Today’s B2B Marketers are inundated with the hype cycle promoting more marketing cowbell. There are literally thousands of messages daily that promote new marketing automation software technology as the silver bullet that will solve all their ills. But the truth of the matter is, B2B marketers don’t need more silver bullets or more cowbells, what they need are more qualified leads that are sales ready. Realizing this ultimate business objective requires rethinking the lead management process that most B2B organizations have in place today. Simply capturing leads, automatically scoring them, and automatically flipping them off to sales as qualified leads is a huge mistake for B2B marketers. With sales teams under increased pressure of bigger quotas, fewer declared sales cycles, and smaller average deal sizes, they simply don’t have time to pursue anything except “qualified sales-ready opportunities.”
Getting more of those requires tight alignment between sales and marketing and requires each organization to break-down the functional boundaries that artificially separate them. Marketing must develop processes and put people in place that take raw inquiries and vet them against their target market’s buying journey profile...

• Are the inquiries with the right role?
• Are the inquiries even in their ideal target market?

Most of the time, this “vetting” can only take place with a voice-to-voice (V2V) engagement. Short-cutting these engagements takes Moment of Interest (MOI) follow up processes and techniques.
Here is what I mean by Moment of Interest – Studies were conducted in the past few years at MIT Sloan to determine the optimal telephone follow-up period for B2B leads. What they found is that the optimal window for phone follow up is within the first 16 minutes of a prospect’s online activity (email click-through or inbound opt-in). Here at OppSource, we advocate making the investments in the lead management process and operational design to accommodate this level Moment of Interest (MOI) follow up. Our own data suggests that connect rates are 9 times greater when our clients adhere to a 15 minute SLA for lead follow up. How would you rate your organization’s ability to design a lead management process that ensures raw inquiry follow-up within 16 minutes of their digital engagement?

Want to put more MOI in your lead management process, click on the link below and we’ll engage you at your Moment of Interest.

connect@oppsource.com
 

Just as important as sales and marketing alignment is the team requirement for sales people to 'accept' or 'reject' leads produced by marketing. This is a pivotal activity that must happen, according to industry analyst firm Sirius Decisions, within 3 to 24 hours. The proper systems and processes must be set up on the back end to properly code reasons for acceptance and rejection with a click of a mouse with the opportunity to add more commentary. Sales should want and be excited to deliver feedback. Creating this culture will help marketing deliver better qualified leads continuously, resulting in more revenue and success for all.

It is enough to start with a non-systems powered process to just get this initiative off the ground, but integrating it into where salespeople live, their CRM system and its related mobile applications is critical for long term success. Marketing and sales is now a closely knit team - neither can succeed if they walk alone.

Often, much like CRM, marketing automation administration is lumped into someone's day job - just another task on a list. However true lead nurturing and lead generation is a hour to hour, day to day activity that needs its own focus and attention. Some companies outsource the personnel and expertise, or even the entire process (like OppSourcing) to gain economies of scale. Other companies let their lead generation and nurturing plan fall down as new priorities shift into place. Many execute well.

With any marketing automation and lead nurturing / generation strategy, you need the right system, people and process to drive success. Many outsource it - should you? That should be a wide and deep conversation as sales and marketing align.

Renowned Psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the phrase “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” in the 1960’s. This is certainly true today for the marketing automation software vendors. With all the data suggesting that lead scoring or the lack thereof is a problem, then all you need is marketing automation software and it’s fixed – right? Wrong!!

Today’s marketing automation software is architected around contacts not accounts. Unfortunately, in the B2B world, it’s accounts that actually buy things. Thus, lead scoring all the contacts that respond to digital-based marketing messages does not help create more qualified leads for B2B sales professionals. Closing the gap on this requires finding the right influencers and decision makers in the accounts and then having conversations with them to identify their objectives, pain points, motivations for change, etc. With these critical pieces of intelligence in hand, a lead can be properly scored and qualified into sales ready or not.

All of this requires human intervention in the lead management process. As inquiries generated by marketing are augmented with new contacts through conversations, referrals and research, the collection of interactions both digital and conversational make their way into bona-fide sales leads. Only when these personal contacts and interactions occur can a lead be effectively qualified and handed off to sales as sales-ready opportunities. If you would like to learn more about our best practices in lead management, download our white paper “Six Pillars to an Effective Lead Management Program.”
 

