8Jun09 Birth to College Education - Lead Generation and Nurturing Cont’d

Become a Leader
Your child needs his parents to be his leaders. Your customer is looking for a leader too. He needs a thought leader that will evolve through the nurturing process.
What is a thought leader? It is a recognized authority in one’s field. It is a person (or company) that “deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates” according to Elise Bauer. Thought leaders share their time and knowledge in a spirit of humility to help those around them.

Thought leaders provide research and information that is helpful to decision-makers. Not only do they increase awareness of their own brand, but they help prospects learn to differentiate the various brands and to better understand their own needs thus generating leads for your firm in the process.

The ability to engage prospective customers even before they are thinking of buying makes thought leaders seem more like trusted advisors. A relationship is formed and built in small steps. As the prospect learns new bits of information and verifies them, he learns to trust the thought leader. Slowly, as he is nurtured, he learns to think of the thought leader as a member of “his team” rather than someone competing for his business.

Thought leaders are not necessarily the leaders of large or well-known companies, but through their genuine desire to help others, they become the people who are quoted. They are the ones whose insight is sought. They become educators - just like any parent - because they are able to get people to think and then to nurture that process(which becomes lead nurturing).

Communicate

Communication is the key to interaction. It is the key to lead generation and to the nurturing process. Parents engage their children in communication - conversation, questions, answers, commands, thoughts, etc.

Thought leaders engage with their prospects through the written word on the internet using blogs, Tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Blogs are simply an ongoing monologue which can become a dialog or discussion about the topic on which the thought leader is knowledgeable. It can include many other related topics. Those who read it can respond. To be effective, a blog entry must be posted at least twice a week and must contain words in its title (Lead Generation and Nurturing)and first paragraph that signal the topic, thus allowing search engines to find it, RSS feeds, bookmarking, and use of social media sites extend the reach of a blog.

Twitter is a social media that helps people and companies keep up with each other through short messages daily or multiple times a day. These messages are called Tweets and responses to them are called reTweets. These can be done using the computer or any internet-connected device such as a phone or Blackberry. A YouTube video can also get attention, go viral, or help to build your brand by extending your audience.

Facebook has become an essential tool for individuals and companies that want to connect with employees and prospects. By using Facebook profiles and messages, much can be learned about a company or individual. Relationships are started and maintained through Facebook.

LinkedIn is the premier businessperson’s social media. Through groups created on LinkedIn, a prospect can easily find a company or businessperson associated with a company or can learn about a variety of topics and products. Not only are relationships built, but products and services receive comments and recommendations.

More Later

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5Jun09 Birth to College Education - Lead Generation and Nurturing
Birth to College Education

Birth to College Education

Birth - Discovery of a New Person
There is excitement, anticipation, and apprehension when Mom and Dad first find out a little one is “on the way.” Each doctor’s appointment heightens the excitement and anticipation. And each time Mom hears the heartbeat or feels movement, the reality of the upcoming introduction is brought closer. Usually the mother-to-be reads everything she can to see what she should eat, how she should move, what music she should play, and how she should talk to her baby to influence him to healthy, smart, and ‘perfect in every way.’

Discover Your New Prospect

Discover Your New Prospect

Discover Your New Prospect

Just as you want your new baby to be ‘perfect in every way,’ you want to nurture your ideal prospect. So you need a profile of your ideal prospect. You need to determine if that prospect is a company with 100 to 500 employees or a company with more than 3,000 employees. You also need to know the type of industry your ideal prospect will be. And you want to create a profile that includes many other facts about your desired prospect. What kind of problems or whose problems were your products or solutions designed to solve? Once you can answer all the questions about your ideal prospect, to conduct effective nurturing you need to determine how you will be in the right place at the right time to meet this prospect. Obviously, a baby is made through a very specific meeting of two people, so the acquaintance of your prospect will be the result of an ‘engineered meeting,’ a planned meeting with a specific desired result.

