During the recent recession, B2B marketing managers at technology vendors have yet again come under the spotlight in terms of how much value they add to their organisations. Managers have had to go back to basics to make sure that they follow best practices involved in successfully generating and nurturing leads, leads which subsequently result in sales.
Generating new leads means acquiring potential customers i.e. contacts who have indicated they are ‘in the market’ for your company’s products and services. There are a number of channels through which to generate leads, but for many technology vendors, the vast majority of leads are now generated online. The following tips on lead generation might highlight one or more areas which require your attention. The starting point for any strategy for lead generation must start with you accurately identifying your company’s target customer group.
1. Pinpoint your ‘ideal customer’ profile
The ‘ideal customer’ is a concept which underpins all decisions about how to allocate marketing budget and, importantly, the input of both sales and marketing will be required in order to decide the basis of this crucial profile.
Take a good look at your customer database and you should be able to work out which are your best and most profitable customers, and those which are least benefiting your business. Both types of customer may have certain characteristics in common, e.g. geographic location, employee numbers, but differ widely in other respects. Taking everything into consideration you should be able to define characteristics shared by your ‘ideal customer’. Knowing this information should help to target your lead generation efforts and drill down on which prospects are more likely to become valued customers.
2. It’s the Buy-Cycle not the Sales-Cycle that matters to your prospects
The internet has changed the way technology buyers make purchasing decisions. These buyers are now much more proactive when seeking out solutions to business issues, relying less on the salespeople at vendors to provide the information that they base their decisions on. A recent report by TechTarget and Google suggest that 95% of technology buyers conduct their own research online, starting with search terms about solving particular business issues. This is the ‘Awareness Phase’ of the buy-cycle; when they are discovering ‘How to solve X, Y Z’. The next stage is the ‘Consideration Phase’ where specific solutions &/or vendors are researched, followed by the ‘Decision Phase’, where online behaviour is characterised more by ‘Brand’ and ‘comparison’ research. It’s worth noting that around 70% of these browsers will go on to buy a related product or solution within the next year.
3. Buyers dictate how the sale progresses
As buyers learn more about the solutions that can solve their business issue, they start to narrow down their research and begin drawing up a shortlist of vendors. It is at this stage that buyers indicate a willingness to start engaging with a vendor’s sales team i.e. after they have researched solutions and/or have an understanding of the competitive vendor landscape & offerings.
Buyers these days are unreceptive to cold calls or uninvited sales pitches. But if vendors manage to ‘get on the radar’ of prospective buyers during the ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration’ stages of the buy-cycle they stand a much better chance of being able to help shape the criteria for a purchase as well as influence budgets.
4. Use intelligent content to engage with potential customers
In order to increase the chances of a buyer including your company as the right ‘fit’ to help them address their business issue, you need to get their attention early on in the buy-cycle – as mentioned in point 2, this is the stage where they are looking for general information about issues affecting them.
In order to generate leads, B2B marketers must put their energy into placing content online, for examples, white papers; getting themselves talked about positively on blogs and generally finding ways of having a positive presence in areas of the internet which their target customers will be likely to go to for advice. Information must be knowledgeable, unbiased and authoritative – the emphasis is on engagement rather than selling your products. Brand awareness is being created in a low key way and succeeding at this ‘back door’ approach is becoming critical to businesses in order to stay in competition.
5. It’s a marathon, not a sprint
Successful lead generation is a process that does not end once a lead arrives. It must continue beyond the initial indicators as to whether the prospect is ready to buy. Chances are they are not. But at some stage they will be and to ensure that your company is one that they want to talk to when they are ready, you need to be prepared to develop an ‘ongoing dialogue’, known in B2B marketing speak as lead nurturing. This ties in with tip #6, and provides timely content to decision makers as they go through the ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration stages’ in the buy-cycle. Don’t be surprised if the lead is still not sales ready several months down the line. Successful marketers set up the systems and processes to ensure they are still in the running after most others have hit the wall and given up.
6. Don’t lose precious leads
As a marketing professional you will be aware that there is often a distinct lack of communication or even an element of hostility in the relationship between sales and marketing. The unfortunate result for companies is that attempts to implement successful lead generation campaigns are inevitably hampered.
The vast majority of leads passed on to the sales team are simply wasted. To give you an idea of the scale of lead wastage that companies allow, it is estimated that more than 80% of the leads which get passed to sales departments will be categorised as ‘leave for later’, and are rarely contacted by the company again. Studies have shown that around 70% of these will go on to buy from competitors at a later stage. The leads are still ‘in the system’– but are not accessible to marketing.
7. Get consensus of agreement on what a ‘sales ready lead’ means in your organisation
According to John Coe, in his book The Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing (McGraw-Hill) “The job of marketing is to develop a lead generation system that matches the readiness of the buyer with the expectations of your sales person”.
Using your ‘ideal customer’ framework you can go on to form a consensus about what a ‘sales ready’ lead is. According the Brian Carroll in his e-book ‘Start with a Lead’ an estimated 80% of leads which are passed from marketing to sales are ‘lost’ or wasted in the system, along with the time, financial commitment and energy of generating them. This situation can only be improved by achieving a consensus of opinion between sales and marketing on just what is a ‘sales ready’ lead.
8. Create a closed loop to recapture your leads
If leads passed to sales are then subsequently identified by the sales team as ‘not sales ready’ there should be a mechanism of passing these leads back to the marketing team rather than the sales teams retaining them, often in hidden silos! The only way to ensure this is done is to put into place a closed loop feedback system and supply sales with an incentive to return what have become ‘their’ leads to marketing.
Very often sales executives are reluctant to relinquish a ‘warm’ lead fearing that they will lose the right to pursue the lead in the future and any commission from a sale. If however, they are confident that these leads will be returned to them in due course (e.g. by name tagging them) your sales people will begin to return non ready sales leads back to where they belong – the marketing department – to be nurtured until they are ready to be put back into the sales continuum.
9. Automate to generate
Marketing automation software is becoming more popular and provided by what is known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This technology is there to help you track and analyse your prospects online behaviour, for example in order to analyse their engagement when on your website. If a potential buyer returns to visit an area of particularly ‘high value’, then this will increase their ‘lead score’ indicating to you that this might be timely for a salesperson to pick up the phone and call them. A high value area would include the pricing page; the ‘contact us’ section, or a website pages where visitors go for further information.
Using marketing automation software can also help to improve communication between sales and marketing departments by being integrated with the company’s CRM system. Also, by taking much of the repetitive tasks involved in lead generation such as data capture and lead management the marketing department can focus on making the most of their leads in terms of properly nurturing them.
Marketing automation cannot collect all the data about your prospects relevant to lead generation, but it can provide you with an online picture of their behaviour and predict what might happen next.
10. Successful lead generation means getting the tactical mix right
There are a diverse number of strategies we can implement in order to increase our success in generating leads for our businesses. There is no right or wrong way, just the appropriate way for your particular company at any given time. Tips already mentioned including the benefits of investing time and energy into your website, content and database. However these tactics cannot work as stand-alone measures. In addition to your own marketing, you could consider using the services of a demand generation company such as OneStopClick, which will provide a range of qualified leads and a closed loop feedback system that you immediately put to use.
Whatever measures you put into place make sure they are fully integrated and sensitive to your customers’ needs. Keeping a balance of the right sort of tactics is the key - like any efficient system different tactics must be able to stand up to scrutiny and be measurable in terms of financial performance. One of the biggest obstacles to introducing new marketing lead generation systems or tactics is proving to your finance director that they will bring you ‘real’ financial rewards. They must therefore be capable of being quantifiable financially.
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