What are some ways to generate leads with the letter M?

Marketing Plan. Most marketers I talk to do not have a formal, written marketing plan or a demand generation plan. They have a budget, but there is usually not an overall plan to follow. A good marketing plan outlines the objectives and goals the team needs to follow that align with the corporate strategic direction. Things will change throughout the year, but just because you change direction doesn't mean you throw out the map. To drive sustainable revenue growth, your team needs to develop an annual plan with objectives, goals and tactics and then develop key performance indicators and controls to measure your performance. Your plan should be reviewed on a monthly basis with your team. It is too easy to get caught up in the daily grind and forget about all the other things you need to be doing. Sustainable revenue growth companies operate consistently from a plan.

Measurement. How do you measure your marketing performance? Hint: It is not the creative awards, # of impressions, or clicks you get. It is all in financial terms. Your CFO and board only want to know a few things: 1) What is your Revenue per Marketing Spend? For every dollar they give you to spend in marketing, how many dollars in revenue are you returning against that dollar? 2) Lead to Customer Conversion Ratio - How many leads does it take to generate one customer 3) Lifetime value of a customer - how much revenue and referral revenue will a customer produce over its lifetime, and have you stratified these customers into tiers based upon that return? 4) Lead Portfolio - what is the average rate of return per given lead and how much does it cost to take one lead through to a sale. By concentrating on these financial drivers and looking at how much revenue marketing is producing, not the number of leads, you will align your team much better with sales and endear yourself to the Board.

Many of you probably have a stock portfolio or some type of investment plan. Leads need to be looked at in the same way. Not all leads have the same value, risk, or rates of return. To run a sustainable revenue growth operation, you need to have a balanced lead portfolio of varying quality and rate of return. Start by scoring your leads with explicit and implicit criteria. Explicit criteria includes budget, authority, need, timeline and other relevant hard data. Implicit criteria is behavioral - it looks at website visits, content viewed, webinars attended, etc. Together with Explicit criteria, you get a much better picture of your leads. Once you have developed a scoring system, you can assign percentages - 80% and above are A's, 70-80% are B's, etc. Then, using your CRM system you can set up closed loop reports to look at how long A leads have taken before they convert into sales, how long it takes for a B lead to convert to an A, etc. In this way, you start developing a much more multi-faceted approach to evaluating lead performance. Your CFO will be very open to discussing this with you, and you will be on your way from talking about Marketing as an expense to Marketing as an investment.

Today we explore several different ways to create demand with the letter “L”.

Lead Scoring. Not all leads are created equal. In many cases, inbound leads are being sent directly to the sales team. Whether they are web to lead, or call to lead, sales teams are inundated with a large quantity of requests. From marketing’s standpoint, this is typically considered good, but from sales it isn’t because the majority of those requests are not sales-ready leads. Enter lead scoring. Lead scoring is the process of automatically qualifying and screening inbound requests for the purposes of determining which requests are really leads and which ones aren’t. The sales ready leads are usually then sent either to the sales team or to an inside sales/telemarketing function for further qualification. Leads that are not ready to buy are held back in an incubation or nurturing program, until they exhibit signs of buying behavior. Lead scoring works by reducing the overall number of opportunities, but increasing the conversion rate, shortening the sales cycle, increasing average deal size and increasing overall revenue. The analogy is simple: give salespeople high quality at-bats, and more often than not will knock it out of the park. Lead scoring works best when you marry both explicit data such as budget, authority, need and timeline with implicity behavior such as website visits, downloads, and webinars attended.

Lead Nurturing. Lead Nurturing, Lead Incubation, Lead Harvesting is the process of continuously marketing to leads that are not sales ready. Many times after sales disqualifies a lead, it falls into a black abyss. Or worse, marketing spends more money and time to reacquire the same lead over and over again. With lead nurturing, you use marketing automation to leverage channels such as email, direct mail, microsites and telemarketing to send a continous series of messaging to your prospects. When the prospects display buying behavior, they are then routed to a salesperson for follow-up.

