Lead Management Solutions
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The Latest Solutions From Modern B2B Marketing Blog
Modern lead management covers the entire spectrum of sales lead generation, from acquiring and scoring leads, to measuring and optimizing the process over time. Juggling each of these components can pose lead management problems. At Modern B2B Marketing Blog, we pose lead management solutions.
The lead management solutions we publish to Modern B2B Marketing Blog help marketing professionals improve both ROI and efficiency. With each post, we provide insight designed to ensure your strongest sales leads are effectively identified, scored, and most importantly, closed.
Discover the latest lead management solutions by reading our lead management posts below.
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The 6th Annual MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit in San Francisco
This year's MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit was a great success. Those that attended the event could tell from the minute it started that they would be leaving with actionable ideas to improve their marketing program.
The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing: Free On-Demand Webinar
More than 4,000 people have downloaded the Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, our 40+ page eBook sharing practical tips for getting started with lead nurturing, optimizing your program, and measuring the results. Now you can get it, with no registration required: download The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing.
Also, on August 19, more than 1,000 people attended the Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing webinar that I presented along with Sergio Balegno, Sr. Analyst at MarketingSherpa. Now you can watch it on-demand, anytime, just by clicking the button below. No registration.
In this recorded webinar, you'll get practical tips for how you can actually implement lead nurturing at your company
What made the Digital Marketing World-Go-Round? 10 Takeaways from the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing World Virtual Conference
Yesterday's Fall 2009 MarketingProfs Digital Marketing World Virtual Conference was the perfect event to prepare for the planning of Q4 marketing programs. And I must not be the only person who thought so, as over 12,000 registered for the six hour virtual event that featured both B2C and B2B program tracks. I focused on the B2B sessions along with hosting a one hour chat session on Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing in the network lounge during the event. Here are my top takeaways from the event
Give Your Leads a Regular Check-Up
Would your leads get a good bill of health? Marketers need to give their leads a regular check-up to ensure continued sales success. Review this short list to see if your leads would pass a quick health review or if they would be sent to critical care.
Don't let Bad Leads Happen to You
Building solid opt-in lists are no easy task. Lead Management requires creating solid thought leadership pieces, forming relationships with bloggers and analysts, building and optimizing forms and landing pages, and creating viral marketing pieces. This takes time, patience, and hard work, and, even when you're doing the right things, and bringing in great leads, sometimes there is pressure for quantity, even if your leads are high quality and meeting your goals. So, at the end of a quarter, tens or hundreds of leads short, how do you make your goal?
5 Reasons Why Lead Management is more than Lead Nurturing and Scoring
I think one mistake many marketers make is to think of their lead management requirements too narrowly - and to be honest, quite a few demand generation vendors make this mistake as well.
As I wrote back in December, 2006, the fact that today's buyers take control of their buying processes using search, social media, and other online tools means that marketers need to move away from a mindset of "generating leads" and towards a model of "managing leads". Done well, this unlocks serious revenue growth. At Marketo, our lead management system helps our sales team to be 40% more productive than comparable SaaS companies, and allows my demand generation team to generate 50% more qualified, sales-ready leads per month at 33% lower cost per lead.
More Resources to Define Lead Management Requirements
A few days ago I posted a link to the new IDC Workbook: Optimizing Marketing and Sales Lead Management with Marketing Automation. This is a great tool, but there are quite a few other resources out there to help you define what you are looking for in a demand generation system. Here are some links to help you out; please let me know if you write about this topic and I'll be happy to add you!
IDC Workbook: Optimizing Marketing and Sales Lead Management with Marketing Automation
The marketing automation space is exploding. And whereas the rapid emergence of flexible, easy-to-use, e-marketing tools is good news for marketers, choosing the right solution for your business can be a daunting process.
If you're grappling with how to make the right choice, or just looking to make a business case for marketing automation at your company, here's a new resource from the smart analysts at IDC's CMO Advisory Practice: a new workbook titled "Optimizing Marketing and Sales Lead Management with Marketing Automation."
