Four Key Distinctions of Effective B2B Marketers

May 7th, 2011

B2B marketers, when developing a marketing plan and corresponding marketing budget, will find an effective model to follow in the successful B2B organizations who participated in a recent study by Lenskold Group. The B2B companies in the survey who rated their marketing efforts as highly effective and efficient differed from other B2B marketing organizations in four key ways:

  1. Of the marketers who categorized themselves as highly effective and efficient, only 10 percent responded “don’t know” when asked how much profit increase they could generate with a 10 percent increase in their lead generation budget, whereas 48 percent of other marketers did not know how much profit could be generated with such an increase. In fact, 65 percent of highly effective marketers said they could utilize a 10 percent increase in their lead generation budget to create more than a 10 percent improvement in profits, while only 35 percent of other marketers indicated such ability.
  2. A much higher percentage (70 percent vs. 35 percent) of these highly effectiveB2B marketers indicated that they currently track and measure lead quality based on revenue from the initial sale as well as total customer revenue over time.
  3. Most (60 percent) use ROI metrics to assess the efficacy of their marketing campaigns. The ROI users were also more likely—at 68 percent—to be outgrowing their competition, compared with only 48 percent of marketers who use traditional methods to evaluate marketing effectiveness.
  4. The most effective marketers are more likely to engage and educate customers through product trials; 82 percent rated this method highest on the list of effective means of generating high value leads that are likely to convert to sales.

The study also reported that 51 percent of B2B marketers who use marketing ROI metrics consider customer revenue generated from the initial sale as an indicator of lead quality. And 63 percent of marketers who use financial metrics rather than traditional ones indicated that they measure lead quality based on sales conversion rates.

Interestingly, 31 percent of small businesses reported a need to improve their basic capability to identify their most effective lead acquisition strategies. As the results of this study clearly show, tracking lead quality with detailed financial metrics should be a top priority for B2B companies.

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Sales Leads Top B2B Challenges

April 20th, 2011


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Six Reasons Your Marketing Budget Should Include Highly Targeted External Lead Sources

April 13th, 2011

Staying productive and profitable during slow times can be an ongoing challenge. Every business experiences fluctuations and times when the demand for new leads is exceptionally high.

While your sales team may be able to generate some of their own leads during times like this, research shows that the majority of leads generated by sales are not highly targeted.

In order to meet these challenges, 51.9 percent of B2B marketers plan to substantially increase their marketing budgets in the coming year, according to BtoB’s “2011 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans” survey. Of those respondents planning to boost their budgets this year, the majority said they plan double digit increases, and 25 percent will increase marketing spend by more than 20%. Customer acquisition is this year’s top marketing priority for 69.1 percent of the survey’s participants.

Whatever your marketing budget for the coming year, allocating a portion of it for purchasing targeted leads can prove to be one of your best strategies for several reasons:

  1. High quality, pre-targeted external leads can offset those inevitable slow times that virtually every business contends with periodically.
  2. Real-time leads with verified, contactable data will keep your sales team busy closing sales instead of scrambling to generate leads.
  3. Online lead generation companies use highly developed systems for gathering, scoring and verifying leads, saving your business the time and expense entailed in carrying out these processes in house.
  4. With a full pipeline of fresh leads from a reliable source, you can turn your focus toward other vital aspects of your business, such as customer retention and future growth strategies.
  5. Results are easily measured. Tracking and measuring are critical determining factors in marketing budget allocation. In-house social media and email marketing campaigns can be somewhat problematic to measure, but the process of tracking purchased leads is more straightforward.
  6. The best lead generation companies deliver warm, inbound leads who are already seeking your services. These leads will produce the maximum ROI for your marketing budget. In one recent case study, for example, leads purchased from InsideUp resulted in 125 percent ROI for the client.

As online marketing options continue to be refined and tested, you can ensure a steady flow of leads—and a reliable ROI—by augmenting your in-house lead generation tactics with ready-to-buy, real time leads.

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How to Get Better ROI from Inbound Marketing

March 28th, 2011

Embracing the latest online marketing strategies, businesses are spending countless hours and marketing dollars in an effort to keep their sales teams supplied with inbound leads.

Marketing teams are kept busy revising, perfecting and testing their inbound strategies using the myriad social media, content marketing, search marketing and public relations tools at their disposal.

Inbound marketing may seem like the latest trend but it is built on classic marketing principles. Closely related to the principle of “permission marketing,” a term coined by Seth Godin in the late ‘90s and now widely used by marketers, inbound marketing is an effective means of acquiring leads who are actively seeking your services.

