To accurately target the right companies in your in-house database, first use what you already have ― your CRM data and your website visitor logs

With your CRM data –

• Profile your top-performing market segments. Where are you winning?
• Identify your best target markets. What kinds of deals close the fastest?
• Determine key qualifying company characteristics and buyer roles.

With your website visitor logs –

• Look for visitor patterns. For example, do you see any companies from your key markets or vertical industries that you haven’t already targeted?
• Are companies visiting that are already currently in your database? If so, are you recording these page visits?
• Your online marketing and PPC advertising is driving lookers, so track these visitors as well. Just because they don’t announce themselves doesn’t mean they aren’t potential leads.

This analysis will help you determine where to find your target market “sweet spot.” You should also follow these other steps as you find the right targets.

• Mark all records that are included in your current target market. You don’t necessarily want to delete the data you aren’t using, but you need the ability to pull your target market data easily.  It may be as simple as a field for industry or industry segment or as complex as a series of tags that indicate parcels within your target market.

• As you fill in gaps and build out contact data for new roles, consider other segmenting options.  Maybe segmenting based on employee size isn’t the way to go, can you use annual revenue as an indicator of opportunity size or maybe geography if you are targeting for a site specific event. Do this while you’re updating as well. This will help you better target your message at these prospects.

To get more from your in-house data for lead generation, you need to keep it clean ― but that’s like hitting a moving target. With companies merging or going out of business and a workforce that is constantly changing, marketing databases get dirtier at an alarming rate.

In fact, 2.1% of data goes bad every month, according to MarketingSherpa. This means  over 25% of contact data goes bad per year.

The only problem is knowing which 25%.

The good news is that marketers can dramatically improve their campaign results by using the right strategies to consistently update, clean and refresh their lead-generation database. According to SiriusDecisions, “the company that markets with a healthy data-cleansing routine can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an ‘average’ organization, based purely on data quality.”

Lately, we’ve been talking about the best ways to start with data cleanup, what to consider when marketing to your in-house database, important signs that your database might need help, and more.

Armed with this information, you should be in a better position to optimize your in-house database, reduce wasted efforts, improve conversions and get more revenue from your marketing dollar.

Do you have some great tips for starting the clean up process?

Aberdeen recently released a great report on leveraging customer data to better serve your marketing efforts. Here are some of the take-away points we thought were worth sharing:

If your database is in the slow lane:

• Start by using data for activities that will have a positive impact on revenue. Demonstrate the value of your data to justify investment in its ongoing health.
• Develop timelines and processes for cleaning your data. The importance of good data hygiene can’t be understated. If you clean it once and walk away it will get dirty again. Only constant attention will yield golden results.
• Invest in tools to help analyze customer data. Data analysis and marketing automation technologies will help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

If your database is already on the right path but needs a boost to hit the fast lane:

• Implement a formal data hygiene strategy. Create repeatable processes for de-duping, cleaning, and appending data as well as documenting best practices for users of your data.
• Engage multiple departments for data analysis. Encourage collaboration between your sales, marketing, customer service, IT, and finance organizations.

• Democratize all customer data. Centralize your database to measure and optimize the performance of your multichannel campaigns.

The great folks over at Aberdeen are doing a new benchmark study – “Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling.”  The report will allow your organization to benchmark its adoption of services and technologies that impact sales force productivity against peers and Best-in-Class companies.  To take part in the study click here.

For the purposes of this survey, the phrase “sales intelligence” refers to any information used to educate and enable the sales force and enrich the sales pipeline. This includes news on industry trends, consumer generated content, list/database providers, analyst reports, prospecting tools, competitive/market intelligence, and lead augmentation solutions.

To thank you for taking 10 to 15 minutes to answer this survey, Aberdeen will provide you with a complimentary copy of the report which is expected to be available after March 1st, 2010.  I don’t know about you, but I love a free report!

This was and actual email I received last week:

Hello,

Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.

