The one trend we have been following consistently in business to buiness marketing technology is how it’s moving towards being able to identify prospects for your business even before you have spoken to them. Right from lead data capturing, lead nurturing to lead qualification, technology has been evolving to help automate the demand generation process and help marketing and inside sales work smarter.

Website lead capturing for building marketing data has been right at the forefront of most marketers strategy to build in inbound leads this year. It’s scalable, the leads are more qualified and often already partly educated on your offering. Whether they come from form fills, landing pages, rss subscriptions, webinar registrations or downloads, these are now regarded as some of the most qualified and actionable kinds of leads that can be generated. But these are business visitors who have committed enough to give you their contact details and are ready to speak to you. How about the more casual visitors who are interested in reading about your offering or company but perhaps not warmed up enough to fill in any information. Do you have to let these slip through?

Not any more. There are a few very useful applications which not only allow you to track the volume of visitors and their content viewing patterns but also go a step further to help you identify which company those visitors came from which effectively capture potential leads from a simple visit and not necessarily a form fill.  Netfactor’s Visitor Track - Web Leads Technology is one forerunner in this field and helps capture visitors to your company website and also translate which company they are from. Some others include OpenTracker and LeadsExplorer which help identify companies who have been showing an active interest in your website. Although it may not always yield completed data such as the actual visitors name and title if coupled with a data append and lead qualification service, these can be great ways for sourcing more leads which can be nurtured and then developed into actionable business leads.

This is certainly a step in the right direction for marketing automation and online lead generation in making the process more intelligent.

It’s intriguing how marketers are turning to explore new strategies to change their game plan during this time of recession and how blog posts and articles that address this topic are quickly gaining in popularity and demand. As Jon Miller “Sign Of The Times: Marketing In A Recession“ 

For the past two months, the number one post on my blog has been “7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession: The Definitive Guide“.  Originally published in June, what’s really dramatic is how quickly it’s ramped up since September when the crisis really took hold. Take a look at the Google Analytics report:

Put another way, that’s a 1,300% increase in searches, clicks, and page views on that topic in just seven weeks, and yet another way, each and every day more than 35 people are typing “marketing in a recession” into Google and clicking through to read that blog post.

Similarly other blog posts from marketers that tackled the subject right from the first signs of the banking crisis and discussed possible effects as well as solutions for business to business marketers have seen constant search traffic and even increases as teams are re-alligning their strategies to the current global economic conditions. Some of the other related good reads with helpful insight into this are:

• Don’t Cut Marketing In A Recession - Dianna Huff’s MarCom Writer Blog
• 4Ps Of B2B Marketing During Recession - Eddie Choi
• Should I Change My B2B Marketing Strategies During a Recession? - The OneIMS Blog
• Hiring A Lead Generation Team For Less Than One Persons Salary To Beat The Recession Blues - Neil Sequeira / The B2B Marketing Data Management Blog
• Dealing With The Downturn - Kate Maddox 
• When all are pulling back on marketing during recession: take advantage - LeadsExplorer Blog
• Marketing During Recession - Harish B’s Marketing Practices Blog
• Marketing Your Way Through a Recession - John Quelch of the Harvard Business School Blog
• Five Tips For Marketing In Recession - Glen Gow on the MarketingProfs Blog
• Marketing In A Recession - Seth Godin on his blog

Business to business technology marketing has it’s own learning curve and comes with it’s own set of challenges. Likewise, the demands on having the right kind of marketing data for effectively selling specific technology based products and services also vary and a lot based on the nature of what you sell.  If you sell technology to a more generic market like a simple accounting software or document management software its perhaps more straightforward to source data suited to your campaigns simply by determining a market segment, target company size and perhaps revenue. Then ofcourse you need to locate a source for technology decision makers who are broadly responsible for accounting software or document management software. Purchasing a list of technology leads or subscribing to a database of IT decision makers should give you a decent source of potential leads for your CRM and you are good to go. However, when your product or service is depenedent on another technology generic lead sources are just not good enough and you need to be able to qualify your company and contact data much more thouroughly before its ready for your campaigns. With selling products dependent on another technology the market is not as obvious and its absolutely crucial to know whether what technology your target company is using before it can be added to your ecosystem of potential leads. If you’re not doing this, you’re trying to kill a fly with a gatling gun.

Qualification and lead account profiling is the solution to this challange and what does not qualify should not enter the lead pipeline or you will end up with a very inefficient marketing machine. For example, a company selling a salesforce.com appexchange application needs to qualify every target company in their system at the very least for “whether the company is using salesforce CRM”. Further lead profiling for the number of salesforce users in the company and other more specific questions will only improve the quality of the marketing data you are working with and provide you with more to base your approach and message off. Although there is more work involved in qualifying, profiling and building your marketing data more slowly and steadily,  having good data will pay off in the long run as you are building a more qualified base of potential customers rather than going after companies which may turn out to be dead ends.