A prospect’s permission to contact them is one of your most valuable marketing assets, especially since most people do not give out their information freely to just anyone who asks for it. It indicates that they are already interested in what you have to offer, so you don’t need to expend any effort convincing them on that count. The only thing that remains is to demonstrate that yours is the ideal company for their needs. And this brings us to the heart of successful inbound marketing.

Speak to your customer out of a genuine desire, not just to sell them on your solution, but to truly help their business succeed. Keep this motivation at the core of every piece of content you create and every interaction with your prospect.

Building a genuine rapport does take an investment of time, but the results will be solid and lasting. These are the same principles used by the best lead generation companies to generate warm leads who have demonstrated an interest in your services, supplied information about their specific needs, and are not only willing, but eager to hear about your solutions.

Treat these inbound leads like gold. Be the company who provides value before your prospect has even committed to using your service. Answer their questions and build their trust. Make sure your company’s message is aligned with your prospective customers’ needs. You will be building a loyal customer base while you strengthen your reputation and your brand.

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Four Key Factors for Wise Lead Buying Decisions

March 4th, 2011

When leads generated by sales and marketing leave a gap in the sales pipeline, you can quickly offset this deficit by purchasing leads from an online lead generation company. Naturally, if you’re working with a tight marketing budget you will want to be sure you’re getting the best leads for your investment.

Every business has different objectives–and therefore different needs–when it comes to lead buying. To help you in your purchasing decision, here are four key factors you should consider:

1. Lead Supplier

A quality online lead vendor can essentially become your partner in marketing. Your lead supplier will work with you to determine the amount, quality and price of leads you will need for a sustainable sales campaign.

Communicate openly with the lead suppliers you are considering. Tell them what your objectives are and how your organization operates. Be open and honest about your needs and expectations.

2. Lead Quality

The best lead suppliers on the web are the ones who continually refine their system of qualifying and targeting leads.  Their methods may include the use of smart forms, online data verification and data scrubbing technologies.

Such applications do add to the cost of obtaining each lead so you can expect to pay a higher price for these highly targeted leads. Paying more for top quality, real-time leads will be your best solution if your sales reps are very adept at closing deals but have some difficulty generating their own leads.

Conversely, if you require an abundance of fresh leads for your call center or automatic dialer, or if you need leads for training purposes, low-cost bulk leads could be the ideal solution. If your lead provider has a lead guarantee or return policy and will swap out any un-contactable leads, then your risk with lower quality leads is minimal.

3. Lead Volume

Most lead providers will be able to supply enough fresh leads to keep an organization with ten to twenty sales reps very busy. Larger companies may need to use more than one lead partner to keep the pipeline constantly full. This situation has the advantage of allowing you to track the results you experience with different lead suppliers.

4. Lead Price

Ultimately, the price you pay for your leads will be determined by the other factors involved in the purchase; your business objectives and marketing methods, and the quality and volume of the leads. Deciding which of these factors are most important to you will help you find the right balance between lead volume and lead quality.

Of course best way to derive the greatest value from whatever mix of leads you choose is to work them as thoroughly as possible. Talk to your lead provider about best practices that will help you see the highest possible return on your investment.

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Get to Know Your Prospects Through Progressive Profiling

February 16th, 2011

If you haven’t been getting to know your customers through progressive profiling, you could be missing out on one of the most powerful strategies in B2B marketing. Progressive profiling allows you to gradually engage prospects while learning more about their needs on each visit to your company’s website.

For example, a prospect who initially downloads a technical whitepaper and later returns seeking detailed product data sheets or a free trial is likely getting closer to making a buying decision.

Each subsequent visit gives you the opportunity to gather additional detail such as company size, purchasing budget and details regarding their company’s needs and interests. To do this effectively you will need to have a “smart” form on your website. This application saves each bit of data gathered during a prospect’s visits to your site.

One of the key advantages of this method of customer profiling and lead gathering is that it avoids the use of lengthy forms. Often, persons seeking business services will have already visited several sites by the time they encounter yours, and may have tired of filling out forms.

Progressive profiling can become an indispensable part of your marketing strategy, but it does require time to effectively plan the process and manage the data you gather.

If your site does not initially produce enough qualified needs, you may want to complement your efforts with pre-qualified leads from a lead generation company. Many businesses find that purchasing at least some of their leads helps keep the pipeline full and compensates for any lack of qualified leads gained through the company website.

To be certain you’re getting leads of the highest possible quality—ones that would be equivalent to those you gather through progressively profiling visitors to your site—make sure the lead gen company utilizes this methodology in their own lead-gathering process.

