A better way to ensure leads get treated--and routed--appropriatelyCategory Archives: Demand Creation

ROI or MQL – Where’s your focus?

marketing ROI focus
marketing ROI focus

Following the ROI path can be more difficult–but ultimately more rewarding. (photo via growmap.com)

In reading the latest headlines and watching the trends in direct response marketing, it seems to me that the marketing world is, much to its own detriment, focused on a “More is Better” approach when it comes to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) production.

I have talked with several marketers who have spent large amounts of capital on Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) investments and months perfecting lead scoring algorithms to end up with parades thrown in their honor because of the large number of MQLs they were able to produce.

Inevitably, however, there comes a time when the confetti falls and someone in Finance or the C-suite wants to justify and quantify all that marketing spend…and they come calling for the marketing ROI reports that show all those MQLs actually went somewhere meaningful and led to more closed business.

It reminds me of my first sales manager who said that if I only made more dials I would generate more sales. It did not take me long to realize that one had no direct correlation to the other – I learned that making the right dials produced more sales.

MAPs (in the right hands) can do wonderful things to create demand, uncover demand, and find demand – but at the end of the day, is it the right demand? Are the right people at the right accounts actually converting to the MQLs you’re proudly handing off to Sales?

Human intelligence and intervention is key to vetting MQLs as actually having the potential for ROI (more on this in our Lead Scoring whitepaper). Your cost per MQL may rise a bit, but just as my old sales manager learned, the ticker tape parades last longer when the result produced is the right result.

Defining Your Total Addressable Market

One of the first, and most important things, we do with our customers is work to define their Total Addressable Market (TAM): the accounts that make up the desired audience.

Although this sounds incredibly simple and obvious, many fall down on actually defining and leveraging the right TAM (leading to lots of finger-pointing between the marketing and technology groups about the database). It’s important to go beyond typical attributes (companies who might want to buy what you sell and a handful of key titles) to flesh out the exact titles, departments, and roles of influencers and decision makers; analyze where your competition is targeting its messaging; and subsequently laying out various messaging tracks accordingly. Without defining the TAM, it’s almost impossible to accurately assess if you have the right data–or determine what additional data you need to purchase to fill critical gaps. 

To define your Total Addressable Market, you will want to ask yourself: 

  • What titles are likely to have a pain I can solve?
    • Who are the Economic Decision Makers?
    • Who are the Technical Buyers?
    • Who are the End Users?
  • When looking beyond the contact to the entire account, where do I find the right accounts that need what I have?
    • What industries do I want to target?
    • What geographies do I want to go after?
    • How big are my ideal accounts?
    • What attributes does an account need to have? (A certain fleet size? Remote workforce of 100+ employees?)

Answering these questions will prepare you to accurately assess the current state of your data (either through a lot of spreadsheet madness or a third party resource). Ever heard the phrase “Junk in, Junk out”? This is where the rubber will meet the road and you’ll be able to determine if you have what you need. The sad truth for any marketer is that if your data doesn’t match your TAM (i.e., the people your sales reps want to ultimately talk to), you’ll spend a lot of time and money on the wrong people.

In a future blog post I will discuss why addressing the Total Addressable Market is important and how you can fully leverage it.
 

Meeting Basic Expectations

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‘Twas a week before Christmas and my inbox was jammed,

With offers and coupons for sweaters and ham.

When what to my wandering eyes should appear,

But an email that brought to my eyes a small tear.

It was from [Name Redacted], my favorite store,

And offered me deals to end the Xmas shopping chore.

Although they have all the items I like,

I can only buy in-store and it just ain’t worth the hike.

When I’ve been driven to rhyming, you know it must be bad. Like you, I probably received 836 emails today with holiday shopping offers. Unlike you, I still have a lot of holiday shopping to mark off the list (at least I hope this is unlike you anyway – there’s nothing worse than scrambling to finish up when there are 5 days to go) so I am all about anyone that can send me a compelling deal and still get it to me before next Tuesday.

An email from one of my two favorite department stores arrived today and it intrigued me enough to actually open it as it was offering 40% off. “Perfect!” I thought. “Now I can finish my shopping at a one-stop shop and get the last gifts I need!”

And then I actually read for comprehension and realized it was in-store only. If you’re anything like me, you would give almost anything, pay almost any shipping cost, go to almost any sketchy third-party site just to avoid having to go to the mall (look at what happened to me last time I tried). And most vendors have caught onto this–especially those who know that if they’re sending an email in the late morning on a workday, they’re pretty likely to reach someone who cannot readily drop by their storefront.

It’s simple really–in addition to meeting your prospects where they are with the right content at the right time (all checks in the “Yes” column for this department store), you have to meet basic expectations. I think it’s pretty obvious that from Thanksgiving to New Year, people want ease. Sure there are some who will nearly kill themselves to take advantage of a Black Friday sale, but a lot of us just want to get the holiday shopping rigmarole done as efficiently as possible.

