3 ways lead nurturing drives sales and marketing success

5 reasons Good beats Perfect (almost) every time
The perfect is the enemy of the good. This wonderfully compact nugget of wisdom – commonly attributed to Voltaire, the French Enlightenment figure – is a fixture in the vernacular of modern business. My undergraduate French degree doesn’t qualify me to challenge Voltaire’s intellect. But hey, Voltaire hasn’t done a lick of work in over [Read more...]
The 3 Keys to Marketing Happiness
Here’s the deal: marketing is hard. If you think marketing is easy, you’re probably not a marketer. Or a human. Yes, you’re probably some kind of replicant who (that?) has been lucky enough to have the Google algorithm programmed into memory. Or you are, in fact, the Google algorithm, crawling this page right now. [In which [Read more...]
New white paper on Medical Device demand generation
Most of my readers may not work in the medical device field, but there are some nuggets in the piece that can be applied “horizontally.”
Are you a rainmaker or a meteorologist?
A CFO with whom I once worked shared with me the qualities he believed essential in a VP of Sales. As he worked up the list from bottom to top, I was certain that some variation of “consistently achieving revenue and gross margin quota” was going to occupy the #1 slot. But instead, he treated me to [Read more...]
Smart social media – 5 ways KLM gets it right
A friend in Amsterdam shared this video on Facebook today, and I was inspired to spin it here on the TLOTL blog. It struck me as a potential “beginning of the end” in the tedious debate of the question: is social media dead? I refuse to waste pixels issuing birth or death notices for social media (or [Read more...]

A picture spares us from a thousand words

b2b marketing, b2b sales, lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing automation, sales process, Thought Leadership

Oct 202010

I’m pleased to share with TLOTL readers the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models. This collection of 14 one-page funnel visualizations was created by sales and marketing leaders who are active on the Focus network. If you spend any time following thought leaders in this space, you’ll recognize most if not all of the other contributors. I’m truly honored to be sharing pixel space with this distinguished group!

You can download the guide here (PDF).

Below I’ve included some additional links and context:

Here’s the full list of other Experts’ Guide contributors, with links to their blogs (and my sincere wishes that the links boost or at least help maintain their organic search rankings).

Ardath Albee, CEO and B2B Marketing Strategist at Marketing Interactions
Michael Brenner, Director of Online/Social Media at SAP North America
Michael Damphousse, CEO/CMO of Green Leads LLC
Christopher Doran, VP of Marketing at Manticore Technology
Barbra Gago, Social Media Manager of Cloud9 Analytics
Steve Gershik, CEO of 28Marketing
Sue Hay, CEO of BeWhys Marketing Inc.
Matt Heinz, Principal at Heinz Marketing LLC
Carlos Hidalgo, President of The Annuitas Group
Jon Miller, Vice President of Marketing at Marketo
Adam Needles, VP of Demand Generation Strategy at Left Brain Marketing
Matt West, Director of Marketing at Genius.com
Steve Woods, Chief Technology Officer of Eloqua

A link to the Experts’ Guide download page on Focus.com

Craig Rosenberg, the leader of the Focus Expert Network, is currently running a guest post series with each of the contributors on his blog, The Funnelholic.

And lastly — for anyone who may still be reading — here’s the back story on my entry:

I sent my picture to Focus at the end of August, right around the time my daughter attended her first few days of kindergarten. At the time, it occurred to me that I was participating in a kind of show-and-tell for grownups. Just like the objects that kids describe to their classmates, each funnel concept in this guide tells us a story. And the story isn’t just about the funnel as a business process. It’s also about how the storyteller thinks and solves problems.

Prior to submitting my picture, I had white-boarded it twice before for two different prospects. The first prospect said she really appreciated my (impromptu) illustration, as it helped her think differently about her problem. We haven’t done a deal yet, but had we not had that meeting, I probably wouldn’t have drawn my picture.

The second time I drew it was in a meeting with a prospect who – a few weeks prior — had asked me to send him a “brief, high level write-up on how we’d work together.” I wrote out my proposal in text form, and, per his request, kept it really brief – barely over 1 page in length. But as brief as my proposal was, when I met with my prospect, I could see that I had made excessive use of that obscure, incomprehensible, buzzword-laden dialect: consultantese. Even in sanitized form, I’m embarrassed to share that original proposal verbatim. But I ran it through a word cloud generator (thank you Wordle) to show what I mean.

Scearce Market Development proposal wordcloud

Consultantese

Pretty messy isn’t it? The proposal wasn’t much easier to follow.

Once I drew a simple picture on my prospect’s whiteboard, our conversation became simpler, and we ultimately started working together.

No matter how long I work in this business, I still forget sometimes that consultantese has no place in my sales process. Plain English is better. And a simple picture is even better still, especially if it’s something my kindergartner might understand.

3 ways lead nurturing drives sales and marketing success

b2b marketing, b2b sales, inside sales, lead nurturing, lead scoring, marketing automation, marketing to sales handoff, sales effectiveness, sales lead management

Jun 242010

There are several ways lead nurturing can drive performance gains in your sales and marketing function. I’ll provide a few examples below as oversimplified and linear “cause -> effect” cases, with the obvious caveat that, in practice, there’s a fair amount of interplay between these causes and effects.

1) Improved service levels -> improved customer experience. Lead nurturing allows vendors to define a pre-determined program of follow up touches — which in most environments should include at least one phone call attempt — that guarantees each lead will receive the same baseline level of attention. These programs must be well-planned and executed. For example, the programs should factor in variables such as time zones, inside sales staffing levels, optimal email timing and deliverability, audience-appropriate copy treatment, relevant content and offers, 3rd party evidence, etc…. With these and other key factors addressed, vendors not only eliminate the rarely discussed but very real issue of leads “falling on the floor” but they also cost-effectively drive brand preference through a better customer experience than may be offered by their competition.

2) Improved pipeline intelligence -> better messaging and positioning. Most lead management platforms provide reporting and analytics capabilities that go beyond what is offered in pure play CRM platforms. These reporting tools especially reward those vendors who have enabled rich sets of lead profile data (e.g., lead source, campaign tracking codes, industry, annual revenue, employee counts, sales routing details, etc) to flow through their process. Not only do these enhanced data sets allow for more compelling lead scoring scenarios, they also bring valuable intelligence back to executives, sales, and marcom experts about the market segments are responding best to certain offers, promotions, content, or even individual sales people. Over time these diverse stakeholders can re-tool their approaches to mine the best segments for profitable pipeline and revenue growth.

3) Improved spend management -> better marketing ROI. As a result of points 1 and 2, lead nurturing allows marketers to more closely examine where they are (and aren’t) getting leverage in their marketing mix so they can confidently optimize performance. In many cases, the successful implementation of a lead management process allows vendors to either reduce marketing spend, or to re-deploy it “down-funnel” where it can drive specific outcomes that may be more valuable to your sales team than raw demand generation. One application of this is combine lead nurturing with appointment-setting from firms such as Green Leads or AG Salesworks. Another option for funds re-deployment is a 3rd-party-managed study of the “stuck in the funnel” lead population – those prospects who have yet to purchase a solution or opt out of nurturing communications, but who are not moving forward in the buying process. Many companies offering products with a high consideration factor lack a full understanding of their prospects’ buying process. A focused study of these latent, in-market prospects can deliver valuable insights that may not be revealed through a traditional win/loss analysis conducted “after the fact.”