The ones who do are very adept at collecting information about your prospects and categorizing leads according to detailed demographics. Some have a highly refined scoring system that will rate leads by their online activity during each visit to the lead gen company’s site. This type of system delivers warm leads in real time, ones that will bring an excellent return on your investment.

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Two Cost-Effective Alternatives to In-House Email Marketing

February 5th, 2011

Email marketing is without doubt one of the best ways for B2B companies to acquire new leads. That’s why a recent study by BtoB Magazine found that 80 percent of the companies surveyed plan to increase their online marketing budget and of those, 68.6 percent intend to invest more in their email marketing campaigns.

To produce high quality leads, however, email marketing must be well planned and executed, with proper attention given to segmenting and targeting your audience. To optimize the results of your campaigns, you must determine your most crucial and actionable key performance indicators and test the results of each campaign accordingly.

Many companies report that the most challenging aspect of successful email marketing lies in finding employees with the expertise to properly develop and implement an email strategy. A recent survey by InsideUp found that for 70 percent of B2B companies, lack of expertise within their firm and difficulty finding qualified people to do the work were the biggest obstacles to successful online marketing.

Additionally, in-house email marketing can drain your budget and resources and make your marketing department more dependant on IT. It will also require a substantial investment  in customized software and server technology.

If this scenario rings true for your company, there are two excellent options that will allow you to reap the benefits of email marketing without the expense and hassle involved with hiring an in-house staff.

1. Outsource Your Email Marketing – Finding a quality email marketing company to take care of your needs can save your company considerable expense, not only in regard to hiring an in-house staff, but also in terms of email server processing power and internal bandwidth. You will have the advantage of the email provider’s expertise in all aspects of email marketing, such as list management, customized content, deliverability, testing and tracking, and regulatory compliance.

2. Purchase Quality, Pre-Qualified Leads – The crème of online lead generation companies have turned the process of generating quality, real-time warm leads into a veritable science. By diverting a portion of your online marketing budget toward purchasing leads that have been verified and scored using a detailed scoring process, you gain immediate access to prospects who are actively seeking your services–at a fraction of what it would cost to pull leads of similar quality from your own email marketing campaigns.

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InsideUp Lead Generation Blogs – Could Your Company Use Leads with 125% ROI?

January 31st, 2011

Any company considering purchasing leads from an online lead supplier will naturally want to know what type of results to expect. Will the leads you receive prove to be worth the investment? One of the best ways to answer this question is to research the results other companies have achieved while using a third party lead supplier.

One such firm, TeleDirect, is a call center services firm employing more than 100 professional CSRs. The Sacramento Business Journal has listed the company as one of its “Fastest Growing Companies” in each of the past six years.

The company recently needed a continuous pipeline of qualified, high-ROI leads that would be sales-ready within a few weeks’ time. However, the company’s marketing executives had learned from experience to be selective when choosing third-party lead suppliers. Some vendors, they found, employ unrefined, generic lead-gathering methods, resulting in low-quality, unqualified leads.

Supplying their sales team with a continuous flow of fresh leads had been a key to company success, allowing TeleDirect’s sales force to concentrate on the sales process and conversions rather than spending too much time and resources on prospecting or qualifying potential leads. However, call center executives felt that they were using too many external lead sources and needed to bring efficiencies into their lead-gen program.

Knowing that call center service buyers rarely submit their contact information to an individual vendor, and that most prospects prefer comparison shopping, TeleDirect chose to purchase leads from InsideUp, where prospects enjoy the efficiency of using an online service to evaluate the pricing and features of several vendors simultaneously.

The results? TeleDirect Call Centers received an average 125% return-on-investment within the first 30 days of signing up new call center customers. This means that the total revenue it generated from customers within just 30 days of signup is 125% of the total cost of generating those leads using InsideUp’s platform.

On average, 80% of InsideUp’s lead prospects requested custom proposals from TeleDirect, permitting TeleDirect’s sales team to work with interested and engaged potential new customers. By using InsideUp leads, TeleDirect was also able to reduce its external sources of sales leads by 50 percent.

InsideUp’s lead verification process ensures that leads provided to TeleDirect have a high response rate. InsideUp remains one of the company’s core lead sources. TeleDirect’s CEO, Tom Coshow, put it this way, “InsideUp far exceeded our expectations. InsideUp leads were not only qualified and verified..they were either warm or hot to the touch! Plus they were exactly the prospects that hit our sweet spot. Thanks to InsideUp, our business has grown significantly.”