We have worked with a company previously whose software testing tool is built for companies that use Java, a company whose application performance software works only in data centers that use EMC, a software services company who support only companies who develop in Microsoft .Net and database application company who needed to know if their target companies use Oracle. The common trend is their products depenend on the use of another technology and to build their marketing data they needed target lead profiling and qualification to build better marketing lists for their teams. It needs that extra time and effort but is it worth it? Absolutely!

This last week has been fun trying out an early beta version of Nurture an ‘easy to use’ lead nurturing application. Though there are one or two small bugs to fix since its still in the earlier testing stages and not live for everyone to start using yet, it looks promising and worked well for me. The application is built to be a simplified lead nurturing solution to which leads can be added, you create and schedule email campaigns, define rules for campaigns, track activitiy and score leads based on activity to help identify which of them are sales ready and keep nurturing the remaining. What I liked was its a no-nonsense application which does exactly what it says it will and does it well without the bells and whistles.

I started my campaign by designing a set of email templates which point to a landing page we created specially for this reach out to capture leads. The email templates included different formats and copy for follow-up emails for those who dont open the first one and also different ones to follow up after discussions with sales reps. Once there were setup, I uploaded a small list of target contacts and tagged them with the campaign name by which I could identify them by later. The ‘tagging’ feature is quite a nifty one in the Nurture application and helps being able to associate a set of leads or contacts with a specific word like a campaign name, lead owner etc. I setup the campign which was quite simple and set a rule to send a follow up email within 12 days of a lead not opening the initial introductory email. Once that was set, the campaign was good to go. 

The exciting part is definitely watching the activity stream which is displayed well on the dashboard as well as the activity stream for each individual contact in the Nurture system. It helps you identify which of your target leads opened their email, how many of them clicked through a link on your email, which of them went on to read your website, what pages they went through, which of them went to your landing page and also which of them filled in a form. Based on all this activity, the application scores each lead with a point system and helps you identify what is sales-ready. The rest of them remain in your Nurture cycle and further actions can be set for them.

It was very useful for the smaller campaign that I carried out and I also enjoyed the simplicity of being able to add individual decision maker contacts on the fly without creating a campaign and send out emails to them through the system as an alternative to contacting them through my outlook account which wont let me track what happens next. This application may not rival some of the bigger players in the lead nurturing and marketing automation space but then again it was not meant to. It can be compared to the ‘Basecamp‘ of lead nurturing by being a smart sleek application thats simple, great to use,  does the job and does it without fuss. Though the application is a few weeks from going live, you can drop your email on the main page for an update and an early bird discount so check it out here!

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 

Although most of our custom role based list building is done for business to business sales and marketing purposes for our clients who need to reach out to some very specific decision makers in specific job roles, they are not exclusively the only ones who can benefit from this solution. As we had discovered from earlier experience, a well built custom list of role based executives can be a goldmine for effectively connecting with the right executives for executive management recruiters and headhunters too.

One such project we worked on quite recently was for a financial investments company who were looking to recruit or head hunt some very qualified and exclusive executive management talent from some of the top European investment companies. The executives they were looking to locate were highly specialized in very niche financial product development positions and the exact nature and responsibilities of their work was crucial to their recruitment requirements. Based on this, our team spent time locating these high level executives with these special profiles along with their direct contact details which in turn helped our customers connect with them and discuss their offer without much trouble.

A custom executive list building service really helps cut out a lot of the time consuming groundwork that recruiters and headhunters have to regularly go through. Once the executives that you need to target have been located with contact information, the process of connecting with them and continuing the process is simplified and your productivity will increase significantly. So if you are headhunter or executive management recruiter looking to develop on your database, role based list building is the way to go!  

When any company is looking out for B2B lead sources and especially for a database of companies and key executive contacts, Dun & Bradstreet’s Hoovers Online company database is on everyone’s evaluation list. Having been around for several years and with a comprehensive database of over 23 million companies, its rightly amongst the most widely known online source for company and executive information for business to business marketers. Other than the sheer volume of data that Hoovers maintains, the amount of data on each company ranging from financial figures to locations is very comprehensive and an excellent source for company intelligence which can be useful while targeting them.  

As a business to business lead source, the Hoovers Online database comes with some of the high level executive contacts in each company, some with email addresses and some without. Although they have only high level executive decision makers such as the CEO, President, COO, CIO, VP Finance, Treasurer, VP Human Resources and so on, it can be a good source of leads provided your best target contact is a very high level executive. Hoovers currently offers connectivity to Salesforce CRM and works well to populate your Salesforce account with target companies and high level contacts.