Linking. Linking is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and optimize your position in search engine rankings. Identify complementary partners, associations, industry boards and other websites where it would make sense to have a link pointing back to your site. You then reciprocate. You have now turned the power of the web to your advantage by leveraging everyone else’s position to amplify your own. This is easy to do and very cost-effective.

List Acquisition. Ideally, you want to grow your house list organically. But sometimes, it does make sense to acquire a list if you are just starting out or entering a new market. There are a number of good list brokers out there. Do your homework and try to use as much criteria as you can to build a highly targeted and relevant list. Keep in mind that even the best lists will never be more than 80% accurate due to shifting patterns. Leverage off-shore calling centers for a few bucks per call to validate the names on the list and obtain email permission (usually about 20% of the time).

Knowledge Center. One of the best things you can do for your visitors and customers is to provide them with a central place to acquire knowledge and make informed decisions. Over 70% of B2B Decision Makers are now doing their primary research over the Internet. Why should they go to other sites when you can provide them everything in one destination. You can use RSS Syndication to bring in relevant content that is complimentary to your offerings and add them into the Knowlege Center. Intersperse this with your own white papers, interviews, podcasts, analyst briefings, tools, benchmarks, research and anything else relevant to help your buyers make a more informed decision. Consider gating your content. For simply supplying their email address, visitors can get access to good content that is valuable. For filling out a more detailed form that better profiles their buying intentions, you give them access to even higher value content. This will also signal to your sales team which prospects are showing much more serious buying behavior and they can then prioritize their time.

Stay tuned for the letter “L”

Today we look at the letter “J”.

Join Professional and Trade Associations. As part of your lead generation strategy, you should map out all trade groups and associations that your target profile would be actively a part of. Look for niche organizations and other associations that your competitors wouldn’t necessarily be a part of. As you expand your sales and marketing teams, ensure that you have a local membership in every region that you have field personnel. Rather than just joining, consider offering your services as a board member. Many of these organizations are starving for people to help them out. A lot of times it is as simple as asking to be on the Board or to run a committee. Once on the board, you will have access to a much better network, and at events, attendees will seek you out rather than the other way around. If you can’t find a suitable association that meets your needs, how about starting your own? You get to call the shots and control the players and content. This is one of the most powerful ways to network. Why sit in the back of the room and fight everyone else for a valuable contact when you can stand up front and have people come to you?

Stay tuned for the letter “K”

Today we look at Incubation, also known as Lead Nurturing or Lead Harvesting. The challenge for most marketers, is what happens to the leads after the pass them off to sales. Many times, these leads fall into the abyss, never to be heard from again. Worse is when the marketing team spends more money and campaign resources to reacquire the same lead again and again.

Incubation takes leads that are not ready for sales and keeps them warm with a series of marketing messages over a period of time. Then, when the lead exhibits signs of buying behavior, marketing can move the lead back over to sales. Incubation can consist simply of a series of emails or phone calls over a fixed period of time. More experienced marketers use multiple channels such as direct mail and personalized landing pages to vary the pace and content of the incubation period. You will need a marketing automation platform to accomplish this on any type of scale. Companies such as Eloqua, Vtrenz, Pardot and Loopfuse all have technology that can deliver the goods to varying degree. Incubation ensures that all leads get followed up on and your conversion rates will be higher down the line.

Stay tuned for the letter “J”

Today we look at Hosted Wiki’s.

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is a group-editable website. Wikis are composed of web pages you can write on, enabling fast and easy collaboration. It’s as easy to use as email. You might be familiar with www.wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia. Wiki’s allow users to have socially revelant and contextual conversations. How does this help you build demand for your products and services? Hosting your own wiki around relevant industry information allows professionals within your space to network and collaborate with each other around specific topics. When you host the wiki, you have access to that network and are also viewed as a thought leader. People that end up using your wiki will be much more highly qualified than someone that just fills out a form for more information on your website. There are a number of free wiki tools out there like www.pbwiki.com, www.wetpaint.com and www.wikispaces.com. They are easy to set up and maintain and are also highly optimized by the search engines. Consider staring your own wiki today.