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Twelve Key Ways Marketing Automation Can Benefit Your Business

January 25th, 2011

According to a new report by DemandGen, the number of companies that have adopted marketing automation solutions in 2010 is double that of the previous year. Several giants such as IBM and Oracle were among them.

With marketing automation’s capacity to help companies maximize their return on investment, manage revenue cycles, and create brand awareness, the number of B2B companies taking advantage of this technology is expected to continue to grow. But you don’t have to be a mega organization to reap the benefits of CRM and other forms of marketing automation software. So what, exactly, is marketing automation and how can it help your business grow?

According to SearchCRM, marketing automation software is used to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. Its use makes processes, which had been performed manually, much more efficient. It also provides new features and capabilities that companies have yet to exploit. Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management (CRM).

Marketo further defines marketing automation as a tool for increasing operational efficiency and driving revenue. It automates the routine and repeatable tasks involved in lead management, lead nurturing and lead scoring. It will also build and maintain your company’s marketing lead database. It can also be integrated with your company’s existing sales force automation systems.

Automation software enables marketing departments to measure what works and demonstrate the impact of specific marketing and lead nurturing campaigns on company revenue. Used effectively, it can foster collaboration between marketing and sales teams and increase productivity.

The two main functions of marketing automation are campaign management and customer segmentation. Organizations use factors such as gender, age, and education to separate and categorize customer data. This helps marketers create campaigns targeted to particular demographics and measure the effectiveness of advertising and lead nurturing strategies.

Within these two main functions, marketing automation programs perform a multitude of tasks. Some of these will vary by provider, but most will help increase the effectiveness of your marketing in these 12 ways:

  1. Increase productivity by replacing repetitive manual tasks with automated systems.
  2. Help to manage your company’s revenue cycles.
  3. Automate lead generation and lead nurturing processes.
  4. Create marketing work-flow systems, budget plans and organizational calendars.
  5. Manage organization-wide marketing campaigns
  6. Manage mailing lists based on existing lead, account and contact data.
  7. Assist on campaign asset creation.
  8. Analyze campaign effectiveness based on customer data.
  9. Use information captured in lead details to qualify leads to next stage.
  10. Deploy mass email campaigns to targeted mailing lists.
  11. Import leads from external sources, such as lead suppliers and Web downloads.
  12. Create, automate and deliver multi-channel promotional messaging.

If you’re planning to purchase marketing automation software tools, it’s important to realize that your initial purchase is only the beginning. When companies express disappointment with their marketing automation system, this is often because they have not taken the time to learn how to use it fully. To get the most benefit from your software, you will need to integrate it with the right resources, people, and processes.

Think of marketing automation as one component of your complete marketing solution. When used effectively, it can help you build brand awareness and realize a higher return on your sales leads.

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Strong Social Media Growth Presents Challenges…Benefits to B2B Marketers

January 3rd, 2011

The big news for B2B companies for 2011 is the undeniable trend toward social media marketing. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that B2B companies will increase budgets for interactive marketing spend to $54 million by 2014, double the amount spent in 2009. And for good reason: according to SiriusDecisions, by 2015 as much as 75 percent of B2B demand will come from the Internet.

Clearly there is great potential for B2B social marketing as prospects regularly go online to research business services and vendors. Social media can — and should — be used to engage prospects and interact with them throughout the buying cycle. Many companies are already immersing themselves in the social media marketing scene, with excellent results. A recent report by Mashable cited a study in which the vast majority — 86 percent — of B2B companies said they use social media for marketing.

Yet according to Marketing Sherpa’s recent social media benchmark survey, shown in the chart below, 48 percent of participants stated that social media was only “somewhat effective” at generating leads.

This is likely due to the fact that many companies lack well-defined strategies for capturing online prospects through social media, as well as the resources to develop and implement such strategies. A study by White Horse Marketing reported that 60 percent of B2B firms have no staff dedicated to social media and a mere 10 percent use outside agencies or consultants.

Successful social media marketing does require a substantial commitment in terms of time and budget. B2B online marketing is always evolving — and becoming more fragmented. It is no longer a simple matter of mastering search marketing. Companies must now become adept at effectively leveraging video, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and a plethora of other tools. Finding out where your prospects are and what type of online media they are using involves constant, diligent research followed by continual fine-tuning of your social media strategy based on your research results.

Consider using the expertise and experience of an outside company that both understands B2B marketing and knows how to effectively use social media to generate quality leads as part of an overall lead generation platform. Using a third-party source for leads could help your organization save countless labor hours and other resources that might otherwise be swallowed up in the social media vortex.

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