Although this is a B2C story, it translates easily into the B2B space, particularly when you consider that B2B customers are acting more and more like consumers. Expectations for usability, versatility, and availability are high. If you’re not meeting prospects and customers where they are with the solutions they need, how can you have any hope of making a sale? Getting someone interested is only part of the equation–giving them the right next step is even more important.

Don’t take my word for it though–look at what your competitors are doing. The email in question came within seconds of three other emails from retailers promising I could find great deals online and get free or cheap shipping to receive by Christmas. If your customers expect it and your competitors offer it, guess who’s going to win every time?

File courtesy Arcadia University

Closing the Loop

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After I wrote my post last week about the importance of putting the customer first, I decided to subject myself to the a place where I hoped for a great customer experience and was greeted with one of the worst.

OppSource Holiday Gifts

A better kind of holiday shopping – my “sleigh” filled with gifts for OppSource’s
Adopt-a-Family

To be fair, it is that magical time of year when store clerks are over-worked and on their very last nerves. I honestly don’t expect stellar customer service at the mall between Thanksgiving and the New Year but I was especially surprised during this recent visit. I was at a very large national department store that shall remain nameless and knew exactly what I needed. I walked up to three salespeople who were standing at a register, sorting through some inventory. When I asked for help, they all looked at each other and then one spoke up to tell me that they all really had to focus on this inventory project before the upcoming Friends and Family Sale and could not step away.

I asked, “So, due to a Friends and Family Sale I’m treated like neither and can’t get any help in completing a purchase?”

They all looked at me blankly before one of the clerks sighed and told me she “supposed” she could step away to help me locate the item. How very magnanimous. (Right after she helped me, another customer asked her a question (the nerve!) and she gave me a conspiratorial eye-roll that seemed to say, “Customers! Am I right?!”)

As I fumed out of the store I ranted to myself that this was unacceptable and would never fly in the B2B world. We have automation for that! Everyone always gets what they need in a timely manner! Inquiries are never ignored!

And then I thought twice…and realized this happens more than we’d like to admit. Even with the best of intentions, workflows, and automation platforms, more often than not, prospects do not get what they need, even when they explicitly ask for it. Part of this is a smarketing alignment problem between that critical hand-off from Marketing to Sales, but a lot of it happens long before a hand-off occurs and is due to not having the right content, resources, or processes in the right hands. Some things to consider:

  • Who is most likely to interface with basic inquiries? What training and resources does this person need? Access to a resource library? Advanced scripting?
  • How is an inquiry most likely to contact you? If you have a click-to-chat feature on your site, does it say during which hours it’s available (including time zone)? Do most inquiries come via phone, email, web, or social media? How are you staffing these entry points?
  • What do inquiries usually want to know? And what the heck do you do with someone who asks a tough question? Make sure your front lines are equipped to answer questions on the spot or know how to immediately escalate a question that cannot be easily answered.

This last thought is the most important. At the end of the day, it all comes back to supporting your brand. If interested prospects can’t meet their basic inquiry needs, why in the world would they want to but something from you? Personally, I told at least five friends, four colleagues and a handful of family members about my horrible experience at the unnamed department store–don’t open yourself up to this kind of negativity. Be ready to close the conversation loop with every inquiry that comes your way.

The Art of the Concierge Approach

Tokyo12

Deciding to try something new for Thanksgiving this year, my husband and I spent ten days in Tokyo visiting family. This was my first time in Asia and I was completely taken with the city and culture I found in Japan. One of the things that impressed me the most was the graciousness of the Japanese people. They were unfailingly courteous and attentive, especially in transactional situations. It’s not atypical for a clerk to escort you out of the building at the end of your purchase and carry your package to the door before thanking you profusely and sending you on your way. Truly, this is how service is done.

Tokyo by night

Tokyo by night

The more I experienced such exemplary service, the more I came to realize it’s exactly like the concierge approach that we talk about all the time here at OppSource: the idea of completely devoting yourself to a prospect’s moment-of-interest in order to guide him to the appropriate next step. It sounds obvious, but many companies do a poor job of this–they get someone on the hook (by phone, over email, even in person), and their instinct is to push the sale instead of taking the opportunity to really understand what the prospect is looking for or interested in. Sometimes, the prospect just has a simple question and if your answer is to send a product brochure instead of asking thoughtful follow-up questions (and actually listening to the response), you’re missing a potentially greater opportunity.

If you learn best by example, take it from the Japanese:

  • A smile goes a long way. I was constantly greeted with a smile in Tokyo and you know what it did? It made me smile right back.  Lesson: Good moods go a long way. Even over email or chat, cheerfulness counts.
  • Pet the ego. Between the bowing and the smiling and the attentive graciousness, I felt like nothing short of royalty in Japan. Lesson: While you don’t have to fawn all over your prospect, remember that you’re interacting because they have a need right now–keep the focus on who they are and what they need, not what you can sell them.
  • To the bitter end. As I glanced back at the Narita airport after our plane was backed out from the gate and onto the tarmac, I noticed that the ground crew had stopped what they were doing and were waving good-bye to the plane. Lesson: Always say good-bye. Whether it’s walking a prospect out the front door or ending a phone or email conversation with well wishes, don’t forget to finish the transaction memorably and warmly.

