Yesterday on The B2B Lead, we talked about how marketing’s job has changed over the last couple of years from generating general awareness to tracking leads from cold to close.  Gone are the days of dumping lists of random names into the top of the funnel for sales to sort out.  Well, guess what, it turns out they weren’t sorting them out.

According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.   Of the remaining 21%, 70% are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.   Furthermore, 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

There’s a lot of talk about leaky funnels and marketing’s role in driving more leads to close but is this really possible if leads aren’t truly leaking out, they’re being rejected and kicked out by sales?

This makes me wonder.  Can better targeted lead generation programs be the answer to everyone’s woes?
I think so.

Here’s a few tips to think about before launching that next great program:

• Before you kick off the next quarter, make sure marketing and sales TOGETHER define what a lead is.  Marketing leads are different than sales leads.  Be certain everyone on both teams understands this and how you’re handling the 2 groups.

• Ask the sales team what is working for them.  Where are they winning? Who are the critical decision makers inside of these companies?  Make sure you are targeting the right companies and the right buyers inside.

• What programs deliver the best leads?  And not just the best leads but leads that convert to customers.  Does this align with what sales says?

• Don’t forget to take a look at who is already visiting you. This can be a goldmine.  Target your outreach efforts back at those visiting, don’t just sit and wait for them to come back and announce themselves.

• For those that are disqualified by sales for BANT reasons, make sure sales is able to pass those leads back for more nurturing.  Budgets and project timelines change all the time.  Because they don’t need you now doesn’t mean they won’t ever (just make sure you have the right buyer engaged, marketing to the right company with the wrong buyer won’t get you very far).

At ReachForce, marketing and sales are 1 team.  We know one can’t be successful without the other.

B2B Marketers have been going through big changes the last couple of years.  With marketing automation tools/platforms coming on strong, so are the questions of ROI and the effect marketing really has on the top line.

Our jobs have changed, we are no longer responsible for just general awareness and filling the top of the sales funnel.  Instead, we are tasked with moving leads from cold to close and building a closed loop feedback system with Sales along the way.

Eloqua, one of our partners, has a new whitepaper, The Springboard Effect, that does a great job of describing how our roles have changed and what is now expected of a best-in-class B2B Marketer.

Here’s a few interesting bites from The Springboard Effect:

• Jaap Favier, Vice President and Research Director for Forrester Research, emphasized that intelligence will be a key differentiator in the way companies survive a downturn.  “The name of the new marketing game: targeting.”

We love hearing this, it’s what we’re all about here at ReachForce.

• Aberdeen Group says that “companies with best-in-class lead prioritization and scoring systems have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.”

• According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.  Of the remaining, 70% of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.

Ok – here’s the MOST INTERESTING part – SiriusDecisions goes on to say that 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

WOW – look at all of the opportunity lost!

Interesting stuff here, be sure to check out the rest for yourself.

While Twitter is still trying to figure out a revenue generating model (which will include Pro Accounts) for their hugely popular free service, some people claim they are willing to pay for certain upgraded features.  Dan Frommer took a look at comments on his most recent blog post about Twitter and put together a list of what Twitter users say they would be willing to pay for.

Amazing what people will “say” they’ll pay for…

• Slightly longer messages: 160 characters instead of 140.
• Unlimited or prioritized access to API. (Twitter limits how many requests an account can make per hour.)
• Auto-deleting deadbeat followers who haven’t logged in within a month.
• More reliable service. (Can’t really charge on a per-user basis for this though, unless there’s a separate Twitter that’s more reliable, right?)
• Link-click analytics. (Free already if you use bit.ly, though some limitations.)
• Guaranteeing that their old tweets (all of them) are available forever, and easier to sift through.

Would you pay for twitter fearures?

It seems like everyday I hear about a new social networking tool and read another article about how to increase my Twitter following or maximize my Facebook presence.  You can’t be everywhere but how in the world do you go about choosing the right networks to participate in? I have found there are 3 questions to ask myself when choosing where to spend my efforts online:

• What are these networks already talking about? - Most every social network has some sort of search tool. Plug in your keywords to see if your industry is already being talked about.  Sign up immediately and join the conversation if they are.  Don’t forget to include your Company name in the search.  Someone else may have already started the conversation about you.
• Where are your competitors? – If your competitors have a presence there, you should too. To find out where they are, go to their website or blog and look for links like “follow us on Twitter” or “join our LinkedIn Group”. You should also head to some of the post popular social networking sites and see if your competitors have created profiles/accounts/pages.  Be sure to check for activity in groups and discussion boards like in Facebook groups and in LinkedIn Answers.
• Where are your customers? – I think the best place to start is with your customers. Their activities should most closely mimic those of your prospects.  You can find out where they are by a quick survey to your customers.  Do you have a customer advisory board?  Use them to help you get started.  And there is always the hard way (not really all that hard but rather time consuming) which is to go out to different networks and search to see if your customers are already there.

Keep in mind that social networking is not right for every industry.  You definitely want to do your homework up front so you can be stategic in your social networking lead gneration.  If you feel like you are a little ahead of your time for your industry, I would start with something like LinkedIn.  It is the most professional of the networks out there and is kind of the gateway drug to other social networks.

Do you think you have mastered the basics of Twitter and want to take it to the next level?  I was amazed that there are 8 analytics tools out there just for Twitter.  Here is a great blog post from Social Media Today on 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams.  I am not sure that they all have great B2B applications, but interesting stuff to check out.

Do you keep track of what is being said about your company online?   If you don’t, you should.  I am certain that the folks at Mzinga were shocked by what Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Analyst, said about them in his post on Monday.  Thankfully they were monitoring and able to respond.  He chose one of the most public forums at his disposal to publicly bash the company.  He says, “Why this post? It’s my obligation to have my clients best interest in mind, and this is the fastest way for me to reach them, by using the tools where we’re already connected.”  I find that a little hard to believe.  My guess is that email is the fastest way to reach his clients, not a public blog post.