Marketo's Secret Sauce for Demand Generation
You may ask, why should anyone care what I have to say about demand generation? Well, at Marketo, we’ve built a world-class demand generation machine that has helped us in just 10 months to sign up over 130 customers in more than eight countries, including companies such as Thomson Reuters, Reed Business, and CollabNet.
Now, I'm not writing this to promote Marketo, but I think our results are proof that we’re doing something right with our own demand generation and lead management processes. I frequently get asked to share how we achieve these marketing results, so I recently presented a fact-filled webinar titled Secret Sauce for Demand Generation: How Marketo Nurtures, Scores and Accelerates Leads through the Revenue Cycle. In order to share these lessons with as broad an audience as possible, we’ve made the webinar available anytime on-demand, without registration.
Demand Generation Quiz: How Good Are You?
How do you know if your demand generation is good enough or when it's time to take your lead management processes to the next level? Here are 14 important questions that indicate whether or not you can benefit for more sophisticated marketing automation. Ask these questions to yourself, your boss, your direct reports, your head of sales, and any other stakeholders in your demand generation process. Questions cover important topics to address, such as lead generation, lead follow-up, marketing efficiency and demonstrating ROI. Take this test, interpret the results and find out if you’re ready to take the next step.
Re-inventing Marketing Automation
Fresh off the launch of Marketo Lead Management, Phil Fernandez, our president and CEO, was the subject of an interview with Andrew Gaffney of Demand Gen Report. In his presentation at Under The Radar last week, Phil iterated that Marketo aims to 're-invent marketing automation.' The Demand Gen Report article lets Phil expound on that statement, and make a few others, including these highlights.
Lead Management Will Never Be The Same Again
$300 billion dollars a year. That’s what the 3,000 largest B2B companies in the world spend annually on lead generation, resulting in billions of leads. Yet despite this massive expense, I have yet to find a sales executive who is happy with the number and quality of marketing generated leads.
Why the disconnect? The old model where marketing generates a lead and sends it over to sales doesn't work anymore. Mass marketing, big tradeshows, and buying lists don’t work in a world where buyers use the web, search, and social media to take control of their buying process. Companies today meet prospective customers earlier in the buying cycle, and those customers want to engage with sales later than ever. This dynamic complexity also makes it harder than ever for marketing to identify which programs really impact revenue and pipeline.
Lead Nurturing With Brian Carroll
As author of the B2B Lead Generation Blog and the popular book, "Lead Generation for the Complex Sale", Brian Carroll has long been a thought leader in the fields of lead management and lead nurturing.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Brian about the importance of a personalized touch in lead nurturing, the best ways to encourage a latent prospect to start an active buying cycle, and the ROI of thought leadership. An excerpt of my interview appears below.
Stupid Marketing that's not so Dumb
I was just checking out Kevin Epstein's Stupid Marketing blog, and came across a great entry about the top ten marketing lessons to learn from Ikea. And it occurred to me that most of these 10 also apply to marketing automation and lead management software.
Lead Nurturing - Dating for B2B Companies?
No one enjoys blind dates. Whether you’re introduced by friends, the Internet, or your neighborhood matchmaker, it’s nerve-wracking to meet for the first time.
Conversely, everyone loves weddings. The flowers, the tradition, the drunken dancing at the reception, you can find something you like.
Everything that comes in between is the interesting part. When you're dating, you're learning about each other: what you like to do, the things he doesn't eat, the stuff she does on Saturdays. And you're discovering the things that you do well together.
It's no different when it comes to B2B marketing.
Improving Lead Quality Can Improve Sales Productivity
I attended the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, and one of keynotes was given by Stu Schmidt, Vice President of Solution Sales at Cisco Webex. Among many interesting things he imparted in his presentation on sales process and measurement, was this:
A 10% improvement in lead quality can result in a 40% improvement in sales productivity.
While Stu was talking about improving the sales process to qualify leads earlier, I found this to be an interesting statistic for marketers, as well. As a marketer, I spent the past couple of years (at another company), attempting to nurture leads until they were sales-ready. That is, I tried to build a process that allowed me to communicate with prospects, build relationships with them, and track their interest in my product line.
Join Marketo's Lead Management Software Beta Program?
