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B2B Lead Generation Articles on lead management
- 50 Most Influential People in Lead Management
B2B Lead Generation Blog / Brian Carroll | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
The Sales Lead Management Association posted their list of the 50 most influential people in lead management. I was humbled to see that I was included on the list along with a lot of of people I really like and...
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- Lead Generation Check list – Part 7: Effective lead management
B2B Lead Generation Blog / Brian Carroll | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
My checklist for optimizing the lead generation process so far has included six steps: the mindset of not pushing; repairing the rift between sales and marketing; creating the ideal customer profile (and the un-ideal customer profile as well); agreeing upon...
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- Lead Generation tips for Tradeshows Conferences
B2B Lead Generation Blog / Brian Carroll | Nov 21, 2010 | Permalink
Tradeshows and events are still being used consistently by B2B marketers for lead generation. With that in mind, Roger Lewis has some useful tips on how to improve your lead management strategy with from tradeshows. Lewis emphasizes how vital lead...
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- Lead Management and Football
Anything Goes Marketing | Nov 20, 2010 | Permalink
In one of my meetings these past few weeks I was thinking of an analogy where I could break down the lead management process into much simpler terms so everyone could understand their roles - this is where football comes in. Why football? Well, if I compared it to hockey no one outside of Canada would care. I'm going to introduce the players and coaches below and then summarize how the different
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- Lead Management with Steve Woods - Week 5 of Best Practices That Need to Die
Demandbase | Sep 16, 2010 | Permalink
The series continues on Tuesday 9/21 with Steve Woods, CTO of Eloqua and author of Digital Body Language. When I approached him for the series, he decided to take on lead management -- discussing best practices to live by (as well as a few that need to die) ...
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- The Problems with "Lumping"; Separate the Four Core Sales Functions
Build A Sales Machine | Mar 01, 2010 | Permalink
This post builds off a prior one, “We have a different sales structure here, the sales people just sell!� Building a highly productive, modern sales organization requires increasing specialization - and frankly, it's a big reason salesforce.com has such an amazing sales organization. Though they take it to the extremes - you wouldn't believe the number of different kinds of sales groups, inside and out, that salesforce.com has :) One of the biggest sources of lost productivity is the practice of lumping a mix of different responsibilities (such as raw web lead qualification, cold prospecting, closing, account management...) into one general "sales" role. Issues contributed to by lumping Lack of focus: Salespeople juggle too many responsibilities, reducing their ability to get things...
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- Pushing Prospects through the Pipeline
Accelerating IT Sales | Jun 10, 2009 | Permalink
A recent Marketing Sherpa report addresses lead nurturing best practices, and is a helpful update on how to best reach prospects once they've engaged with your content, but not independently returned to your site. By applying the practices outlined in Lead Nurturing Best Practices: New Data, Charts, Tips to Put More Punch in Your Cultivation Tactics, you can align your lead nurturing program with what's shown to be working industry-wide. In compiling this report, Marketing Sherpa partnered with Eloqua (a lead management & demand generation powerhouse) and On24 (a leader in the virtual event and webinar space), to survey over 1000 marketing professionals to learn about their lead nurturing methods. According to the report, lead generation isn't what's difficult - with the general t...
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- BtoB Online Goes Interactive with the Lead Generation Guide 2008
Accelerating IT Sales | Jun 10, 2009 | Permalink
The recently released the BtoB Online Lead Generation Guide 2008 provides a comprehensive overview of the B2B lead generation industry's recent innovations and upcoming trends, and is published in an interactive format that puts their own suggestions regarding content usage into action. The interactive guide has a range of features that allow users to search, bookmark, customize, and generally manipulate their experience with the content within. To explain all of the features, the guide contains a narrated tutorial that points out and explains each of the features available. The fact that BtoB Online published the guide as more an interactive tool than as a document is interesting, and could signify a change in how content is distributed online. In the past, most similar publication...
