MarketingSherpa just came out with a very interesting how-to on using LinkedIn for lead generation.  While most of us have a profile, many marketers are unsure on how to use this new channel as a lead source.  MarketingSherpa interviewed Jason Rushin, Director, Marketing at Quantivo on his process and found 6 lessons that all B2B marketers can learn from.

Here are some of highlights from the article:

Lesson #1. Target groups by activity level, not just size

For each group, Rushin spent 15 or 20 minutes reading through recent posts to assess group members’ interest areas, and how much activity each post generated. In the end, he identified 17 groups that matched his needs.

Lesson #2. Join groups under an individual name, not a company identity

Social media is a two-way channel, which makes it especially important to assign a point-person to oversee your social media initiatives, establish themselves as a community member, and respond to feedback.

Lesson #3. Place collateral in the context of a conversation

Every time the team had a new piece of collateral to promote — such as a webinar or a white paper — Rushin looked for opportunities to share that information with the team’s LinkedIn groups.

- For example, when promoting a white paper, he would write a message to the group announcing the new title, sharing a link, and asking group members to provide feedback on the white paper itself.

Lesson #4. Response rate is highly variable

By participating in several groups, Rushin quickly saw that response to his lead-generation offers (in the form of landing page registrations) was highly variable. Each group has its own characteristics and dynamics, which make some white paper or webinar offers highly successful and others relative duds.

Testing content offerings among different groups is essential. Beyond that, Rushin also saw two factors that affected response rate:

- Placement in the weekly or daily update newsletters

- White paper or webinar topic

Lesson #5. Create social media-specific landing pages

Rather than taking LinkedIn members to a standard landing page, Rushin created landing pages that specifically addressed the LinkedIn audience.

The tactic did not require a complete landing page redesign. Instead, the team modified the landing page text to create continuity for visitors arriving from LinkedIn, using phrases such as: “Thank you for your interest in this discussion”

Lesson #6. Quality can be an issue with leads from LinkedIn

To discourage job-seekers, the team changed its registration form to require prospects to use an email address from a company domain — forbidding the use of free email accounts such as Yahoo! or Gmail. The technique backfired, though, when LinkedIn members began complaining to Rushin (and sometimes to their Twitter followers) that the company was preventing unemployed people or independent consultants from viewing their thought-leadership content.

Rather than risk alienating LinkedIn members, you may have to rely on inside sales follow-up or further nurturing to eliminate non-qualified leads from your marketing funnel.

Ultimately lead generation on LinkedIn is the same as any other lead gen channel.  Be targeted, stay relevant to your audience, measure everything you can and always go for quality over quantity of leads.

The entire article is open to non-MarketingSherpa members until August 5th, be sure to check it out.

Thanks to Emily for the Manticore post earlier this week.  Manticore has great resources section on their website full of best practices and tips for anyone trying to learn more about marketing automation.  For those of you who are trying to make the tough decision to decide on the best marketing automation solution for your company, Manticore has 23 Questions Demand Generation Companies May Not Want You to Ask.  The checklist coves five categories of questions you should be asking:

• Key Features and Functionality
• Customer Support
• Usability
• Company Reliability
• CRM Integration

Questions to consider include:

• What is the specific version of the product that you are showing me?
• Do you have your own email engine?
• How long will the implementation take?

The best part is it is not just a list of questions.  Manticore breaks down why you should care about the answers to each and how it will affect your business.

Don’t forget to download your own copy for the full list of questions (it is the first item under the whitepapers tab).

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Emily Mayfield at Manticore (@ECMAYFIELD) for this post.

What is Manticore?

Manticore Technology delivers marketing automation solutions with the ideal combination of power and usability.  Marketing Automation improves marketing and sales alignment resulting in increased close ratios, decreased marketing spend, and increased revenue.  We’ve been asked many times how our company got its name.  Our name and our solutions were inspired by a Manticore, which is a legendary creature that has the body of a lion and a human head – a combination of power and intuitiveness.   Manticore Technology provides marketers with marketing automation solutions with the power, usability and support needed to ensure success.  How do exactly do we do that?

Our solutions are intuitive and user-friendly without sacrificing power and sophistication.  Manticore customer Aaron Raymo, Marketing Manager at Gevity, says, “When it comes to marketing automation, I believe that form and function are equally important.  Manticore’s user interface is incredibly easy for every day marketers to understand and utilize effectively.”  Unique features and services that contribute to Manticore’s user-friendly reputation are:

• Demand Booster – Intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows you to build powerful lead nurturing campaigns with no IT resources or extensive training.  Its incredible flexibility enables you to build, copy, and modify programs on the fly.
• Easy Implementation – Complete integration with your CRM system in just one-hour with no implementation fees or consulting costs allows you to start running campaigns immediately and quickly show ROI.
• Email Marketing Management – WYSIWYG Editor enables you to design emails and landing pages quickly with no HTML.  Templates and image hosting allows for quick deployment and advanced personalization.