While the Hoovers Online database is an asset to almost any marketing team, if you are on a budget which doesnt suit the subscription fee required to access Hoovers or the business contacts you need are more deep-rooted and more specific roles than the high level key executives it offers, then it may make more sense to use a custom role based list building service like ReadyContacts or evaluate other alternative sources. If these are not constraints, a Hoovers subscription is always a valuable asset to have.

Just the other day we had a call from a potential customer who had a business contact list requirement and called to inquire about how we could help build one for him. The discussion went well and then hit the brakes when he discovered custom role based list building would cost more per lead delivered as compared to buying a single contact from an existing database such as Jigsaw.com or even purchasing a pre packaged contact list. The turning point was a question that hit him right away which was “why should I pay a premium for a custom business contact when I can pay less per contact by purchasing a large list instead?”

There is a difference. When you purchase a list of business contacts you are buying a list that was created based on some criteria and though the costs are lower, you are relying on the fact that some percentage of those contacts will be the right decision makers to receive your marketing message or sales call.  In a custom role based list building effort every account is called into individually and the best decision maker for your message is locatedensuring that you are targeting the right person within your target account. In this respect, short of qualifications based on asking qualifying questions, these contacts are more qualified as leads compared to ready lists or databases and yield higher returns. 

Lets say a company has a CRM software which they need to pitch to potential customers. A custom role based list building service would identify decision makers or key executives within IT who overlook CRM requirements for the company and hence you know you are reaching out to the right person. It takes away part of the ‘trial and error’ aspect associated with a title based list where although the titles maybe along the lines of your potential decision maker, a lot of time and energy may end up being wasted on trying to connect with the wrong decision makers. So while purchased lists and contact databases like Jigsaw are great sources of title based contacts and probably better for a bigger source of volume raw leads, the role based list building option would be worth the premium if you are going for a more focussed, more qualified set of leads where “what the decision maker is responsible for” is important. In our experience, its well worth the premium and the ROI should speak for itself.

Tuesday October 28th 2008 saw the offical launch of LinkedIn applications, possibly the most awaited update from LinkedIn users all over the world. The last update which had a very significant impact on the way users can do business on Linkedin was Linkedin Answers. While LinkedIn has over 30 million registered users and has already been tremendously useful for a lot of us, I believe this the launch of LinkedIn API’s for developers to integrate LinkedIn with their applications and the actual launch of LinkedIn applications will unleash the real potential in the 30 million strong business network. 

So far among the first featured applications familiar players like Wordpress, SlideShare, Google and Amazon have early bird apps for users to add on, it will be interesting to watch and see what applications will hit the list of LinkedIn application platform and leverage the B2B marketing and sales potential for users. Company buzz for example brings the Twitter element by showing you what people are saying about your company, a useful social marketing app. However the question is ‘how could the LinkedIn applications be used to create serious tools for sales and marketing?’. Perhaps connectivity to your CRM could help you read up bios on decision makers within your network and act as a source for contact intelligence while selling into accounts. Perhaps an application that lets you communicate updates on your company blog within your own network or one that lets you share sales intelligence or known requirements to providers. The possibilities are many and its going to be great to see how it all plays out.

Any suggestions or ideas on what you would love to see on Linkedin applications?

If you ask any business to business sales person ‘what is the one problem you face more than anything else and would like to find a solution to?’, they will say hitting voicemail box and spending minutes or even hours without actually getting to speak to a decision maker. In fact we resigned to the fact that the only way to get around this is to have more business contacts and make more calls while keeping your fingers crossed that the decision maker will pick up. I’ve been there myself and its a helpless feeling knowing that if there was a way to get to talk to more decision makers in a day, you would have much better results. So when I learned about a solution developed to tackle exactly this while reading Aaron Ross’ blog post “connectandsell 100x roi in generating pipeline!?” I was thrilled thinking “finally a solution to the voicemail box problem!”

Cold calling is an indispensable part of selling and the biggest impact to its productivity is the low availability of decision makers on the phone and spending a lot of precious selling time simply attempting to connect with them. By filtering out voicemail boxes and connecting sales people directly with decision makers using an innovative system, this is exactly what ConnectAndSell have addressed and solved so that your productivity shoots up and you could get more connected calls delivered through every hour than you would if you had to sift through large business contact lists.

One of the reasons we advocated using customized role based business contact lists for cold calling is the ability to have direct contact numbers and extentions for each of the decision makers located so that you can navigate through departments and gatekeepers and maximize your connectivity with decision makers. The downside is that you can still hit a voicemail. I would imagine building a robust, custom business contacts target list and combining it with a solution like ConnectAndSell would help step up the results from cold calling or teleprospecting by more than 100%. It’s worth checking out!