Lead Development

A Hot Topic for Marketing, Sales, IT, and Executive Teams

To reach your business goals, your company requires a steady stream of strong leads linked to an effective sales force. New technologies and techniques are changing the game – and the skills your organization needs to be successful. Here we explore the developing discipline of marketing, what it means to you, and how it can affect your business.

TrendWatch on Leads

How does your organization stack up against best-in-class firms?

• As a guideline, marketing should allocate 65% of its resources to demand generation and 35% to lead nurturing and management.¹
• 83% of companies are expected to adopt marketing automation solutions by 2009-2010.²
• 70% of leads generated by marketing are never acted on. Top companies mine inquiries to keep sales resources focused on sales-ready leads.³
• 62% of best-in-class companies are focused on lead scoring and lead prioritization as the top strategy for focusing sales efforts and reducing the sales cycle.⁴
• Marketers who shift from demand generation to closed-loop nurturing are 2 times more productive.⁵
• Companies that score and prioritize leads with marketing automation should pass about 5%-15% of all leads generated to sales (only leads qualified as ready to engage in the sales process).⁶
• Companies that have achieved marketing and sales alignment are growing 5.4% faster, closing 38% more proposals, and churning 36% fewer customers.⁷
• 90% of best-in-class companies are increasing return on their market investment year over year.⁸

References

¹ “Six Principles for Better Demand-Generation Tactics.” B2B Webcast, 2007
² “Automating Leads to Sales.” Aberdeen Group, 2007
³ “B2B Demand Generation: How Successful Companies are Improving Sales and Marketing Results.” vtrenz, 2007
⁴ “Automating Leads to Sales.” Aberdeen Group, 2007
⁵ “B2B Marketers Lack Lead Management Maturity.” Forrester Teleconference, 2006
⁶ “Six Keys to Lead Generation Success.” MarketingProfs, 2007
⁷ “Marketing ROI in 2007 – Moving Into the New Era of Marketing.” MarketingProfs, 2006
⁸ “Success Strategies in Marketing Automation.” Aberdeen Group, 2007

Lead Development Tips

How to improve your lead development results for 2008

• Assess how you currently define your target market and explore how new best practice techniques such as “persona development” could help you improve your market insight and segmentation – to create more attractive offers and messages for lead development.

• Review your current lead development programs and score them on a customer-centricity scale.

• Calculate your cost per lead and scrutinize how you are spending your marketing budgets – there may be ways to get better results for your investment.

• Investigate how your Web site could evolve to become a more effective hub for your lead development campaigns.

• Explore how to adopt or improve automated lead nurturing, lead scoring, and routing rules for passing better qualified leads to your sales team at a lower cost.

• Advocate marketing measurement and implement real-time dashboards so you can observe the measurable performance of your lead development campaigns.
  

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Practical Wisdom

Q & A with Paul Reader

Why is lead generation such a hot topic in marketing circles today?

As Geoff Moore elegantly illustrates in Living on the Fault Line, the importance of marketing relative to sales and operations varies according to the stage of industry maturity. When organizations are in the stages where sales drive the business, marketing's first job is to make sales work better. This is not new — but it is a useful explanation for some of the friction that develops between sales and marketing departments.

What is new is the availability of tools and paradigms for Web-to-lead programs supported by automated marketing – to nurture leads until they are ready for the sales team’s attention. These generally offer an unprecedented level of marketing measurability and integration with sales teams. In turn, they produce a framework where marketing is held to a higher standard of accountability for performance and ROI.

There are a host of software solutions being marketed around claims of lead generation. What are the important differences among them for prospective buyers?

With feature sets evolving rapidly, software manufacturers may wish to respond with their own reaction to this question, but here's our perspective. As solution integrators (mostly in B2B markets) of Web-to-lead and automated lead development solutions, we see the following as key success factors:

User Experience
Most application usage is constrained by the level of usability and knowledge achieved through interaction design, and there is no reason why this class of applications should escape this general rule. The value claimed by software applications deals in potential. But the value realized often hinges on whether people enjoy learning, using and pushing the application to its limits. The pace of turnover in corporate marketing departments compounds the significance of this factor.

SFA Integration
This is increasingly table stakes, and here's why. Salesforce.com, and to a lesser extent some other SFA tools, are attaining the status of "sovereign" applications — that is, applications that are always on and are ingrained in the daily work habits of the user. If your sales team has reached this stage, then it makes sense to consider how elegantly your lead development system integrates with this pre-existing SFA solution.