While a user-friendly interface is an important feature, at the end of the day, you need a solution that has the power and functionality to meet your demand generation needs.  Manticore customer Robyn Foreman, Online Marketing Director at Jaspersoft, notes, “We looked at a number of demand generation solutions, focusing on usability, price and performance before deciding on Manticore Technology.  Manticore offered the most extensive capabilities for lead nurturing, lead scoring, email marketing management, real-time campaign analysis, list management and multi-channel PPC tracking at its price point.”  In terms of power and functionality, Manticore is an industry leader in:

• Holistic CRM integration – Unified platform allows for exceptional alignment between marketing and sales.  Custom objects enable users to enter leads into lead nurturing processes from within their CRM.  Marketing activity history, lead scores, and promotion codes exist within your CRM interface.
• Dynamic Content – Deliver targeted messages based on a lead’s specific attributes and interests within one email campaign or lead nurturing process.
• Multi-Model Lead Scoring (M²L) – Run simultaneous models to match leads with unique products.  Depreciate scores based on lack of activity over a period of time.  Automatically send leads to sales or add to a Demand Booster process based on their score.

Because we are dedicated to ensuring your success, we deliver unmatched customer service.  When you become a Manticore customer, you are assigned to a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM), who has deep expertise with our platform.  Your CSM’s job is to make sure that you’re successful in achieving your desired results. Diane Block, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Liquid Machines notes, “Manticore’s customer support team has been instrumental in helping with the implementation of the tool, as well as in setting up effective processes and campaigns, and in addition, are very responsive to all of our requests.”

Bottom line, Manticore Technology improves your business and enables you to be a better marketer.  Like the mythical beast, Manticore Technology is a combination of power and intuitiveness unlike anything you’ve ever seen.   If you would like more information on Manticore Technology or are interested in taking an online demo, please visit www.manticoretechnology.com.  For marketing automation best practices and insight, check out our blog at http://blog.manticoretechnology.com/.

Thanks again to Maria for the Marketo post earlier this week. As an add on to her post we wanted to make sure our B2BLead readers check out this onDemand webcast, Marketo’s Secret Sauce.

Jon Miller, Marketo’s VP of Marketing, has a done a great job of explaining how they have set up and work their marketing and sales funnel to drive success. And it’s obviously working. Just last week they announced surpassing the 200 customer mark in only 15 months. My guess is most of these customers originated in marketing.

Any B2B Marketer out there looking for guidance should watch this and be sure to take notes. I promise, it’s worth your time.

Here’s some of the things covered in the 45 minute webcast:

• Marketo’s demand generation funnel
• Growth in our organic awareness
• Effectiveness of various lead generation channels (paid and organic): % qualified, % sales-ready lead, % opportunity, cost per lead, etc.
• How we use lead nurturing to develop relationships with prospects that are not sales ready; the ROI of lead nurturing
• The exact lead scoring rules we use (demographics and behaviors) to identify sales-ready leads
• Our 21 day lead follow-up process
• Metrics and conversion rates for every stage of the demand generation funnel
• How we present marketing forecasts to the board

No forms, just click here to get started.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Maria Pergolino of Marketo (@inboundmarketer and @marketo) for this post.

What is Marketo?

Hi Amy, Thanks for taking time to ask about Marketo.  Since I am new to the company I thought I would share with you how I choose a marketing automation vendor when selecting for my previous company.

I first became aware of Marketo when I was working as a demand generation manager for a mid-sized IT company.   Here, I had two primary responsibilities- I needed to generate leads and I had to pick out the best leads for sales.  While this may sound like a small job, it involved deciding on a mix of online and offline lead generation activities, vendor selection, social media marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and more.  I realized quickly that my CRM system alone was not able to provide all the data I needed to accomplish my goals, so I started looking at marketing automation vendors.

I went through a detailed search, comparing a number of different marketing automation companies.  There were many differences in the vendors, and I needed to select the one that was powerful enough to meet all my needs without locking me into a complicated, rigid structure that would slow me down.  The features that were most important to me were:

• Powerful email marketing
• Lead nurturing with personalization
• Landing page creation and optimization
• Integration into my CRM system
• Lead management
• Website monitoring
• Powerful  reporting

I also needed to make sure it was easy to use so I didn’t waste a lot of time training and could get started using the solution right away.