I typically avoid too much self-promotion in this blog, but I'm really excited about recent developments at Marketo. We've been working hard on our easy-to-use marketing automation software, and now we're finally getting close to the beta release of our new solutions for email marketing, lead nurturing, and lead scoring.
Lead Management Tips and Ideas
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Tricia Reilly about trends in lead management software. Tricia was one of the speakers at Best Practices in Lead Management, a B2B marketing session at salesforce.com's recent user conference.
A veteran in the field of lead management, Tricia currently heads up Bluebird Marketing, whose services include helping companies optimize the Marketing aspect of their salesforce.com deployments, and designing and implementing lead management campaigns. Before Bluebird, she spent several years as Senior Manager of Global Lead Generation at Genesys Telecommunications Labs.
Drive Revenue With Lead Scoring
Another popular session at Dreamforce 2007 was titled 21st Century Lead Cultivation. My favorite part was the presentation from Jason Hekl, Sr. Director of Marketing at InQuira, which focused on best practices in lead scoring.
Best Practices in Lead Management
The most crowded session I attended at Dreamforce 07 was Best Practices in Lead Management. The room was PACKED beyond capacity, and to make matters worse, the AC was broken so it was sweltering.
I was amazed to see how many B2B marketers endured the crowds and the heat to learn more about lead management best practices. In fact, pretty much all the Marketing Track sessions at Dreamforce were packed… which goes to show excited people are to learn more about B2B marketing!
Four Steps to Better Business Leads From Search
Many B2B companies have a chasm between the pay-per-click campaigns that generate clicks and the campaigns that help turn those clicks into customers. When the goal of search marketing is to drive high-quality leads to sales, no B2B pay-per-click campaign is complete without these additional "post-click" steps.
Do You Recognize the 4 Warning Signs of Bad Lead-itis?
Countless companies end up with poor sales-marketing alignment because they suffer from Bad Lead-itis. This crippling disease can destroy marketing's credibility, waste demand generation dollars, and damage your company's brand reputation.
It is important to learn to recognize these four signs of Bad Lead-itis. If you notice that you suffer from any of these, be sure to check with a lead management professional.
Direct Mail Services from FedEx Kinko's
FedEx Kinko's announced a new service called Direct Mail Services, delivered in partnership with AAS. It provides an end-to-end service that allows marketers to design and execute simple direct mail campaigns completely online.
You begin by designing a direct mail piece. Templates and formatting options are very limited, but may be sufficient depending on your needs. (Postcards have better options than letters.) You then upload your own mailing list, or purchase a list from their database by selecting on ZIP code, title, company size, and SIC code (names were approx $0.40 each). When finished, you select when you want the mail to be sent and they take care of the printing and fulfillment.
8. Measure relationship depth
As part of the lead management process, make sure to measure the "depth" of your relationship with a target company. By depth, I mean both the number of contact names you have at the company as well as the quality of the interactions you've had.
If you've had meaningful marketing interactions with six different people from a company, then that company is more likely to be sales ready than a company where you've only interacted with one person. Similarly, a prospect who has downloaded two whitepapers, attended one of your in-person events, subscribes to your podcast, and has recently spoken with a telemarketing rep is more likely to be sales ready than a prospect who only downloaded one whitepaper.
7. Lead nurturing 101
So you’ve managed to get a potential customer to register on your landing page. Congratulations! What do you do now?
If you are like many companies, the prospect’s information goes into an SFA system like Salesforce.com and sales gets alerted about the new lead. The problem is that up to 95% of prospects on your website are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep, according to research by Brian Carroll. They are on your site to research your product and your industry. Some of those prospects may be truly unqualified, but as many of 70% of them will eventually buy a product from you – or your competitors.
6. Manage leads – don’t generate demand
Forrester recently published research titled "How Mature Is B2B Lead Management?" in which they claim that B2B marketers who shift their focus from “demand generation” to “lead management” are twice as productive.
As Kristin Zhivago points out, one reason for this is because the term “demand generation” implies an outdated mindset where the company is in control of the buying process. In reality, B2B buyers don’t “demand” anything (though they do have needs) and few marketers can create demand, even with the most clever campaigns.
More from Modern B2B Marketing blog.
