Marketing and lead generation is one of those roles where no matter how much you do every day, it always feels that you could have done a little bit more if you had extra hands to work with. Perhaps you have a great email campaign planned out and if only you had someone to help you with list building for a bigger list of target decision makers. Maybe a whitepaper download campaign just went well and you would love to have another done within the month if only you had someone to help you keep up with lead qualification for all the inbound leads generated.  What if you could focus more time on generating more leads while someone else could profile existing leads and deliver clear business opportunties to the sales people? So you need some help and the obvious solution is to hire so that you have that extra capacity but there are things to consider and questions to ask yourself such as:

• Do you need the extra capacity in the long run or is it just a need you feel now because you have short term plans which need that extra effort?
• Will it be worth the time, expense and effort required to have a new team member on board, get ramped up and wait for your investment to start bearing fruit?
• Is adding the head count really giving your team more capacity and efficiency or will it be an overhead in terms of management time and other resources?

There are those who will argue that outsourcing parts of your business to business lead generation activity is not recommended since marketing is a core part of the organization and should not be outsourced but I would differ there. Outsourcing your entire marketing and sales perhaps, but then again not many would do that. Leveraging services like we provide at ReadyContacts.com can actually augment your own internal efforts and help you build that lean mean marketing machine. Once you have identified what parts of the process you could use those additional hands on, give it a run and in time your existing marketing team will be able to step up their productivity without having to augment it with additional head count. Especially with a per performance pricing model or delivery based pricing, you will really find a very clear ROI for your costs and you should be able to get a lot more done for considerably less than an additional employees monthly salary and expenses. So if you are looking for those extra hands and still stay lean. Think about it!

Here is the report on the conversion of qualified web leads to oppotunities generated between Saturday and Sunday with an estimated closing time of between 2 and 3 weeks. Here is another report of total leads generated by various channels and the return on investement for the first half of last month. Here is the ratio of emails sent with projections for revenues of next month based on last years open rates. Just because your CRM software gives you a million reports and does analytics like nobody’s business, it doesnt mean you need to use all of them.

With all the analytics features available now, it can get confusing if you are tracking 30 different metrics every week to understand where your lead generation or sales figures stand at that point of time. Printing and analyzing unnecessary reports can actually become more a bottle neck in your lead management process rather than being  a source for information which can help you better it. In short, if you spent half a day on reprimanding your sales team for a reduced number of sales calls and number of hours spent logged onto the CRM as compared to last month when your monthly revenue from qualified opportunities was actually higher this month…..then you are missing the point.  Too many data points to analyze can often create a wrong impression and shift your focus from results to questions on how much activity was there?, how many campaigns were run, how many raw leads were added? 

Good reports have only the metrics you need to track. Additional ones that need to be pulled up to solve certain problems or take a closer look into how a particular campaign worked can be done when required. Here are a few pointers that can help remove the noise created by distracting analytics reports and still give you visibility into your lead management:

•  Create a dashboard which has only the metrics you have identified as important to track on a daily or weekly basis. Any other report can be pulled on a need basis.
• Track the simple metrics which show you the results and where you stand in terms of those results. In the end the aim is to generate results from all the activity and not just generate activity since thats what lead generation entails.
• When you compare metrics, compare them with the right context. As we mentioned, if your sales people did less calls than last month but still got more customers than last month, then they did something right, not wrong. 
• Tracking metrics is pointless if you cant convert what you leanrt from them in to tangible action items and use them to improve on the results.

Maybe there should be a report on all the pointless reports some of us end up reading just because we can. Or, we could simplify it and get what we need to know and filter out the rest.
 

Testimonials are one of the best sales tools ever and there is nothing like it. A good testimonials can lead a hesitant slow moving decision making business contact to close quickly after feeling assured and confident by reading or hearing testimonial for your product. Likewise, even the hottest lead can turn cold reading a not to good or an iffy testimonial or feedback from your customer. It is important for you to realize the value of testimonials and how get every customer to write a testimonial and one that matter and helps you close. 

1. Choose the timing carefully. Right after a successful delivery or project completion, send a quick note asking for them to write a short testimonial about their experience and feedback about your company and its solution. 
2. Follow-up rigorously. Testimonials can be requested and not asked for. So its important that you come up with the right style and strategy for follow-up until you get the your customer to write a recommendations. 
3. Help them a bit. When requesting a testimonial, feel free to share a few past testimonials or suggested examples that help them to write one for your faster. Sometimes customer don’t write one because they can’t figure out how to articulate. A little help from you can get what you need done much faster. 
4. Rinse & repeat. Follow-up with all customers until you get a testimonial and repeat the same for every customer you work for, however small the project or engagement may be. 

Every testimonial is a great sales tool for you to leverage and you will be surprised who long testimonials continue to work. LinkedIn is a great tool for gathering testimonials and recommendations from customers and partners and keeping them organized. Try simple email or use LinkedIn and see what works best for you. 

I just finished an interesting conversation with a CEO at a security software company and he told me something that made me think about the underlying strategy. He said a well known startup in the email space that was acquired by a large public company started off with one part of their sales and marketing effort focused on selling into accounts that were using their competitors product. At the face of it, it might seem strange and unnecessary. But if you think further it can be a very good strategy for some businesses:

• Targeting your competitors’ customer defines the target market for you very easily. You know that the customers have a need, suffer a pain point and are using something. You, obviously, have to show something to differentiate from your competitor, but this strategy solves an important issue of finding target accounts who have a pain point. 
• If you can sell into your competitors’ customers it helps you to validate your product and build confidence in its ability to address well defined requirements of customers who are already using another solution and have their requirements clearly identified. It helps you to whet your product and sales pitch very well. 
• If your customer has a large customer list, then focusing on those customers may be a good for your startup to go out and get some quick wins without having a heavy duty list building, lead generation, lead qualification and appointment setting process. You can go straight to the decision makers and pitch. They already know what you are trying to sell them. 

How to go after your competitors’ customer is a topic for another post that I will cover soon, but dwell on this and see if this is applicable to your startup.