I just had a brief conversation with our prospecting team who are currently working on qualifying leads for a well known technology company. The leads come through from events and tradeshows the company regularly participates in and the team was notified that a bunch of leads from a more recent trade show have been added to their CRM and these would be a priority over the previous events that have been uploaded earlier. This was a good call for the simple reason :- the sooner a lead is contacted and qualified after it’s been generated, the higher the chances of a positive response. 

On the other side of the spectrum we have commonly seen and had to follow up and qualify leads generated from a past trade show or seminar which have been sitting in the CRM for a few weeks to months without being called or contacted once during this time. That is not a good lead and data management practice by any standard. It’s a complete no no! 

Its been carefully studied and generally agreed on by B2B marketers that the ideal response time for an inbound web lead is within the first few hours and 24-48 hours is considered the maximum response time before the chances of a positive response starts diminishing. So why should it be too much different for trade show leads or leads generated from other channels? To think about it practically, unlike web leads there will have to be a gap between the time when the lights go out at the tradeshow and the leads have to be sorted and uploaded into the CRM or lead management system before they get tranfered to the qualification stage. That rules out qualifying them within the first hour or the first couple of hours perhaps. Nevertheless, its important to get those newly generated leads from events into the system and qualified as soon as possible and definitely not weeks and months later! 

A good percentage of the leads generated from older events failed to even recollect why they were there , what they were interested in and a few wouldn’t remember the the event itself! When the objective of such events is to generate leads, no matter how exhausting the trade show was and how much you want to put your feet up at the end of the day, don’t rest until you get those leads passed on to those who are responsible for the next steps or all that hard work (and costs) won’t yield as much as they could have. Build this practice into your team and it will count for something.

The last months have seen an increasing emphasis on building a strong qualified lead database through robust inbound lead generation programs. Inbound lead marketing has set marketers buzzing to develop more content, experiment with new ways of getting prospects to the website and filling the lead funnels with inbound leads so that the lead pipelines never dry up. Having leads generated and flow in to your database gives you a fantastic sense of achievement and anyone who has started an inbound marketing effort from scratch will know the feeling. There is one important area to pay attention to which can easily be overlooked. The aim shouldn’t be to fill the lead funnel with as many leads as possible to build a large database. The aim should be to fill the lead funnel with as many qualified leads as possible to build a strong and valuable database.

Even lead funnels need filters in the form of a quick and effective lead qualification process in which inbound leads are qualified at a high level (at least) before moving on to the main lead database. As with other forms of lead generation, inbound leads are not immune to having unqualified prospects signing up or filling in forms and its important to filter these before they make it to the database. At the higher level, you don’t want to filter out leads which are not ready to buy right away as those can be nurtured over time but you do need to have some questions which would help you filter out anything which has no future potential or is a junk lead which would just litter your database. Whether you qualify inbound leads in house or contract the process, the response time (how soon after the lead has been generated is it contacted and qualified) and the ability to qualify all inbound leads daily is key. This small step can spell the difference between a quantity database and a quality database. Its the quality database that will bring home the sales in the long run so get that filter if you don’t already have one for your leads!

Rich Data: Role-based Decision Makers Are Key

Mike Damphousse of Smashmouth Marketing blog posted an interesting analysis today comparing the value/cost of inbound versus outbound marketing. With the rise and hype of social media, there is a lot of discussion around how to leverage social media for B2B lead generation, but what is really missing is the fact that social media takes a lot of time and effort, the results are not easily measurable and it is time you are taking away from other proven channels for pipeline development, specifically outbound marketing in B2B. As Mike points out, while inbound marketing is a necessary element, it must be clear that its just not going to replace outbound marketing, especially telemarketing.

If we leave out low priced software or SaaS offerings which cannot justify a large inside or field sales force, the rest of the B2B market segments usually have significantly priced products and solutions where sales cycles can be long, prospects need to educated and relationships need to be build to develop a qualified opportunity. In such cases, while inbound marketing may take a long time to reach the complete segment of buyers (especially considering the fact that a tiny fraction of B2B buyers are interacting with social media for their buying decisions, other than Google search) and it may take more time from there on to qualify the leads. Compare this to a systematic outbound marketing effort and I am positive that the results will be a lot more effective and in a shorter period of time.