Become Known

Become Known

Become Known

A new mom wants her baby to know her through her voice, her movements, her scent, and her touch. Long before the baby can say “Mommy” he knows she is his mommy. In much the same way, you want a prospective customer to know your name and many things about you even before you meet so you can do an effective job of nurturing.
That’s where “branding” comes into play in B2B marketing. Although you are marketing to prospective customer companies, the meeting and the response and decisions are functions of real people in those companies. People listen and read. People have emotions and form opinions. Their information, emotions, and opinions influence their purchasing decisions.
If one company has created awareness of their name and product through targeted messages, the prospect is more likely to ask questions of that company and begin to develop a relationship. That company has developed a brand by making itself distinct from its competition and telling prospects it is there and it can do what they need.
Brands are developed and messages are sent in a variety of ways today. There was a time when billboards, radio, and television were the methods of sending branding messages. Today social media - blogs, webinars, podcasts, and the use of Facebook and Twitter has become the preferred method to send marketing messages in both the B2C and B2B worlds. However, developing those messages takes thought leadership and marketing know-how

More later

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1Jun09 More and Better Leads, More Deals, and More Revenue

Sales<br /> Funnel

Sales Funnel


When we optimize our lead generation process the quality of our leads will improve, our sales cycle will be shortened, we will generate more and better leads, more deals and more revenue. So how do we go about improving our lead generation process?
There are at least 7 things we need to do.
1) Re-define what makes a “qualified” lead
2) Improve our landing pages
3) Create nurturing multi-contact campaigns
4) Create or improve your online surveys and submittal forms
5) Create lists that are targeted at niche markets
6) Conduct multiple tests to insure you have it right
7) Make sure your campaigns are automated
1) Re-define what makes a “qualified” lead
This gets everybody within the organization on the same page. We’ll know one when we see one. This definition becomes the basis for an effective “Lead Scoring” system. Once we have identified those characteristics that qualify a lead we can get sales and marketing working together managing and nurturing leads. Naturally, we want to get the “A” leads to the right sales people promptly so the organization can respond rapidly.
2) Improve our landing pages
When a prospect clicks on a search or a paid ad online, our landing page must provide the information that meets what he/she were looking for and our offer is compelling. In order for our landing page to be most effective it must deliver the content that clearly addresses precisely the problem the prospect is trying to solve. It must encourage the prospect to accept our offer. We must include a strong “call to action” if we hope to get the prospect to “Act Now.”
3) Create nurturing multi-contact campaigns
Once we have captured the lead we want to commence building credibility, building a solid relationship that creates in the mind of the prospect we are trustworthy professionals who are genuinely there to educate and inform them, to address their concerns and questions first and foremost. We need to be judicious in the frequency and timing of our touches. In the beginning of our campaigns we can touch frequently as we attempt to establish ourselves but then we need to spread out our contacts touching them approximately every 21 days. The control of the campaigns must be tightly managed so we do not have several people all communicating separately to this contact with too many touches, causing confusion with the prospect. We should have campaigns built for the various niche markets you serve so you get the right message to the right targets.
4) Create or improve your online surveys and submittal forms
Our surveys need to capture relevant prospect data. We must limit the amount of information we try to capture in the beginning while gradually collecting more info each time we interact with the prospect. We need to be sensitive to providing value when we are capturing data. What does the prospect get for providing us with their information. If we are to understand who they are and how we can meet their needs we will need to collect certain information. In our first or second contact we need to ask for permission to use their information and we must communicate our commitment to the prospect that the data will not be abused. Make sure you honor your commitments in this area.
5) Create lists that are targeted at niche markets
If our nurture campaigns are to be effective in building a credible trusting relationship we must develop carefully crafted messages that are targeted at each niche we serve and then we must make sure that each prospect is attached to the proper campaigns. These segmented lists ensure that we get the right message to the right people.
6) Conduct multiple tests to insure you have it right
SEO and PPC must be tailored to fit your organization’s needs. It must be personalized and your messages must be continually optimized. These activities are very labor intensive. You must be continually experimenting and evaluating these activities if you hope to achieve optimum results. Your testing needs to be consistent and repeated regularly. One shot testing won’t tell you very much.
7) Make sure your campaigns are automated
Lead generation, processing, scoring, nurturing, assigning are labor intensive. You should be working at shifting as much of these activities to automation systems that will save time and resources. There is so much activity going on with all the actions and interactions with prospects the potential for getting tangled up in your underwear is huge and of course when this happens the trust building results are diminished. The biggest premium to be gained from automation comes from the ease of gathering and analyzing performance metrics for marketing campaigns. This analysis can be used to improve future campaigns so that the organization is providing the best possible message to each prospect at the lowest possible cost.

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18May09 Growing Revenues Through Nurture Campaigns

Nurturing-Moms2

Most new capital equipment purchases have lengthy sales cycles that include careful research into identifying the best product fit, identifying any new product developments, determining whether improvements in products have been made that address existing problems, evaluating brands and evaluating vendor alternatives.

