, it is best to export the bad data with a unique identifier (like the Lead ID provided by salesforce.com) and then re-import  the data using the same identifier. By using the Lead ID, you can ensure that notes and activity history that were previously attached to the record are not lost in the process.

It is important to remember to reset the Lead Status field once the data has been cleaned up (or whatever custom field designates the data as bad) so that sales reps calling on the data know it is ready to be called on again.  Here at ReachForce we also have a “born on date” for our refreshed data.  In that field we import the date that the records were updated in salesforce.com so that the rep calling on the record always knows how current the information is.

After data has been cleaned up, it is important to continue to keep the data up to date, using the error reporting discussed above and setting a time-table for how long it takes for a lead to “expire” allows you to keep all of the data in your database fresh.  For example, if a lead is new on 9/1/2007, it is safe to assume that by 9/1/2008 it might be in need of an update.

DATA SCORING/RECORD COMPLETENESS

We have found it useful to leverage a free AppExchange program put out by salesforce Labs called “Data Quality Analysis Dashboard 1.0″ to give better visibility into the completeness of records and what deficiencies exist. This package installs a set of dashboards and reports that give scores to each type of record within your CRM and then provide high level views of how your records score.  Using this tool can give you a better idea of where your records need improvement and/or if particular types of records are better kept than others.

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.

It’s the perfect storm – tough economic times … budget scrutiny … the Q4 numbers chase … budget planning for 2009. As Reachforce CEO Suaad Sait says, this Fall is a marketers ‘oh-crap’ moment when we start asking ourselves if there is enough fuel (or money to provide the fuel) in the lead generation engine to fulfill current year sales needs and fuel 2009 momentum.

Under old school marketing rules this storm would usually lead to 1 of 2 things … 1) slam on the breaks and try to hit NOP numbers by minimizing expense, or 2) a flurry of spray and pray direct marketing activities that seek elusive bluebirds against all odds. The big problem is that neither of these well worn paths does a very good job at motivating prospects who are in the middle of the funnel.

On this note, Josh Bernoff – Forrester’s Interactive Marketing expert – made a great point in his February 2, 2008 writing entitled “Strategies for Interactive Marketing in a Recession.” It’s more obvious to some than others, but most mid-funnel contacts are logically folks who are still in consideration mode or somehow on the fence about making a purchase. Mid-funnel contacts are not only abundant, they are literally bluebirds in waiting who just need to be earned.

Companies who opt to slam on the marketing brakes in an effort to save their way to success are essentially putting all of the pressure to motivate a purchase on their sales closers. This may work in certain instances, but it’s not very strategic, scalable or sustainable. Nor is motivating these people a matter of creating awareness with direct marketing. While consistent DM needs to be happening for sake of keeping the top of the funnel fed, it rarely has the sort of impact needed to push mid-funnel situations forward.

But social marketing applications like interactive webinars, e-communities, blogs and networking sites are an effective way to align B2B marketing’s work with the things that are most critical to driving mid-funnel situations to closure I.e. – establishing credibility, delivering proof points, deep-dive Q&A, earning “trusted partner” status and best of all – a structured, pragmatic way to capture, manage and execute against those issues/objections that most often create and add to mid-funnel traffic-jams.

In his easy to read, highly recommended article Bernoff points out three important social media attributes that help recession proof your marketing plan:

• Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.
•  They’re cheap. Advertising campaigns often run into millions of dollars. But Facebook pages and blogs are two examples of social programs that you can start for next to nothing. Even more sophisticated programs like a full-blown customer community typically don’t cost more than $50,000 to $300,000 to get going.
•  They motivate consumers in the middle of the funnel. Social applications like discussion forums are better than advertising at helping people in the consideration phase when they’re on the fence about purchasing. In a recession, improving consideration will be more cost-effective than blasting awareness messages at resistant consumers.

Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.

In this current economic crisis many businesses have a natural, knee-jerk tendency to “wait and see how everything plays out.”  It seems that business spending is put on hold, which only exacerbates the overall problem.

We as marketers and sales people feel it the most.  I’m sure we’ve all heard something like this in the past couple of weeks, “We’re going to ‘wait & see’ what this economy ‘does’ before we spend any kind of money on ‘that.’”

Yeah…and sometimes a deer in the headlights just “waits to see” what that car is going to do.

Here’s what I don’t understand – if what you sell can grow your customers’ bottom line, then why wouldn’t they buy it?  If they can’t afford what you offer “right now,” then how are they going to afford the additional cost – “right now” – of NOT having it?

I do believe that in an economic crisis it may be wise to lighten up spending on certain things if we can’t afford them (i.e. lavish parties, luxurious vacations, designer nose-hair clippers, doggy massages).  However, as sales guy at ReachForce, we have a unique opportunity to show our prospects how we can contribute to helping them through this mess.

If what you sell saves time, saves money, or adds to top line revenue or productivity in some way – AND YOU CAN DEMONSTRATE IT – then not only do you have an opportunity, you have a responsibility to tell as many prospects as possible about it.

If you’re still with me, you’re probably reading along, looking for your tip on how to get action from the ‘wait and see’ crowd out there today.  Well, here’s what I’m doing…

• I’m direct about how what I sell drives revenue
• I show real customer case studies that include customer results
• I provide best practice information around how to act on ReachForce solutions

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.

As the summer ends and everyone comes back from vacation we’re quickly reminded that the end of the year is right around the corner.  As Marketers that means we really only have about 10 weeks left to drive meaningful activity (sales-ready leads) this year.

With only limited time left we naturally want to target our marketing efforts at low hanging fruit first.  Targeted lead generation requires reaching the right buyers in the right companies, right?  Before you kick off new programs, why not start with what you already know and have?
Consider these starting points:

Sales Pipeline data – Customer win data and in-funnel opportunities can be a goldmine at your fingertips.

• Understand where you’ve been, where you won and who else is out there that match that profile.
• Look at what prospects are moving through the funnel the fastest, find more like these.

Website Analytics – Visitors are stopping by, but do you know who they are?

• Are there visitor profiles or patterns of interest?  If so, do you have a plan to act on these?
• Web analytic tools can help you identify the company that is visiting, interesting.  Identifying the right decision making unit inside these visiting companies, even more interesting.

Once you’ve identified the companies with the highest likelihood to buy, don’t forget about your decision making unit buying personas (influencers, evaluators, recommenders, end users and budget owners).  What do your buyers look like?  What do they care about?  Why should they listen to you?

As you are getting ready to ramp your lead generation for the end of the year push don’t forget where you’ve been, who you’re attracting today and how you are going to use this information to get the best results possible.

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.