Having said that, outbound marketing will only be as effective as the quality of data that its structured around. Broad brush approach of calling on large lists or emailing house lists is not going to cut it. Rich Data must be the foundation of your outbound marketing if you are to get highly effective cost per lead metrics. Rich Data is list of contacts and profiled accounts that help you understand who are your critical decision makers and influencers at your target accounts along with key sales intelligence details at the account. Rich Data ensures that your telemarketing team will be focused on having conversations and not on trying to discover contacts and pre-qualify accounts. The telemarketing team is just 1 call away from a fruitful conversation with a laser focused contact who is their buyer. With Rich Data, email marketing also becomes orders of magnitude more effective as messages are clearly focused reach decision makers who “get it”. Organizations that don’t realize the value of Rich Data to power their outbound marketing will continue to see mediocre results and its not appropriate to compare these results with any inbound marketing results for any analysis of the two.

Generating a good flow inbound leads is just the first step towards building an effective sales machine. Here is quick slideshare presentation on a very simple but critical step in making the most out of your inbound leads.

As marketers we all get caught up in generating leads, building traffic, creating click throughs, optimizing content and generating more views and leads. In doing all this we often forget that the final objective is not just generating the highest volumes of leads but to generate business opportunities which are well qualified and can potentially convert to sales. So what is being done to make sure all those inquiries, downloads and web leads are qualified and the ones that are clear business opportunities are identified and passed on appropriately?

We have covered the need for inbound lead qualification in previous posts and while talking to companies we often hear that they have it all covered and their inbound leads are uploaded straight to their CRM so that in time they can be conatcted by the sales reps. But have they really got things covered? Time is of the essence when it comes to having inbound leads qualified and ideally they should be qualified as soon as they are generated. With every hour that passes by after that, the chances of conversion to a clear business opportunitiy or a sale diminish. Spending on having your inbound lead qualified as soon as possible is more than worth the extra cost. If you can identify clear business opportunities and differentiate them from unqualified leads in the process you will not only have a better conversaion rate but you will benefit from having only good qualified business opportunities from going into your CRM and have your sales team spend their time better on well qualified opportunities rather than just leads. This simple addition to the loop will make your sales machine more efficient and have it working in the right direction. 

Remember the aim should not stop at simply generating leads. Thats just step one. The aim is to generate qualified business opportunities. Identifiying business opportunities within the leads sooner rather than later will give you that extra edge.

Eran Livneh of MarketCapture.com did a post on “The killer demo: why demos are killing your sales” which has some good takes on how even great demos can sometimes kill your sales chances if a few fundamental things are not done right. One of the four reasons he mentions why demos often fail to bag the sale is :

The people interested in the demo is usually not the people that can buy

While getting buy-in from the intended user is important, the key to making the sale is reaching the decision makers. Most decision makers are not interested in the details. They want to know how you’re going to solve their business problems, not how your screens look like. Many of them wouldn’t even know what to look for in the demo. If the person you are dealing with is asking to see a demo that’s a clear red flag.

Everyone who is visiting your website is atleast somewhat interesting in your products and services or something within the domain. Most traditional analytics solution give you just a purely digital description of web traffic. That is helpful but not actionable, atleast for B2B marketers. Most B2B marketers want to know WHO it was who visited the website and if she is coming back again, and how many times and what is she looking at. That is actionable information and now there is a superb tool available for anyone who wants to do this, for FREE. Its the newly launched Demandbase Stream solution that has a slick interface for keeping you and your team abreast of WHO is coming to your website. I would highly recommend using a data cleansing and lead qualification process to whet the leads before calling them “actionable” from a sales perspective. Give it a swirl and post your comments here. 

Trade Shows are a predominant source of leads for companies in a number of segments. While I know that trade shows don’t deliver high quality leads to companies in some verticals, there are other verticals like healthcare, telecommunications and biotech where trade shows are invaluable in generating qualified leads and opportunities. 