Given COMPANY X success with multiple SaaS providers, I wanted to ensure that you were aware of our company and service offerings. We have been winning many key deals from a highly competitive landscape and COMPANY X is able to leverage key pricing advantages from Vmware licenses on a rental basis, a true cloud utility computing model with rapid provisioning of servers, support for Windows 2008, IBM platform standard for managed servers, citrix administration and support services which are handled by some of the best engineers with the most experience in the industry and still coming out with much better pricing than is provided by your other hosting partners.

COMPANY X is a consolidation of multiple, US-based, high-density data centers by Managed Data Holdings (MDH). With facilities in Chicago, Denver and Irvine, CA along with the ongoing acquisition activities for others nationally, COMPANY X is focused on providing both standard colocation services (cabinets, cages and power) as well as managed services comprised of IBM Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage in a virtualized, outsourced infrastructure. COMPANY X is a SAS 70, Type II certified facilities company.

Our data centers are 24/7/365 managed facilities with on-site NOCs, security and network staff available to support your needs on demand. Our customer portal enables our customers to remotely manage their collocated infrastructure, network bandwidth utilization, hosted server & storage infrastructure plus enables Compute-on-Demand and Storage-on-Demand flexibility for our hosted customers. Our Managed Services products range from managed IBM iDataPlex or Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage, security services (firewall, etc.), managed VPN, monitoring of your network infrastructures down to Load balancing, Network management and Infrastructure services (including “hands & eyes”). We have seen significant interest from major companies who have found that turning the infrastructure over to COMPANY X with the Virtual instances of VMware and the dynamic storage provisioning (on the fly) has significantly reduced their OpX as well as scope of responsibility for systems and software updates.

Please let me know if you have any projects with which I may assist you.

Thank you and best regards,

JOE

JOE SALESPERSON

Senior Sales Account Manager

Why is this is a ‘what not to do’ – a few really obvious reasons:

1. “Hello,” is that really my name?  No, don’t think so – if you’ve got the prospect’s name, you know you’ve got it spelled right, use it….don’t just write ‘Hello’ and ignore a person’s name.
2. My personal favorite – “Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.” What does this say about your knowledge of the prospect when your opening sentence assumes you are not sending your email to the right person??
3. How long is this email?  Yes this is a real email, it was sent to a group of folks here at ReachForce (yes really personal, isn’t it?), it’s so long though who is going to read it?

This email cracked me up, how many people really respond to something like this?  It’s amazing it didn’t get captured in my junk email.  Take some time when you are crafting an email to a prospect.  If it’s follow up to a call, make note of the call.  If it’s a cold email and you’ve never had contact with the prospect before, really put some thought into what is going to stand out to the reader.  Or better yet, don’t send cold emails!

As we run across cool companies that are trying to add value to today’s B2B sales and marketing teams  we want to be sure and share them with our B2B Lead readers.  Here’s another great idea…

Have you heard of Gist?  If not, you should check it out.  It might just be the tool your sales and telesales teams have been waiting on!

Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people (prospects) and companies.

Gist enables your sales team to build their ‘network’ from lists of contacts across a variety of sources from LinkedIn, salesforce.com, Outlook, Gmail (or any email service that supports IMAP), Facebook, Twitter  to any CSV file. Then, it sets up a Dashboard view of all the “news” going on within your network.  Once this is all set up your sales team can prioritize their contacts and outreach (or Gist can do it) based on companies/prospects/people you want to watch.

Something new is going up on the web every second of the day.  Can you imagine the efficiencies with just one dashboard of all of these relevant updates?

Lead – a simple word, very powerful impact to YOUR business.

Does it mean the same thing to both your Sales and Marketing teams? As it turns out, the crux of most sales and marketing quarrels (read: logjams) are tied to this one unique issue – how do you define a lead?

Does it mean the same thing to your management team?

My suggestion is that it may be time for a brown bag lunch to find out what your company thinks and getting on the same page on that simple definition.

