Doing More with Less - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #127
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?
One Response to “Doing More with Less - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #127”
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July 25th, 2008 at 11:09 am
List segmentation is so massively under utilized in b2b marketing. It’s the norm in any high media cost b2c company that’s doing more than a few hundred million a year because it significantly improves ROI.
This is for the simple reason that a more specific message always, always, always out generates a more generic message.
There is extensive split test data on this going back 95 years to the time of Claude Hopkins and his seminal book on direct response marketing Scientific Advertising.
The main reason it’s underutilized is that b2b marketers either don’t know this (although they should) or they’re lazy.
It does take extra work to segment your list in to segments and to tailor your marketing to make it a little different, a little more relevant to each specific audience.
Sometimes all it takes is changing the headline and first paragraph of an email, fax, letter, or telemarketing script… but if you have even modest levels of revenue it’s almost always worth the effort.
The other way to segment that was not mentioned above and is also quite effective is to segment by psychographic question.
An example of this would be to offer some kind of freebie: white paper, webinar, bookmercial, and ask a survey question on the request form (paper or web).
What’s more important to you:
(a) Speed, (b) Cost, (c) Vendor track record
You can segment your list based on user provided data and I’ve found in telephone fall up calls it really works. You sound like you have something that’s exactly for them. (This is in a high ticket b2b setting)
I’ve done extensive split testing b2c online and found this type of segmentation increased sales by 40%.