The most valuable outcome of a trade show, other than a on-the-spot-sale or opportunity (which is rare), is the list of attendees. A natural thing to do for most marketers is to take the list and upload it to their CRM system. But that is probably the worst thing one could do with that list, as doing this leads to trade show lists getting lost  once uploaded to CRM, become tough to measure for what they delivered in terms of opportunities and sales and most importantly are tough to monetize if the data is not complete or qualified. 

Here are 3 simple things that everyone can do right after the trade show to maximize the value and ROI: 

• Cleanse the list fully and ensure that the data is both, complete and accurate. The best way to do this is to use internal marketing operations team or an outsourced lead generation or data cleansing vendor to ensure that all name, company, URL, address and phone number data is accurate. The next thing to do is to verify all the email addresses of the contacts by doing a simple email campaign thanking them for their time at the show and may be add a plug or two. The main objective of this to test and ensure that the email address is correct. However, if you do not have email addresses for the contacts as the trade show administrators don’t provide those, then it is a MUST to acquire and append emails to all contacts using publicly available information leveraging a good email append or email verification service. All this ensure that you have lead data that is complete, accurate and actionable. 
• Next, qualify the list to ensure that you are not going after accounts and contacts who are just not the right prospects for your company. This process may be quick for some of you and not-so-quick for others, but essential for everyone. An automated way to segment and qualify is by checking for data that helps you qualify like location, number of employees, revenues, contact titles/roles, and such other high level data elements. For a more deeper qualification, its best to use an outsourced lead qualification service provider who can call and research the target account to qualify against your parameters. For example, if your solution works only with the SAP ERP system, then accounts who do not have SAP are simply a waste of time for your team. The net result of this is a qualified list of target accounts with complete, accurate contact information that is ready for the sales team to call on. 
• Lastly, before you upload the list to the CRM system, make sure how you want to allocate the list across the sales reps and add any parameters that are required for this to the list. This is critical to ensure that you can make the sales reps accountable to call, qualify and report on the status and quality of the lead for you to generate a trade show ROI report. This last step is as important as the first two and almost critical for your ROI calculations. 

All this will definitely take more time than simply pushing the list as is to your CRM system but it will pay for itself with a happy sales team that values your leads, a happy boss who can clearly understand your trade show ROI sheet and overall a scalable process that puts you in complete control to drive leads from trade shows to revenue. 

One last point. In a recent conversation with one of our prospects, I heard an interesting point. He said trade shows drive 80% of their leads and one policy they follow is to only attend trade shows that give them a full attendee list WITH email addresses. If a show doesn’t give them a list with email addresses, then they just pass! 

You’re a marketer and your keyword optimized landing pages with the perfect layout has started to deliver great responses in the form of 500 inbound leads a week which you have passed on to your counter part in the sales department. You’re thinking to yourself “He should love me for this!” and instead at the next sales meeting you still hear him talking about how they are not getting the kind of leads they need. Shocking? Not really because this is a common scenario seen across companies when it comes to inbound leads.

Inbound leads especially from online channels are known to be amongst the best leads which higher conversation chances as compared to other sources like email marketing and cold calling. However there is a difference between an “inbound lead” which is information which came through a sign up, a download or form fill and a “qualified inbound lead” where that lead has been contacted and qualified for a possible requirement or interest in buying. If you can take that extra step to have the inbound leads qualified and deliver a smaller more concise list of leads, your sales team will love you for it. It allows them to filter out the noise and focus their energies on converting a smaller number of leads with a greater propensity to buy rather than a larger list of names, email ids and phone numbers for them to sift through to find a qualified lead who is worth the time and effort they have to spend on it.

Having a rock solid lead management process for quickly qualifying every inbound lead that comes through the funnel is essential and requires a dedicated effort. Whether its done by marketing or sales it’s clear that it has to be done by someone and once the process is in place the conversion rate into end customers and results will show for themselves. The process also helps marketers get clearer metrics on how effective are the leads they are generating from their campaigns in terms of quality and not just the volumes being generated. Put in that inbound lead qualification process before you deliver them to sales. They will love you for it.