Here’s a list of things commonly tagged as leads and typically end up in your marketing database and/or CRM:

• tradeshow scans
• contact form downloads
• contact list buys
• sales rolodex contacts
• customer referrals
• cold calling contact discovery
• partner programs
• target company CEO
• webinar registrations
• partner’s customers
• inbound call
• event attendee lists
• advertising responders
• competitor’s customers
• target company with no contact attached
• contact with no company attached
• contact with personal email address
• whitepaper/eBook form downloads

Are some of these better than others?  Are some of these prospects?  Are they all?  It depends.

Depends on what you have defined as a lead and as a prospect?  Does one come before the other?  Are they the same thing?  It depends.  Depends on how you have defined your marketing and sales funnel (pipeline) and what it takes to convert from one stage of the pipe to the next.

The key to every solid B2B lead generation engine is the agreed upon definition of a lead, a prospect and a suspect.

If you’re reading this and you’re unsure if your sales team would define a lead the same way you would, STOP what you are doing right now.  Set up time for your marketing and sales team to get together and define each stage of the buying process and what a lead (or prospect or suspect) looks like at each stage along the way to becoming a customer.  Remember, this will more than likely cut down on the quantity of leads but the quality will make up for the difference.

Once these definitions have been defined for your company, decide as a team how contacts are going to be touched in each stage and by whom.

Interested in how others define leads and prospects?  Check these out…

Here at ReachForce we use a lot of best practice type content offers as part of our multi-touch outbound marketing programs.  I’ve heard my sales team say more than a couple of times that they don’t seem to get a lot of traction with people from the content downloads.  Even with prompt follow up, nothing.

After giving it some thought, I came to the conclusion that either people downloading content are in an education phase and aren’t ready to speak to a sales rep.  or that these people consume information in a way that does not involve interaction…yet.  Neither of these conclusions provided a solution though.

Then I ran across this blog post, Forgettable Follow-up on B2B Content Offers, from Ardath Albee at The Customer Collective.  This one is a MUST read for all sales and marketing teams.  Here are some of the highlights:

Here are some examples of how B2B follow-up becomes forgettable:

Example:
[Company] Hello, This is Sam from [Company]. I noticed you downloaded our paper on whiz bang issue 57 and I’m interested in helping learn more about how we can help solve your problem.
[Prospect] I’m just researching.
[Company] Well, do you have a project planned that we can discuss?
[Prospect] No, I’m just doing some research. [I knew I shouldn't have answered the phone.]
[Company] Okay, I’m going to send you some product information so you’ll have it on file for when you need it.
[Prospect] Thanks. You have a nice day. [click, buzz, delete]

Example:
Email follow-up message – Thank you for requesting the [Recognizable Name] white paper. As you may know, [Our Company] is a leader in [whiz bang whatever] and we sponsored the white paper. I’d look forward to learning what initiatives you’re working on to see if [Our Solution] is a fit. I’d like to schedule a fifteen minute call to discuss your goals in [whiz bang whatever]. Please let me know when is a convenient time to talk.

This is such a waste of time. Approaches like these do absolutely nothing to elevate your company’s trust level or credibility. Instead, you’re seen as self-serving and, ultimately, forgettable.

Now you need to give them a reason for continued involvement. Here are some ideas on how to improve the response to your follow-up:

• Have a business reason for the follow-up. Just touching base isn’t good enough.

• Have an additional offer ready that builds on their expressed interest. An exclusive report, an article not publicly available, an invitation to a webinar on a related topic, etc.

• Know exactly what they downloaded and be specific to help them make the connection. People are busy. They download a lot of things. Expecting them to remember yours when you call/email out of the blue is just silly. If your follow-up is in relation to content you sponsored, they likely downloaded it because of the source, not you. So have something compelling to say if you want their interest to transfer to you.

• Follow-up promptly.  Waiting a month means you’re likely forgotten and someone else now has their attention.

DO NOT:

• Ask them to educate you.

• Put them on the spot.

• Be ignorant of the interaction that prompted the follow-up.