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- Scrub Your Leads For Job Security
Accelerating IT Sales | Jun 10, 2009 | Permalink
Email list hygiene - and the specific practice of scrubbing out bad email addresses - should be of the utmost concern for any of you out there who actively distribute marketing materials via email messages or enewsletters. When sending your marketing materials to huge lists that have not been scrubbed for junk, you run the risk of destroying your company's reputation and losing business along the way. And while it would be easy to sit here and cite statistics about email bounce rates, blacklisting and silent deletes done by ISPs, I think the issue of list hygiene can best be explained by putting yourself in your clients' shoes. If you are a third-party email marketer, your clients have placed their trust (and their money) in your business model - they provide you with content, you m...
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- 50 Most Influential People in Lead Management
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Lead Generation Topics
 and <a href='http://www.on24.com/'>On24</a> (a leader in the virtual event and webinar space), to survey over 1000 marketing professionals to learn about their lead nurturing methods. </p>
<p><img src='http://www.acceleratingitsales.com/pipeline_revised_2.jpg' height='249' alt='pipeline_revised_2.jpg' align='right' width='165'/></p>
<p>According to the report, lead generation isn't what's difficult - with the general thinking being that most lead generating companies already have plenty of leads, they just don't have plenty of sales ready leads. In order to deliver high-quality, sales-ready prospects to your sales team, you need to put your energies into nurturing your existing leads over the long term, and expect that it will take up to 24 months for some of your leads to turn into sales. To effectively nurture leads over the long term, your lead nurturing programs need to be elevated within your organization, and given the same kind of time and energy that's put into generating leads.</p>
<p>The Marketing Sherpa report touches on a few key concepts that I've examined and explained in further detail below:<br/>
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Best Practice #1. Use multi-media touches to nurture leads </strong></p>
<p>In order to effectively reach your prospects, you need to use more than email newsletters or triggered email messages to move leads through your sales pipeline. While email marketing is a tried-and-true method of nurturing leads, you need to do more. According to the report, a combination of email messages, direct mail, and telemarketing efforts works best when trying to segment your leads. </p>
<p>If you really want to reach people where it counts, you can look to telemarketing as a tool to help increase your brand awareness, determine where in the buying cycle prospects are, and offer educational materials to help further their awareness of your company, products and services. Direct mail is a great way to invite people to virtual and face-to-face events, and remind users of new content or marketing materials they might want to check out on your site. Email marketing is a good tool for drip-nurturing, and can be employed when you have a group of prospects that are actively involved in researching solutions, and want to nudged along with new content or new information related to your offerings. <br/>
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Best Practice #2. Quick response to Web leads can maximize conversions </strong></p>
<p>With our always-on world, it's no longer good enough to wait 24-hours before making contact with a new prospect. With so many competitors vying for the same sets of eyes, it's crucial that you cement your relationship with new leads inside of an hour (!). And according to the Marketing Sherpa data, "calls placed within five minutes of receiving a Web lead have the highest likelihood of making contact." </p>
<p>To achieve this kind of real-time responsiveness, you need to move toward automating your lead generation and reporting processes, so that leads land in your CRM system as soon as they're generated. And while moving from weekly lead reports to automated reporting processes might require an overhaul of your entire lead management practices, doing so may also significantly improve your overall sales. </p>
<p><strong>Best Practice #3. Use a lead scoring system </strong></p>
<p>Lead scoring is a great way to segment your leads and determine how best each prospect should be nurtured through the pipeline. By rating leads based on a series of filters, such as their location, their time frame for implementing a solution, or their role in the IT decision making process, you can place your leads in separate silos, and nurture each group according to their specific needs. </p>
<p>Scoring is also an effective way to separate the "wheat from the chaff," and figure out how long any given lead should require nurturing before they reach sales readiness. While some leads may enter your sales pipeline with low scores, you can develop strategies for nurturing those prospects and keep your pipeline full as each group of leads receives your messages and moves through the buying process. </p>
