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.

‘Sell smart’ is the mantra today among business to business marketing and sales professionals. From the time of launching an all out attack on every single name one could gather in their database, b2b marketing and sales has evolved int to a more careful, well thought out and strategic approach based on qualifying prospects before engaging them. Knowing all you can about your target customers is an essential part of this evolution and has become even more relevant in case of the complex sale or selling to large companies.

In a “rich” marketing database, its not just the volume of data or the number of fields you have for each record which gives it more value. It’s the ability of your data to give you as much useful information as possible on your target accounts to give you an edge while deciding how, when and where to engage that account in the smartest possible way. Account profiling and sales intelligence gathering is one of those solutions which helps you get that deeper insight into an account so that you can decide your moves better informed.

If you are a business to business marketing or sales professional and understand the importance of “knowing your target customer” this is a quick slide show to showcase our on-demand, pay per delivery, account profiling & sales intelligence gathering solution. Enjoy!

In these economic down times when cost cutting is the mantra the positive effect is that it forces you to think out of the box and come up with alternative solutions to ensure you get the most out of your marketing and lead generation dollars. After having discussed this with a number of marketers and bloggers who have debated how will the recession affect lead generation budgets, there are a few things that most of us would agree on:

• Overall spend on online marketing is still likely to rise
• Budgets on offline advertising like television, newspapers, magazines will take more of a hit
• Measurability of results and being able to show clear results on every dollar spent will be important. You need to be able to link spend to what you get back for it clearly in these times.
• There is going to be pressure to generate more leads and more qualified leads during these times and since budgets wont increase, marketers will be driven to do more with less 

Quite simply. Yes they are!

A lot of business to business email campaigns are well planned with the message being crafted to strike a particular nerve with a targeted decision maker who has a specific role or responsibility which should make them think about a product or service and how it could make things better for their organization. So what many email marketers tend to do is throw a thousand emails out to a large list of business contacts hoping that about one hundred of them fall infront of eyes to whom the email is relevant and hope for the best. This is shooting in the dark at best.

When email messages can be customized to hit a specific point, why can’t the target lead lists also be customized to match the email message? They should be. One of our customers planned a well crafted campaign to go after decision makers responsible for testing their software applications for locating bugs in the coding right through the earlier stages of development. However the ideal target for their campaign was not a CIO or VP of Applications. They needed to reach someone specifically responsible for developing and testing applications in Java at the earlier stages for their message to really connect and strike a chord. The solution: A combination of our list building and account profiling services our teleprospecting team called into their target accounts and helped locate very specific contacts within them who were responsible for Java testing and along with the answers to few more profiling questions to score them better. Simply put, as a software applications manager who is responsible for Java testing, you are more likely to open and spend time going through an email which relevent to what you do.

• The open rates are better
• The response rates are better
• You reduce the chances of companies thinking you send them spam
• Your campaigns being smaller and more focussed makes quick follow up and lead qualification easier
• You get into the practice of qualifying early and generating quality business leads over quantity mail blasts

So if you are looking to customize every aspect of your email campaign, try custom building your target lead lists and tailor them to your campaign too. Market smart.

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.

For those readers who are not completely familiar with the South Park episode on “The Underpants Gnomes” , the Underpants Gnomes are an extremely enterprising bunch of Gnomes who have devised an ellaborate 3 phase plan to turn huge profits from going door to door to peoples houses and stealing their underpants. The 3 phases being:

1. PHASE 1 -COLLECT UNDERPANTS
2. PHASE 2 - ?
3. PHASE 3 -PROFIT !!!

It’s great to see an SEM campaign that you have recently invested in generate a few hundred or so inbound leads. Just how much of those are really qualified to go into your lead nurturing process or how many of them are sales ready? Its common to see leads generated through online ad clicks go straight to a CRM and enter the lead nurturing stream or get assigned straight away to sales without being qualified or scored. In reality only a small percentage of those hundred odd leads may be qualified leads which are worth following up on. An even smaller percentage maybe actionable sales ready leads which need to be followed up on right away. The rest of the leads that are completely unqualified whould be filtered from the process ahead before they enter the nurture or sales cycle. Here is why you should put in a lead qualification process as soon as they are generated :

• Unqualified leads will bloat up your lead pipeline and have you believing you have more good leads to work with than you really do
• Unless the leads are qualified and sorted, you wont know how effective that SEM or online campaign was. Total leads will give you volume of leads generated and only qualified leads which can be used will really give you metrics on how effective it was
• With more unqualified leads in the funnel, you will end up wasting time and money reaching out or trying to nurture and lead that was not a prospect for your product or service in the first place

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. 

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. 

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.