I choose Marketo and achieved results beyond what I had ever expected.  My first success with the system happened in just days as I was able to make better utilization of my current house list, interacting with opted-in leads I was missing with my previous email marketing tool.  These successes continued as I was able to create landing pages quickly without needing help from designers or IT anymore.  I was making much better use of new content, as I could deploy programs quickly and ensure it was seen by everyone relevant using my nurturing campaign.

Since then, Marketo has introduced Sales Insight, which helps reps prioritize, understand and interact with your companies hottest leads, saving time and closing deals faster.  This sales tool truly helps close the gap between sales and marketing allowing companies to be better prepared at every stage of the revenue cycle and to deliver the right response at the right time to their prospects.

Also, with Marketo, I felt like I had purchased more than a marketing automation solution – I had found a company that provides thought leadership and best practices.  I found myself reading Marketo’s blog for tips on social media marketing and talking to their support representatives about best practices for marketers.  They even have a presentation that shows how the VP of Marketing at Marketo uses their own system called Marketo’s Secret Sauce, making it easier for new and current customers see how to get the best results.

While I am no longer a customer of Marketo, it is because I am now an employee.  Here I manage Inbound Marketing and can help other marketers learn to make positive impacts in their own organizations.  To learn more about Marketo check out these short demos:

Marketing Automation Demo Sales Insight Demo

After reading Leigh Anne’s post on Sales 2.0 for Dummies, by David Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Genius.com, this got me thinking…

I think David’s funnel left out a big piece of the active funnel – outbound marketing.  This part should be between the attract and interact parts of David’s funnel.  We’re calling this piece – Outbound Marketing 2.0.
If only 3% of people fill out forms and announce themselves, you’re either going to have a skinny funnel or have to do a TON of inbound marketing to drive enough activity to keep the top of the funnel full.  Here’s where the outbound marketing 2.0 comes in.

While keeping your inbound engine running, and pushing the hand raisers to the appropriate sales person or marketing program, there are economic factors that may also lend to considering new verticals (i.e healthcare has $$ to spend but the financial services industry is still struggling).  Also, don’t forget about where you’re already winning.  Take a look at your current funnel and see what’s moving and what’s not and ultimately, what your new customers look like.  And finally, 97% of visitors that are not announcing themselves,  with a robust analytics tool you can identify the companies visiting (shameless promotion ahead) and ReachForce can help you discover the right buying roles for your business.

From there, you’re ready to execute your outbound programs using a marketing or email automation solution.

Here’s what I think the top of the funnel should look like:

Earlier this week, we featured a post on Genius.com, which takes a unique, “Sales 2.0” approach to email marketing and marketing automation.  In fact, David Thompson, CEO and co-founder at Genius.com and former CMO at WebEx, helped launch the whole Sales 2.0 phenomenon, first by founding the Sales 2.0 conference and then by authoring Sales 2.0 for Dummies, the first book about Sales 2.0.  This past spring, David updated Sales 2.0 for Dummies in an executive edition that broadened the focus from Sales to look at Sales and Marketing alignment.

This eBook goes in-depth to define the new technology-based sales and marketing process to help shorten sales cycles, increase revenue and foster Marketing/Sales alignment.

Here’s a short excerpt to wet your whistle:
When Sales and Marketing are aligned, prospects move seamlessly from hearing about you in an online article to browsing your Web site or joining a Webinar to educate themselves to engaging with Sales when they are ready to learn more — and hopefully take the next step toward a purchase. Internally, when Sales and Marketing are aligned, they function like a professional NBA team, where players pass the ball (the Lead) back and forth, dribble down the court (qualifying and following up) until they make the basket (deal closed), and if they miss the basket, Marketing gets the rebound, and the process starts again (remarketing to prospects).

I love this basketball analogy.  I say it again and again. Marketing cannot just throw leads over the wall never to touch them again thinking, “now they are Sales’ problem.”  It has to be a closed loop process where Sales is able to return leads back to Marketing for further nurturing and Marketing is able to push back to Sales once the lead is sales-ready.

David also defines the new funnel:
The Sales 2.0 Funnel (see Figure below) updates traditional sales and marketing cycles by identifying each stage of the Sales 2.0 process and providing you with a sampling of new Web-based technologies that enable you to approach each step in a faster, more cost effective, and measurable way.

Sales 2.0 for Dummies really outlines all of the technologies needed to streamline the funnel and to effectively align Marketing and Sales.  The end of the eBook also gives you a checklist to see how well you have shifted to Sales 2.0 and to help you recognize areas for improvement.

Be sure to download your own copy of Sales 2.0 for Dummies to learn how to put the right technologies in place today to improve your marketing and sales results.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Felicity Wohltman at Genius (@felicity_genius) for this post.

What is Genius.com?

