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.

Lead Nurturing ROI and Content Mapping

This week Marketo released the final chapter of our Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing which focused on calculating the ROI of Lead Nurturing.   This was my favorite chapter as it not only provided best practices and examples, but also included workspace for marketers to calculate the impact of lead nurturing at their organization.  This was the perfect time for the release of this chapter, as Marketo had also just presented our webinar on lead nurturing.   This webinar had over 1300 marketers register to learn about lead nurturing from Sergio Balegno, Sr. Analyst at MarketingSherpa Research Group and Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo and had a section dedicated completely to ROI.

The Difference between Lead Nurturing Accelerator Campaigns and Lead Lifecycle Campaigns

Today Marketo released chapter 3 to The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, and we are so excited to see so many people returning to check out this week’s chapter on Advanced Lead Nurturing.  In this chapter, Marketo shares best practices on Accelerator Campaigns and Lead Lifecycle Campaigns. 

Lead Nurturing - Achieve better marketing results in only 20 minutes a week

Over the past few months I have seen numerous webinars and classes to help marketers do more with their marketing resources and budgets, but often I find that I have given up my lunch break to a webinar that never gets to the meat of a topic. This isn’t because they're not good webinars, it’s because they are created for everyone- the beginner and advanced user- all in 40 minutes time.  That’s a lot of information to take in at once, regardless of how well you know the topic. And typically, these webinars have one or two speakers, so you are only getting one or two points of view.

Today Marketo released chapter one on a four part series on lead nurturing.  This chapter is taken from a new workbook, The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, which is a result of years of Marketo experience and lessons we’ve learned from our 200+ customers.

The Difference Between Drip Marketing and Closed Loop Marketing

These terms, often used interchangeably, are different approaches to how you nurture your prospects.  While they often imply use of email and online marketing, they have been used to improve the success of marketing efforts long before today’s marketing technologies were available.  The increase in the terms usage is due to marketer’s ability to better implement these programs, due to email, website monitoring and web analytics, campaign tracking, and campaign optimizing allowing for A/B email and landing page testing.

Marketing Features in Salesforce Summer 09

There are many new features for marketer to check out in the Summer 09 release of Salesforce.com.  You will know you are using Summer 09 because the image next to the Salesforce logo at the upper left of your screen will change from a frog to a sailboat.  Once you see this new image, the new features will be available to you.  The changes for marketing are diverse, spanning from report improvements to campaign functionality.

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.

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 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.

Unleash Your House Database with Lead Nurturing

Five Tips for Effective Lead Nurturing
Like most companies, you have probably built a significant database of prospective customers. It’s not uncommon to have 100,000s of contacts, or even millions, in a B2B company’s contact database.

That database is a significant asset that gets undervalued at most companies. Think about it: if your average cost per new contact is even just $20 (a low assumption) and you have a modest database of 250,000 contacts, then your house database is a $5 million asset. Do you treat it as such? How many other assets of that size do you have in your company? How much revenue does that asset generate for your business?

Nurturing Sales Leads

If you ask most executives to describe where revenue comes from in their organization, they'll usually talk about the "sales cycle" or "sales funnel".  But as we all now know, the ways buyers research and purchase B2B solutions has been transformed by search and social media. Today, companies can start building a relationship with potential buyers long before they want to speak with sales. This means marketing needs to fill in the gap by nurturing those leads until they are ready to engage in an active buying cycle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bridging The Sales and Marketing Divide - Dreamforce 2007

Marketo is one of the sponsors of salesforce.com's global User and Developer Conference, Dreamforce 2007. One of the first sessions was titled "Bridging the Sales and Marketing Divide", and not surprisingly, the focus was how to break down the barriers between Sales and Marketing by automating the lead development / lead nurturing process.

Lead Nurturing: Automate or Bust?

As a B2B marketer, I know that lead nurturing is the right thing to do. Given time, the right nurturing activities, and a little luck, can turn inquiries to leads that you’re happy to turn over to sales. And amazingly, sales is happy to take them from you.  And commends you for them. Interesting concept, huh?

Lead Nurturing: Triggered Emails, Newsletters and Webinars

Your demand generation programs are running, bringing lead information into your SFA system or other database. What do you do next? Send the raw leads directly to your sales team to qualify?

Isn't this like throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Instead of immediately handing leads to sales, marketing should make it a practice to nurture the leads, setting up a program of activities that provide information on topics of interest to your target and that focus on the value of your solution. Sending and tracking the response of successive lead nurturing activities also lets the lead self-qualify. You can assume that the more information requested, the stronger the lead.

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.

The YouTube Approach to Lead Nurturing

Content is critical for lead nurturing. Whether it is a case study, new research on some aspect of your industry, a how-to guide, or a whitepaper, content is what makes your lead nurturing programs work – and lead nurturing is what helps marketing drive more revenue to sales.

However, the internet has changed how buyers make B2B purchases, and more recently, it's begun to affect how they consume content. Rarely does a business buyer have time to print out and read an entire whitepaper, watch a 60 minute webinar, or read more than a few bullet points on a website.

Instead, today's buyers have become accustomed to consuming bite-sized chunks of information in small free periods. Before the internet, those periods might have meant a minute of mental downtime, but today buyers have Crackberries, RSS feeders, YouTube, and so on to feed them snippets of content all day long.

How To Use Thought Leadership To Build Brands and Nurture Leads

RainToday.com's recent report "What's Working In Lead Generation" got me thinking about the relationship of thought leadership to branding and lead nurturing. In B2B marketing, all three serve the same purpose: to establish your company as a trusted adviser, so when a prospect is ready to buy, he or she will think of you and will want to speak with your sales reps.

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.

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.

So what should you do with those leads?