Posted by JasonB on February 11, 2010
A Dedicated Account Manager
In order to successfully connect with a prospect, you need one Account Manager dedicated to developing a business-to-business relationship with them.
Outsourcing your B2B lead generation to a firm that uses dedicated Account Managers will dramatically increase the effectiveness of the campaign by developing one-on-one relationships with prospects.
Using multiple sales representatives to contact the same prospect runs the risk of losing potential partnerships, as the prospect will get the impression they’re being passed around your organization with little concern about them personally.
Collaterals That Stand Out
B2B decision makers aren’t always available by phone, and if they are they may not have time to speak with you.
It is imperative to consistently maintain contact with prospects. In cases where the decision maker is unavailable, you must have relevant collaterals on hand [such as videos, emails, and quality direct mail pieces] that can be delivered by a dedicated account manager through a variety of formats.
Prospects are receiving information from many of your competitors, which means your company’s collaterals must stand out to cut through the clutter. Standard html emails and voicemails can get buried amongst your competitor’s collaterals.
Effective Nurture Program
Outsourcing to a firm with effective nurture programs is essential in advancing any area of B2B lead generation. It allows a continuous and structured flow of communication, but should vary based on a prospect’s disposition.
Historically, 85%-95% of outgoing phone calls will not result in a live connect, and those who are reached may not yet be in the market for new business-to-business relationships. No matter the situation, even if the prospect won’t be in the buying cycle for 6 months, the nurturing program must communicate to the prospect accordingly.
The Account Manager will be delivering messages to the prospect to maintain awareness over an extended period of time. Outsourcing to a firm who tailors each nurture program according to the prospect’s disposition ensures your company will be in the forefront of the prospect’s mind when they enter the buying cycle.
The Result: an increased Return on Investment
Posted by JasonB on October 6, 2009
Sales success starts with finding the key decision maker at an organization you want to do business with. You have to be talking to the right person. Typically, that person is the one who has the authority to choose vendors or has the responsibility to evaluate and recommend vendors to use.
Having found the right person, you now need to establish a meaningful dialogue with them. If all you sales resources have is a list of names, it’s difficult to know where to begin. A good lead generation process should provide your sales resources with insights into a prospect and their organization.
There are many types of information that are critical:
Qualifying Information – Is a prospect a good fit? Your database should be designed to capture information that helps determine the fit of a prospective client and give your sales resource a starting point to understanding that prospect’s needs. How many employees to they have? What is their annual budget? Who is their current supplier? Etc… With this knowledge, a sales resource can tailor information to a prospect that better illustrates how your company can fill a specific need or overcome an issue the prospect is having.
Anecdotal Information – Is the prospect buried in their current workload? Are they trying to get through next year’s budget planning? Are they having issues with their current supplier? Good written notes, observations, or insights are invaluable in getting a better understanding of the current mindset of a prospect. With this, a good sales resource can make sure they are helping a prospect out and not contributing to their current set of issues. A good lead generation database will be structured to capture significant, relevant notes in an organized, concise fashion.
Voice Recordings – What better way to determine a prospect’s interest level or the severity of the issues their facing, then to hear it in his or her voice. Look for a lead generation service that can provide you with recordings of the calls between their operators and your prospects. Not only does it provide you with valuable insight into a prospect, but it also allows you to audit the quality of the lead generation service, and ensure that you company is being represented in a professional, high quality manner.
Having available the types of information referenced above can mean the difference between success and failure. The more insight your sales resource has into a prospect, the more likely they are to understand the issues or opportunities facing that prospect and be able to custom design the right solution for the right time.
Good luck, and good selling!
Posted by JasonB on July 28, 2009
What is the most effective use of your sales resources? Is it generating B2B leads, closing new prospects or working with existing customers?
Consider the following:
- On average, salespeople spend about 20% of their time selling. The remaining 80% consists of prospecting, servicing existing clients and administrative duties. This means you’ve got a highly skilled and highly compensated individual spending 20% of their time doing what they do best.
