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?

The momentum behind tablet computing has stirred the "mobile buzz" to all time heights.  The questions we B2B marketers are are now asking relates to how the iPad and next generation mobile devices will change our marketing and lead generation plans for 2011?  Recently released data by Forbes Insights suggests that mobile device computing has become the defacto platform for 82% of the C-Suite executives surveyed.   What struck me most, was that 73% of these surveyed executives see their smartphone as their primary communications platform.  

With this level of mobile device adoption in the C-Suite, it is only a matter of time before pervasive adoption throughout the management ranks follows suit.  Given this momentum, here are three areas we at OppSource will be focusing on in 2011:

1. Form factor design - With such a large portion of the target audience vetting and viewing their email and search results on their mobile devices, the design of digital communication must take these smaller screen mediums into account.   

2. Eliminate use of Flash - It was one of the most awesome web technologies invented... until the iPhone came along and then it wasn't as awesome anymore.  It is so frustrating to click through on a link on your smartphone or iPad only to end up on a screen that says you must first download flash.  Of course there is no flash download if you are on an Apple mobile device or many others for that matter.  Even better, get smart fast on HTML5 as an alternative for incorporating animated/video designs for mobile users.

3. Optimize downloads around mobile - nobody wants to wait forever to download some onerously large pdf or video file.  Take your users to smart landing pages and microsites where informative content descriptions give mobile visitors the best chance for selecting content that is most relavent to them.    

Here are a couple of very helpful articles and sites that go into great detail about optimizing content for mobile:

• Mobile Web Design
• Mobile Awesomeness

How the systems are configured to capture and report information is the process and execution question many executives neglect. If your systems and workflows aren't designed to contemplate many marketing touches and give credit where credit is due, the insight identifying the "right 50%" of spend is wasted. The root cause of this problem is marketers and salespeople thinking in terms of "lead source". When an opportunity gets put into Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics or others many companies default to adding a 'lead source' which is then the 'reporting' go to field to see 'how this opportunity was created.' It'd be like buying a house and only asking how the interior painting was done - this was the last critical step, but what about all of the effort that came before?

Enter the notion of campaigns. Campaigns can be associated at the lead, contact and account levels and allow for multiples - not just one 'source'. Companies who are rigorously implementing campaign tags into their CRM systems have a more complete view of ALL of the touches and tactics that contributed to creating the opportunity. Did they first come to a trade show, then a webinar and finally a tele-nurturing resource reached them to qualify? It would be short sided to say, "tele-sales, you did it!" Actually, marketing AND sales did it through this portfolio of action.

What's more, with campaigns you can track back to how many opportunities participated in a particular tactic, and decide if you should do that again (of course, feeling confident that the right sales and nurturing process was interacting with the prospect after the initial touch).

One OppSource customer's marketing department that is doing this well is able to justify spend, cease non-performing tactics and justify their very existence as a delivery group - after all, in business isn't that a point of value we're all trying to show?
 

This is particularly difficult to discern in the complex B2B buying cycle because of the wide range of roles that are involved in the typical purchasing decision.  A busy sales professional trying to meet quota for the quarter might not think speaking with a non-executive contact is worthy of their time investment.  On the other hand, this mid-level manager might actually be playing a significant role in the buying process with responsibility for researching and evaluating how his/her firm can solve a business problem or improve a languishing process.  But, because this "lead" doesn't have the typical "executive level" title, it is assumed they don't play a significant role in the buying process and are overlooked.

Think about an alternative scenario for a moment.  What if this mid-level manager contact were treated with significance.  They were actually asked a lot of thoughtful and insightful questions about their particular scenario.  They were treated as though they might be a significant player in their firm's evolving buying process.  What if we not only made several attempts to connect with this mid-level manager, but after we had an initial conversation, we followed up with helpful information that will actually help set us apart from other "vendors" and instead set us up as an "expert" in the mind of this influential contact.

Leads need to be led.  Don't They?