I have a real problem with anyone using a public forum to bash a company before actually speaking with someone at the company directly or at least reaching out to the company directly.  Why do we feel in this online world that we can post something to Twitter, LinkedIn, or our own blog about another company without ever having taken the time to find out if our accusation is true or to resolve conflict we may personally have.  Jeremiah obviously has connections to the folks at Mzinga. Why not pick up the phone and chat with them first to confirm or deny the rumors he has been hearing.  When they gave him the answer that they would be making a public announcement in a week (in response to his tweets, not his direct reaching out), why couldn’t he wait?  Or if he felt this was truly something his clients needed to know, why not inform them privately?  (Sorry if I have gone on a bit of a tangent, but I fell very strongly about this subject.)

Jeremiah did respond with an apology on his blog.  But like one commenter said, “After reading that “apology”, it wreaks of: ‘I have been asked by my employer to write something, but do not believe that I am in the wrong.’”  I have to agree.  Read the post and apology and decide for yourself.

Lessons learned:

• Track what others are saying about you online – Google alerts is not enough.  Make sure you are tracking what is being said on Twitter (set up an RSS feed of your company’s name on Twitter Search) and LinkedIn.
• Respond quickly and pleasantly to everyone, analyst/blogger/customer/prospect
  
• If you don’t have something nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all – I think we could all use reminding of this wonderful phrase our mothers used to say to us.

For those of you conversing out in the Twittersphere on your company’s behalf, here’s a little tip to leverage your web site visitors to get the word out about you on Twitter.  Create a simple link on your home page that links to the following url:

http://twitter.com/home?status=[whatever+status+you+want]

Be sure to replace the [whatever+status+you+want] with, well, exactly that.  For example:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Checking+out+ReachForce

To be safe, you’ll want to use the “+” character in place of any spaces in your status text.  When someone clicks on your new Tweet This link, it will take them to their Twitter login page and then automatically populate the “What are you doing?” box with the text that you put after the “status=” part of the link.  Below is an example of what happens when clicking on the link above:

In the spirit of my previous post about the signal-to-noise ratio element of Twitter, the edgy, thought-provoking site brainz.org has “a completely unscientific (yet accurate) look at social sites” that lives up to its title.  While the article doesn’t dissect the actual content of the various popular social networks, it does provide a candid analysis of the types of people that are hanging out on sites like Myspace versus Twitter versus LinkedIn, etc.  My personal almost-spewed-diet-coke-on-my-monitor favorite is their classification for 12% of Myspace users, which I will leave for your personal perusal.

There is a litany of other “20 reasons for…” and “30 ways to…” analyses on the site in Drudge Report-style simplicity that are pretty interesting as well, including a fun walk down memory lane with “12 Dead Technology Advertisements“, which conjured up memories of the old big three online service providers: Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL.  Ahh, the good old days.

Our marketing team recently put together a quick survey to see what their peers are doing these days. In fact, if you haven’t taken the survey, please do. We’ll be sure to share the results with you.

What we’re seeing so far is a lot of people wondering how others are using social media as part their marketing mix and how they are measuring these different activities. Since the world of social media is still new to most of us, I thought I’d share with you how we are incorporating it here at ReachForce.

We are using traditional programs to fuel our direct marketing efforts – newsletters, email marketing, customer campaigns and thought leadership content programs, knowing that prospects engage in different ways. We are also reaching them through the new social media tools available to us today.

Here’s how we’re doing it today:

• We’re making sure our Twitter following knows when we have a new blog post
• We’re very active on The B2B Lead. We’re now at over 200 tips for B2B Marketing and Sales teams
• We’re also out there reading other B2B Marketing blogs and commenting on them
• We’re answering questions in LinkedIn and if we have a tip about the topic on our blog, we’re pointing them back
• We’ve recently updated our company email signatures to include our blog and twitter accounts

While I’m not sure how to measure specifics on any of this, what I am sure of is that by adding social media to our mix of lead generation tactics we’re seeing:

• A dramatic increase in inbound leads
• More traffic on our blog and hundreds of people a month jumping from our blog to reachforce.com for thought leadership content
• More pick up and recognition from industry thought leaders

Have you found other ways to track your social media efforts back to lead generation?

Are your tweets optimized for Twitter Search?  Last week, I attended the Eloqua User Group event in Austin.  Somehow the conversation ended up on Twitter.  One of the Eloqua folks asked the group, “are you using Twitter?”  I was shocked when only those of us from ReachForce and Eloqua raised their hands (but that rant is for another day).  Steve Woods, CTO and co-founder of Eloqua, was there speaking to us about his new book, Digital Body Language.  He said uses an almost SEO strategy for his tweets.  I would call it more of a TSO (Twitter Search Optimization) approach.

If you are following a large group of people, it is almost impossible to read every tweet in your feed.  More and more people have started using TweetDeck and RSS feeds from Twitter Search to stay up to date on what people are saying about their company or certain keywords.  Following that logic, it makes sense to try to include keywords in your tweets so they will actually be read by the right people.

If you want to employ this strategy, you need to know two things: what other people are tweeting about and keywords relevant to your business (hopefully, you already have this one figured out).  Play around on Twitter Search to see how often your keywords are used (this is also a good way to find new people to follow).  You will find that certain keywords are used more frequently and in a more relevant way.  Keep a running list so you can be sure to use those keywords in your tweets.

I would love to hear from anyone else about how to use Twitter more effectively.  And if you’re not already, be sure to follow all of us on The B2B Lead:

• @ahawthorne
• @LAWallace
• @ReachForce