- To secure 1 new client, the average salesperson usually needs to pursue 100 suspects (potential, yet unqualified targets, a.k.a., cold leads).
- A minimum of 6.7 “touches” are required to maintain “top of mind” awareness with potential customers.
- Key decision makers are frequently unknown…someone must spend time/effort identifying & qualifying each target.
The answer is that your sales resources should focus their time and effort on CLOSING new business and working with existing customers, while a dedicated prospecting resource should focus on identifying, qualifying and verifying leads for your sales team. Having a dedicated prospecting resource, whether internal our outsourced, can have a dramatic impact on your filling your sales funnel with B2B leads and the amount of business your sales team closes.
Generating qualified B2B leads is a numbers game, as is closing them. If a salesperson must talk to 100 suspects to generate one new client, then it would follow that to generate 10 new clients, 1000 suspects must be contacted. Assuming it may take 2-5 calls to reach that prospect, you’re looking at thousands of calls to secure 10 new clients. That is a lot of activity. In fact, it can be a full time job.
A resource focused solely on prospecting can manage that number of prospects, if they have a structured process. Their time needs to be spent on 3 primary activities: Identifying/cleansing prospects, making an initial introduction, and nurturing qualified leads. Any time a prospect shows interest throughout this process, they can be passed to the sales team to follow up.
This division-of-duties will:
- Increase the amount of leads in your sales funnel
- Allow your salespeople to focus their skills on legitimate opportunities
- Ensure leads that are a fit for your service, but not ready to talk, continue to receive communication until they enter the buying cycle.
Assuming your sales closing rate remains constant, calculate how many new opportunities your prospecting resource must generate to pay for themselves. If you have a process in place whereby your prospecting resource can achieve those numbers, you have the makings of a powerful new-business acquisition team.
As always, please subscribe to our blog for future posts about B2B lead generation and developing new business.
Posted by JasonB on July 8, 2009
When new clients learn that we incorporate direct mail into our Integrated Pipeline Management Process to generate leads, they almost always ask “does direct mail still work?”
Every month our company gets 1-3 inquires from our direct mail efforts. We get about the same for our clients. And, we really don’t send out very much mail.
Direct mail does work, but how?
Right Target
Prior to sending anything to a target organization, it is critical to identify who within that organization makes the buying decision. The days of sending a letter to “Dear Marketing Manager” are over. If you’re not sending your marketing materials to a key decision maker, you’re wasting your resources.
Letters should be from a person, to a person. Placing a cleansing call to your target organization, or even using LinkedIn, can help identify your prospect prior to sending a letter.
A quick note: Sadly, this economic environment has forced significant corporate changes. Very likely, a decision maker that worked at an organization last year may no longer be in that capacity. If your mailing list has not been cleansed in over 6 months, you have a good chance of sending a letter to a vacant office.
Right Message
If you find a decision maker, the next step is to tailor a message that stands out from your competition. Although this sounds like a no-brainer, we often see messages that revolve more around corporate successes than they do about solving a specific pain-point.
Visiting blogs used by your target audience can shed light on what areas of pain are being felt, and how they are being discussed. Observe what terms are being used, and mimic those in your message. This will create the perception that you understand their business.
Right Timing
You never know where your targets look for information – one letter is not enough. Because timing is so important, follow up with phone calls and email. Personally, I use the internet and email so much, that letters addressed to me actually stands out more than an email. I think that’s becoming more common. But letters should rarely be back-to-back touches. In other words, if you send a letter to a prospect, send an email as your next touch. If you don’t have a prospects email address, at least send a different type of letter, such as a case study, for your next touch. By changing your message and media type, it will make each touch stand out that much more.
But most of all, stay in touch – just because someone doesn’t respond to initial mail, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re not interested or a good target. Once you’ve identified a decision maker, and created a relevant message, it should be fairly easy to stay in touch.
Follow these methods, and you’ll send far less mail, with better results.
Posted by JasonB on May 29, 2009
In a previous posting, we talked about the general appropriateness of Pipeline Management and Web Marketing in B2B applications. The question you may now have, however, is what component of each will provide the best results for my organization?