• Push product information on them. Lead with “blah, blah, blah” about your company

• Use buzz words and jargon in the description of your company.

• Forget to use a value proposition for the communication that’s all about them, not you.  The key is to get the prospect to take another step with you because you’ve got something valuable to say or share that they need to know.

After reading Ardath’s post (which I again recommend reading the entire thing, there are more examples and tips) I immediately forwarded it to my sales team and I’m joining their weekly meeting today to make sure everyone “gets it”.

We write new content for many reasons but our #1 reason is to support lead generation programs that convert leads.  Hopefully this helps and we see more content download leads in our opportunity funnel.

Creating new content on a regular basis is tough and very time consuming.  Here at ReachForce with almost everything we create we create a plan on how we are going to make use of the content in as many places as possible.  Things like converting eBooks or whitepapers into blog posts and vice versa or using surveys for lead information gathering as well as trend mapping.

Well, nurture marketers and sales teams out there here’s a GREAT idea!  I got an email from an Account Executive at MarketBright (see his picture below) that simply invited me to visit the MarketBright blog.  Then he went on to list a few of the most popular posts.  I thought this was brilliant.  He wasn’t trying to sell me anything, well maybe he was in the last paragraph but it was subtle.  He was just letting me know they had a resource I may be interested in.  No customization was needed, just a simple introduction and a list of the resources.  Easy as pie.

Here’s what the email looked like –

Ok, I must admit I think the picture is a little cheesy.  But it did make me giggle so I guess it worked, it caught my attention.  But otherwise, his hook worked.  Now I’m sure with the MarketBright email tracking, Jon was able to tell what I was interested in and now he knows what to follow up with next.

If you have a blog, steal some content from there.  Big change your prospects missed it the first time it went out.  If you don’t have a blog, pull out highlights from eBooks, whitepapers, webcasts, basically anything else you have and put together an email that links back to each of these.

I’m stealing this idea and going to do something like this for our pipeline nurturing program.  No selling from me, just trying to be resourceful for our decision makers and help encourage further interaction.  Jon, your email worked.  You caught my attention and I acted.  Thank you for the great idea.

2009 is looking up and we’ve been very busy event planning, getting ready for a new webinar with Math Marketing (if you haven’t signed up, you can right here), and still working on our sales playbooks. Here’s where we’re at so far:

Current Issues Identified:

• The Sales team has too much information available to them and aren’t sure to how to use it

• Support materials not aligned with selling situations and buyer roles

• The sales process was not clearly defined causing missed opportunities

• New sales people need help with triggers that move prospects through the funnel

Next we assembled our playbook team and determined our mission to be:

Our sales playbook is going to ensure our sales team is armed and ready to have valuable conversations that help prospective buyers move through the sales funnel as fast and efficiently as possible.

Ok, now we are ready. We started with a list of questions and asked each sales person on the playbook team to think about some of their success stories and start by filling out the list of questions below.

Understanding the Buying Roles and their goals

• Who did you make initial contact with and how?
• Who else was involved in the buying decision?
• Who was the ultimate decision maker?
• What are they being measured on?
• What does success look like to them?

Understanding the pain

• What was their pain?
• What were they doing before connecting with ReachForce?
• What solutions were offered to solve their pain?

Understanding their environment

• What industry are they in?
• What do they sell? Average Selling Price?
• How long is their sales cycle?

Delivering Value

• What value proposition resonated with them? and Why?
• What were the buyer’s information needs at each stage of their problem-solving process?
• What tools and supporting materials were used and when?
• What would have been helpful during the sales process? Supporting materials needed? Presentation needed? Customer Case studies?
• What objections were overcome?
• Who else/What else were they considering?

And the ultimate question… Why did they choose ReachForce?

Next meeting is tomorrow. From here we plan to discuss key moves that converted the prospective buyers into customers and I’ll be busy trying to understand how to align our marketing support (what we have and what’s needed) with each trigger.

Stay tuned for next steps…