<p>By scoring leads, automating reporting so that leads are contacted immediately upon entering your CRM system, and nurturing your scored and segmented prospects with a variety of tools, you should be able to accelerate your sales as you continuously move leads through the pipeline. </p>
<p>You can learn more about Lead Nurturing by listening to this podcast from <a href='http://www.theinnovativemarketer.com/'>The Innovative Marketer</a>, <a href='http://media.eloqua.com/audio/TIM22.mp3'>What is lead nurturing and why should you care?</a></p><img src='http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/AcceleratingItSales/~4/sCBFB5JiLFc' height='1' width='1'/>)
, I can select the "Links" option and see a list of all of the URLs on the page or in the guide! The publication also contains a fairly in-depth search feature, the ability to bookmark pages and have the bookmarks appear in my browser bookmarks/favorites, and social networking functionalities.</p>
<p>The inclusion of a "<a href='http://www.btob-digital.com/leadgenerationguide/2008/templates/send_to_friend?pg=1&pm=1&u1=friend'>Share</a>" option in the navigation bar is a big step for the B2B crowd which has been slower than the consumer sect in the full adoption of social networking within the industry. By addressing social networking in the very make-up of this guide however, BtoB Online is acknowledging the momentum that social networking has gained in the past year, and invited the use of social networking across the industry. </p>
<p>The guide can be embedded into blogs as a custom widget, shared with friends via an easy-to-use message containing the URL, or submitted to social networking sites such as <a href='http://www.stumbledupon.com/'>Stumbledupon</a>, <a href='http://www.newsvine.com/'>Newsvine</a>, and <a href='http://digg.com/'>digg</a>, among others. </p>
<p>In addition to the new interactive format, the guide also contains a host of valuable information for anyone working in the B2B lead generation industry. From advice on lead scoring and lead nurturing to resources for those looking to find out more about lead management vendors or understand the industry through statistics, the guide is packed full of useful tools. </p><img src='http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/AcceleratingItSales/~4/zp1jcgBhMNk' height='1' width='1'/>){kind=logo}
 in your business model - they provide you with content, you market their content with a variety of email messaging tools, and you send them a list of names (or leads) who have responded to their content. This method of generating leads is used by all kinds of companies (both consumer and B2B-based), and helps all of the involved parties in achieving their business goals. The client is presented with a list of high-quality, (hopefully) sales-ready leads, and the lead generation company is well-compensated for their efforts.</p>
<p>While mutually beneficial however, this relationship relies on the lead generation company's maintenance of their email lists. When working with a reputable lead generation organization, you should feel confident that the leads they deliver not only meet your specific requirements (such as being from certain geographical locations, or from companies of particular sizes), but that they also come with correct contact information. It's easy to generate 1000 leads, what's more difficult is generating 1000 qualified leads!</p>
<p>At the <a href='http://www.webbuyersguide.com/'>Web Buyer's Guide</a>, we have developed a lead management system that allows us to scrub out junk leads on the back-end, and therefore remove junk from our lead databases. Before this system was in place, we would unintentionally sell those tricky-to-spot, but poisonous leads with titles like "None of Your Business," and names like, "Mickey Mouse." Since gaining the capability to scrub lists of new subscribers before they even become potential leads however, our rate of delivering junk leads has plummeted. </p>
<p>When we do occasionally deliver a random junk lead, I always feel bad, and worry about how our clients might respond. And while we never charge for junk leads, I also fear that some clients won't bother reporting their findings (and receiving a refund), and will instead simply choose to stop doing business with our company. After all, if a client purchases 100 leads and 5 are junk, they've potentially been gypped out of a couple hundred dollars worth of leads!</p>
<p>From years of experience in delivering leads, I've learned that it's easier to scrub lists when you're not under immediate pressure to deliver your product. By building some sort of system into your business practices that allows you to clean your lists before you're faced with the pressure of generating leads, you are more likely to remove junk that's both obvious (Mickey Mouse) and less obvious (Bart Simpson). Personally, I would much rather ditch the leads on the back-end than lose business by delivering junk. </p><img src='http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/AcceleratingItSales/~4/0ZQXyNOoZNs' height='1' width='1'/>)