How you answer the following questions will help you decide which combination will generate new customers for your business:
Does your industry have long or short contracts?
Some industries live and die by long contracts. Others seem to switch vendors at will. If your industry has a long, complex contract cycle, then the prospecting and nurturing components of Pipeline Management, combined with web video, will work best for you. Prospect to identify decision makers and contract-due dates. Once these individuals and dates are found, switch to a less intense nurture program, placing compelling messaging (web video, for example) in front of those prospects at appropriate intervals throughout their contract term. This will help you stay top of mind with the right person.
If your industry has no contracts or vendor turnover is common, Web Marketing, including social media, will allow you cast your net in the right pond to find prospects. In a world without long-term contracts, businesses are in the “search phase” of the buying cycle more often. This means they’re online, searching around, often looking for peer input about a solution. You need to ensure your business is present during this frequent searching phase. You can do that in a few ways. One way is to publish a blog, which should be aimed at dispensing useful, relevant information that benefits your target audience. The buyer wants to be in control of the vendor/prospect conversation and the more you can place them in the driver seat by providing highly relevant information, the greater the chances they will engage with you.
Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click will also work well in the no-contract environment. The frequency in which your audience is looking for a new vendor or solution should directly impact the amount of resources you allocate to being found online. Key word searches and social network monitoring can help you identify how often people search for what you offer.
Do you know your prospects, or still searching for businesses that could buy what you sell?
Simply put, if you know who you’re going after, life is easier and less expensive for B2B companies. The farther you get from the decision maker at a business that could use your service, the more complex things become.
Even with social media, in B2B marketing, the goal is to add targets to your list of qualified prospects.
If you have a list of companies that could use your service or know the profile of a company that could use your services, Pipeline Management is the quickest solution. If your Pitch-to-Close ratio is high enough whereby you can afford a fulltime prospecting resource, go for it. Granted, the better the prospecting resource, the lower your overall cost per sale.
Recognizing that most companies fall somewhere between, I’m going to touch on the other end of the spectrum. Let’s say there are thousands of companies that are a fit for your product/service. Almost every major city could have dozens or hundreds of prospects. If this situation resembles your organization, your first step is to profile your best existing clients. Go after companies like them, using prospecting, in every viable market. Only cherry-pick with prospecting. The rest of your resources should be allocated toward web marketing, as hundreds of decision makers could be entering the buying cycle any given month. It may take you a while to find that person using prospecting, but you can find where that prospect will go to find information online. Identify what industry portals, blogs, forums, and keywords your prospects are using, and place compelling, useful content in their path.
Large vs. Small Value of Client
How much is a new client worth to your company? $10,000 annually? $100,000? Pipeline Management provides direct contact between an organization and a prospect. However, with larger buying decisions, decision makers are searching for peer opinions and input online more than ever. Statistically, peer blogs and industry web sites are used more frequently than corporate websites to gather information about a solution.
If your product or service requires a significant investment from a prospect, then you need to focus more of your resources on web marketing, as again, your prospect will be spending more of their time online, collecting information prior to making a decision. Publishing a corporate blog would be important in this situation, but also participating on other industry blogs and forums will be critical for gaining exposure and credibility. The more industry related sites displaying input from your company, the better.
Web video, the fastest growing social media segment, can be a great tool for companies selling to prospects that have a low annual value. Web video can be paid for once, and then used indefinitely at no charge. It often has no, or very low, delivery cost. It also has a much higher response rate than more traditional marketing pieces. With this tool, companies can present a compelling message to thousands of prospects for very little cost.
Please keep in mind, the scenarios above may not be applicable to all businesses. Every business and industry is unique, and some marketing tools may work better than others in certain situations. That being said, remember this; Step 1 in your decision process of what marketing program to use for your organization should always be to identify your potential buyer, and where they look for information to help assist them in their job. Step 2…put a compelling message in that spot!
Good luck. Comments are always welcome.