Rules-based Automation
The difference between more basic email marketing platforms and an automated e-nurturing platform comes down to the ability to plan and program contact sequences in a rule-based interface. Using this feature allows you to exert more strategic intelligence and planning around what gets shared with whom, when, and under what circumstances. Watch for these rules-based platforms to evolve features that let you configure alerts that notify you when either milestones are achieved or things are not meeting minimum performance thresholds.

Dynamic Personalization
The future of direct marketing and lead development involves an increasing degree of experiential personalization. Now that communications are moving towards digital interactions it is possible to collect self-reported and behavioral data. As marketers we can now use this information to produce dynamically generated direct mail (email and print) that is automatically broadcast with a combination of logic and business rules.

For related information, including a recent feature comparison of enterprise marketing automation platforms, please contact Paul Reader.

Featured Interview

Mark Webster, Senior Webcasting Consultant, Streamlogics Inc.

What should B2B marketers really know about live webcasting as they plan their marketing communications strategies and their investment breakdown for the year ahead? What's the trend line? How many people are doing it now, how many people are going to be doing it a year from now, and why?

Trends
Lead generation is far and away the big thing in webcasting right now, and it's because it has this hook — it's live. A lot of the reasons that people are seeing the effectiveness and ROI of live webcasting is the acceptability of the live media. They like the fact that it's interactive.

Marketing and lead generation are taking off with live multimedia events because they're typically much more engaging than static or pre-recorded media. We're also seeing that view times are longer on live video events compared to audio events, so viewers are more engaged when they can actually see the presenter.

The trend that we're seeing right now is that participation in events is increasing as a result of people becoming more comfortable with multimedia on the Web. It started with consumer sites such as You Tube and is now working its way into business. On top of this there is a proliferation of broadband which is driving higher adoption rates, and just a general acceptance of desktop meeting and presentation solutions. Companies have picked up on this buzz, they know they've got to get into it, and they want to know more about it.

Webcasting is an ongoing development. One-off webcasts are not likely to reach the lead generating objective; lead generation programs are. Keep doing it and invest in it — that's what's really driving results. It's a matter of setting in place a program and sticking to it and letting the numbers grow. Don't go in with inflated expectations.

It sounds kind of weird, but after a while you can actually pick up a sense of community within an ongoing series of webcasts.

Best Practices

• Proactive recruitment
  One of the biggest things that people need to be doing is proactive recruitment. Far too often companies go out and ask to webcast an event and they think they're going to get 17,000 people showing up and about twenty people show up because they haven't actually gone out and done the work that's required to recruit the audience.
  
  

Pre-calling people to invite them to an event is not done very often, but your attendance level will increase by reaching out. You can also help craft content around their interest level to find out what they actually want to hear prior to the event. In the normal webinar universe you would send out an email to get people to register, which is kind of passive, and the email might get caught up with spam filter issues. By calling them you bypass these issues by actually signing them up yourself. Although you're accepting a higher cost to recruit them in, one successful audience member shouldn't be perceived as a one-time affair. You're actually building a database of people that will come to future events. Building a large database allows you to segment your viewers to make the content more relevant to the audience.

• Lead scoring
  We can score their responses and automatically see which ones will end up as the really hot prospects, the medium term prospects, and the tire kickers. We do this by asking the important questions: When are you looking to do this? What is your budget for this? How many are you looking to do? When you actually rate those answers the marketing person can see the ones that have scored 95% and contact them immediately.
  
  

• Accessibility
  Another best practice for successful marketing lead generation for webcasts is accessibility — live webcasts need to be available in archive format after the event. They also need to be made available for mobile users via downloadable video podcasts. Slides, white papers, and static content need to be downloadable from a centralized resource centre.
  The vendor should be able to quickly blast emails out through the platform based on behaviour. For example, if they pre-registered but didn't show up, you can send an email out to that group and immediately drive your viewership up by giving people the opportunity to watch the webcast later.
  
  

As we've done with a major global mobile handset manufacturer, we can set up a repository of content that people can sift through at their leisure using what we call single sign on. We can track behaviour, what they've viewed, and how long they've viewed – without them having to register every time. Some of the webcasts we've done for companies are still generating leads months, even years, after the original event — talk about increasing shelf life!

For more information please contact Mark Webster.

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