Deliberate actions should score higher than forced reactions. What I mean by forced reactions is making someone choose a pick-list value or enter free text to proceed to the asset page. How many times have you just "picked whatever" in order to get through the form gate? No process is ever completely perfect, but you can count on the fact if a prospect proactively chooses the asset they want, not only will they fill out the form more accurately (I want that piece, I better give a real email address), but you can also bank that they are more interested than others who don't exactly know what to expect from your resource library.

I also have started following a new blogger, John Cook, who has a storied career in B2B marketing.  John is a fresh new face to the B2B blogging scene and brings some incredibly valuable insights.  One of his recent posts discusses several reasons why a "ready-shoot-aim" approach to Social Media is a bad mix.  The market realities that John points out are certainly unavoidable and are the drivers behind the gold-rush to Social Media.  

I challenge all of us to think about how we can rise above simply posting our self-proclaiming PR to our respective Social Media Channels.  Instead, why not bring a little thought leadership to the problems our firms solve.  Just Sayin.  

I also have started following a new blogger, John Cook, who has a storied career in B2B marketing.  John is a fresh new face to the B2B blogging scene and brings some incredibly valuable insights.  One of his recent posts discusses several reasons why a "ready-shoot-aim" approach to Social Media is a bad mix.  The market realities that John points out are certainly unavoidable and are the drivers behind the gold-rush to Social Media.  

I challenge all of us to think about how we can rise above simply posting our self-proclaiming PR to our respective Social Media Channels.  Instead, why not bring a little thought leadership to the problems our firms solve.  Just Sayin.  

People ask us what does OppSource do?  We do 95% of the dirty work involved in lead generation and nurturing that most marketing and sales organizations know needs to get done, but don't have a process, the people, or the extra time to do. Much of that dirty work involves two things; finding the right people, and making sure that everyone we've found gets properly followed up with and nurtured, often over long periods of time. We call the work we do "oppsourcing" and it is so powerful of a concept that we trademarked it -- OppSourcing™.

Organizations that sell complex offerings in a business-to-business (B2B) mode, usually can't make the sale to the one or two people that have come to a trade show, responded to an email, or even attended a webinar. These contacts are usually just a few of the people that are involved in buying a complex offering inside a large organization. Think of them as the scouts who are pioneering the way for their organization through a long and arduous buying journey.

Getting to their tribe of colleagues and the tribal leaders who commissioned their scouting party is a process we call Account Optimization. It involves all the classic research work that enterprising sales executives have done for decades but in today's time-constrained world don't have any extra time to do. It also involves engaging this tribe with the right kind of provocative content to create "bigger than life" buzz that otherwise would not happen if we only focused on the the contacts (scouts) who reveal themselves to us. This process requires expertise that is a mix of marketing and a mix of sales. In most organizations, this hybrid set of skills and expertise does not exists. Marketing buys off on the idea that marketing automation tools by themselves can somehow handle all that needs done when it comes to lead generation and lead nurturing.  This sets in motion a process that only communicates with a limited set of the people who are truly involved in a B2B buying process.  

If you are considering buying a marketing automation tool or have recently implemented one, you may want to investigate how you are "optimizing" your account records with the other buying contacts that matter. If you would like to learn more about how you should be filling this gap in your organization, feel free to download our white paper "Six Pillars of Lead Management."

Ardath Albee recently provided some great suggestions in her blog post "Make 3rd Party Content an Opportunity not a Necessity" on how to make this kind of content more powerful and go further.  Her suggestion was to find the  "big ideas" contained in each of these 3rd party reports and then tie back into the special things your company does with a complementary article, blog post, or white paper.  As Ardath says, it doesn't have to be a lengthy article, just invest 800-1,000 words that will showcase how your company's solution address the big ideas mentions by the 3rd party research report.  This not only positions your company's key capabilities, it positions your company as a thought leader who has invested in bringing solutions to market to address these "big idea" issues.

New research from Sirius Decisions suggests however, that we B2B marketeers better rethink how we capture our fair share of this expanding market opportunity. Their 2010 research suggests that 58% of B2B inquiries were initiated from the web and they project this to grow to 71% by 2015.

Even if you discount their research for a typical margin of error, you cannot ignore inbound marketing tactics in this new market environment if you expect to get your fair share of new buyers.

1. What is your inbound marketing game plan?
2. What is your content marketing strategy to attract and engage these inquisitive web leads?
3. What lead management and nurturing process are you going to use to make sure that your growing list of web leads are properly scored, nurtured, and qualified?