Thanks for asking. Genius.com delivers two on-demand solutions that help marketing and sales teams solve their biggest challenge – working more effectively together to identify and connect with their best prospects at the right time and with the right information.

How does Genius do that?  First, by unifying a powerful email marketing system with an instant-messenger like sales client that give sales visibility into all the results, in real time.  With Genius, marketers can easily create highly personalized email marketing campaigns, send on behalf of their sales or lead gen reps, and measure results based on website visits as well as email open statistics.  And, at the same time, every sales rep can be notified instantly whenever a prospect is interested enough to open an email or visit the website.  If your company is lucky enough to have so many website visitors that Sales is too busy for real time alerts, Genius makes it easy to throttle back on the volume – all the activity history is stored and available in Genius or in salesforce.com, including access to a page-by-page visual replay of each prospect’s website visit.

That’s the Genius Pro™ solution in a nutshell – powerful email marketing with deep website visit tracking and real-time visibility for Sales.  Genius solutions require no website tagging or server changes, so you can get started sending emails and tracking the results immediately upon sign-up.

For companies ready to automate their lead nurturing, including adding lead scoring to guide Sales activity, Genius Enterprise™ provides a simple drag-and-drop interface for designing workflows that customize prospect follow-up based on demographics (web2lead data) and/or behavioral data (website visit duration, visits to specific page, live chat requests, and more).  Genius lead scoring for Sales is complemented by unique real-time lead conversion events that let our customers specify key prospect qualifying actions that interrupt scheduled workflows and alert sales instantly that a prospect is ready to engage.  With Genius, automation never gets in the way of connecting Sales to interested prospects when the time is right.

Genius customers are typically looking for fast results, and so we’ve focused on delivering essential email marketing, marketing automation, and sales enablement capabilities in a system that can be put to work instantly and without a lot of training or complex implementation requirements.  With Genius, customers have quickly:

• Doubled their pipeline in just one quarter
• Tripled their email marketing success rate
• Quadrupled their previous sales results with half the staff

Determining which email marketing and marketing automation solution will best meet the needs of your marketing and sales organizations can be difficult, given the range of offerings on the market.  Genius Pro and Genius Enterprise stand out for the following reasons:

• Instant implementation, with no website tagging or server changes needed to get started
• Deep experience as a Sales 2.0 leader that’s enabled improved sales and marketing alignment at over 500 corporate customers, including BT, Intuit and Cisco-WebEx.
• Real-time alerts to Sales, along with full visibility into prospect website visits, so Sales can connect with interested prospects, whenever they’re ready to engage
• Proven scalability and performance, including leading email deliverability backed by 24×7 monitoring
• Unmatched integration with salesforce.com, including continuous bi-directional sync

We welcome your questions and hope you’ll get in touch with us through our website or by calling us at 1-888-6-Genius. And, please check out our B2B Marketing for Faster Sales blog.

Forrester, via Mashable, reports that $716 million will be spent on the social media marketing this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014.  Granted, it doesn’t appear to break down this forecast by B2B and B2C, but it’s pretty staggering any way you cut it.  Another interesting comparison stated in the article:

“At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).”

I’m a firm believer that email marketing will see its effectiveness reduced to the point of near-extinction within the next 5 years, due in part to social media as well as increasing proliferation of anti-spam technologies that will drive email into an almost completely whitelisted experience.  But it’s still unclear how all this social marketing spend is going to manifest itself.  The costs and ROI of social media are poorly understood at this point, especially with virtually all the tools and services being free.  I’m sure we’ll see more of this develop very soon.

In the meantime, congratulations to CoTweet who closed their Series A round of funding yesterday.  Good to see some of this activity happening in that booming hotbed of technology (and the town I grew up in), Hershey, Pennsylvania.

ReachForce has teamed up with MathMarketing to offer Funnel Academy, a 2-day B2B marketing training, on August 10-11, 2009 in San Mateo.

Author of The Leaky Funnel and B2B Marketing Funnel Master Hugh Macfarlane, will focus on how to select tactics that move buyers and how to size the funnel for success.

This training was designed for both those who set the tactics at a strategic level and those who roll up their sleeves and execute.  During this 2-day session you will learn how to:

• ensure your marketing dollar delivers a return, with emphasis on tactics like email campaigns and search engine marketing

• get buyers that leaked out of the funnel, back in

• determine the most critical levers of your funnel: volume, size and velocity, and what affect each of these has on success

• build a model funnel with different rates of effectiveness

The standard price for this training is $2,500 per attendee however, ReachForce would like to offer a special discount price of $1,250.
Places are limited, so if you would like to attend, go here for more info and to register.

P.S.  I attended this 2-day training in April and was VERY impressed with the content.  The Funnel Academy team does a great job of sharing proven best practices along with actionable tactics and take aways.