More than anything, the concierge approach is the most effective way to ensure a positive experience with your brand. Even if you never make a sale, making an impression can be just as valuable.

When Leads Aren’t Leads

A great discussion that came out of our smarketing alignment workshop the other week was one centered on semantics, specifically around the term “lead” which we all agreed is quite possibly the most over- and mis-used term in B2B demand generation. 

“Lead” has become the default term for someone who is interested in buying from you. There are a myriad of vendors and services that will promise to deliver leads to your door. Sounds good but what does this really mean? Does the contact have a budget? Some authority to influence a buying decision? A need that matches what you sell?

In most cases, what you’re actually receiving in these situations is an inquiry (or a hand-raise or a suspect depending on your terminology preference). These are not the leads your Sales team wants to work because a responder with a cursory interest is probably not someone who is ready to talk to Sales. Handing these leads over only  diminishes credibility between your Marketing and Sales groups and can lead to nasty blame-games when pipeline reviews roll around.

If you’re in Marketing, I feel for you. I know you want to throw up your hands in the air and ask some omniscient being how you know what Sales really wants. How do you put a box around a lead so that you’re delivering something that will actually receive follow-up? It’s actually easier than you might think. It’s easy to get wrapped around the axle with complex if-then scenarios for lead qualification. My recipe for a lead is this:

A lead is whatever Sales says it is.

Some Marketers don’t like to hear it put like this. They don’t want to give the impression they’re sitting at Sales’ feet peeling grapes and awaiting further instruction but it’s actually more empowering than you’d think at first glance because it shifts some critical ownership back to Sales. When Sales sticks its neck out to say “This is what I reasonably expect and when I get what I reasonably expect, I will accept and work the lead”, everybody wins. Sales has articulated its requirements and Marketing has a guiding outline that also serves as a fall-back.

It’s never a bad time to review your lead requirements, but especially as we slingshot into the end of the year, it’s a great time to look at what’s in your system and your upcoming demand generation plans and take a hard look at how you’re cataloging leads today so that you can do it better tomorrow.

P.S. – Because you know we live and breathe smarketing love, I’d like to  note that this post was a collaborative effort between myself and Marshall Gage from our Sales team.

Listen to Your Computer Screen

Don’t worry, this is not a post about hardware diagnostics (my fix-it strategy: Force Quit, Restart, Pray.), but rather about data assessment.

It took me a long time to learn  that assessing (truly analyzing, not giving a cursory glance) campaign data is required, not optional. Seems obvious, right? I agree. However, I am continually amazed when I hear fellow marketeers justify poor campaign results as being the prospect’s fault: the prospect didn’t understand the collateral she downloaded, the prospect would have understood the message if she’d been in the right role, the prospect didn’t realize she needed product X instead of product Y, etc.

As marketers, we have to accept that our job is getting the right message to the right person at the right time. Not every campaign or piece of collateral will be a winner, of course, but honestly assessing campaign data and responding to what it tells you is the only way to find and leverage the winners. Your dead-end prospect isn’t going to drop you an email to say that the message she read didn’t quite trip her trigger (oh if only!), but your data will.

If you look at results and only see excuses as to why a certain tactic didn’t work, you’ll never improve your campaigns or your marketing acumen. Listen to your computer screen and do what it tells you.

The Demand Gen Dead-End

For my inaugural post, I thought it was fitting to write about something near and dear to my heart (and career)–demand generation.

I still remember the first time I was asked if I could handle demand generation within a field marketing group. Like any good marketer who had no idea what this really entailed, I said “Sure!” and started asking everyone around me (including Google) what this really meant. As you can imagine, my first attempts to actually ‘generate demand’ were well-intentioned but not very successful. In fact, I was finding myself at a demand gen dead-end. I thought I had great multi-touch campaigns and offers (landing pages! content marketing offers! telephone follow-up!), but was finding MarketingSherpa’s estimation that 70-90% of marketing-generated leads are never followed-up by sales ringing woefully true.

About this time I got a new manager who was (and is) an incredible mentor and she distilled it for me thusly: “Demand gen is about keeping Sales happy. They need to buy in to everything we do or it isn’t worth our time.”

Bingo. This is what I was missing. Instead of starting with the Sales team and asking them what they considered a lead, what they needed in order to actually spend time following-up, what they were hearing most frequently from customers and prospects, I was starting with myself. So I backtracked. I had a kick-off meeting with Sales to pitch my campaigns and get their feedback. I sent out revised campaign language and prospect personas afterwards and then had weekly meetings to talk through the leads that were hitting the system to hear what was and wasn’t a fit so that I could keep tailoring appropriately. Finally, I was getting somewhere. My leads actually got worked and, perhaps even better, I got real feedback about how to make my efforts more successful.

I won’t pretend it was all sunshine and rainbows from this point forward–what fun would it be if there wasn’t a little sales and marketing tension?–but it definitely helped both teams bring a little more smarketing love to our field group and helped me learn the all-important lesson that sales and marketing have to be in sync if you actually want your demand gen efforts to not end up in a dead-end.