In a earlier blog we talked about In-Bound marketing as the most cost effective strategy for growing revenues. Now that we have captured this prospect who is NOT likely to be ready to make a purchase decision, we want to build credibility with the prospect so that when the organization is ready to make their purchase decision they will turn to us for a quotation. It is imperative we create an impression that we are experts in our field and that our people are available to provide helpful information (answers to their concerns) that will contribute to the prospect making a solid well informed purchase decision.
What we do NOT want to do is to come off as a slick pushy salesperson who engages in activities that the prospect interprets as pushy attempting to get the prospect to go through their sales process at a faster pace then they are ready to go. Remember, we are trying to increase our conversion rates so we grow revenues in these most difficult times.
One of the best approaches to creating the right impression is to ask good questions. Seek to really understand the prospects concerns. Don’t be in a hurry. Empathize with the prospect. In the first 10 days or so of your interaction make 3-4 contacts so you can gain as much understanding of their concerns and so that you understand their timetable for making a decision. Be sure to supply them with at least one good informative educational document that speaks to their main concerns.
If their timetable is uncertain or if their buying decision date is several months ahead then let them know you will be staying in touch with them. Place the prospect on a long term nurturing campaign that will touch the prospect at least every 21 days. As long as you are sending information that is viewed as helpful you will be building a credible relationship that has the highest possibility for conversion to a sale and thus growing revenues even in these slow times.
You will need CRM software that will enable you to automate this process otherwise your efforts will become too labor intensive and when this happens almost all other activities will take precedence over maintaining constant contact with those prospects in your pipeline. Growing revenues must remain your top priority, so get these campaigns automated so your conversion to sales remains as high as possible.
In a future blog we will address several sources for these educational or informative documents

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13May09 Business Development in These Times

We’ve cut back on everything we can identify that isn’t nailed down or covered by a contract. In sales and marketing we’ve tried to protect our team members so that we had an effective business development effort. In order to meet our expense reduction goals we scoured all those expenses not involving our personnel. We’ve backed out of a couple of shows we thought were marginal because they did not produce a sufficient volume of new business. We did not renew our Yellow Page contracts because our statistics on new business development sources ranked low. We postponed reprinting much of our literature and we cancelled a couple of direct mail campaigns. We have significantly reduced our advertising schedules in media that was not producing new business. We are still looking for more places to cut – the pressure is on!
We know we need to generate quality leads to keep our sales organization focused on business development in order to maintain our market position. Most of the out-bound marketing strategies have become increasingly less effective and increasingly more costly. So what do we do? Management is still pressuring us to reduce expenses all the while expecting sales to keep revenue coming in at high levels.
A while back we started to explore In-bound marketing techniques as a strategy for business development. A whole new ball game. We are exploring strategies that will increase the likelihood our prospects will find us and strategies that will move us up in all the search engines especially Google’s search engine. It’s been very frustrating at times because Google keeps changing the game causing us to move up one week and then back down another week. We have certainly learned a great deal about keyword searches, we’ve learned a great deal about our competition, we’ve learned about blogging but still have a long way to go to optimize our efforts in this area. We’d like to know more. We just got started on social networking. All these strategies to increase the volume of new business
We are convinced that this reasonably new frontier will be far more cost effective in new business development and it will be in step with how our prospects prefer to conduct their research around a purchase decision. It has provided us with the opportunity to establish ourselves as a credible source for our services. We have built nurturing campaigns that are implemented automatically in our CRM software a key strategy in our new business development strategy. The response to the information we are pumping out on these nurture campaigns has been very positive.

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13May09 Increase Revenues Any Time
Fishing lines to increase sales

Fishing lines to increase sales

Years ago when Guerilla Marketing was all the buzz I hopped onto the bandwagon with my small technology company and started dangling more of my fishing lines in the waters filled with my prospects fully expecting to experience an increase in revenues. This approach of using every arsenal at your disposal is still a valid approach in these times. A full court press aimed at increasing revenues must be every sales team’s top priority.

First order of business is to get every fishing line in the water that is represented in the In-Bound marketing arena. These fishing lines are the most cost effective strategies to increase revenues. Where do you rank on Google’s search engine for the most searched keywords and phrased? Are you on page one for any of theses keywords or phrases? Do you have a blog? Are you posting blogs regularly? Are you involved in a couple of the social networks? On your home page do you offer case studies, white papers and research reports? Do you have landing pages connected to each of these FREE information sources? These fishing lines are but a few of the possible fishing lines you can have in the water so you can catch the greatest number of prospects and convert them inot customers thus increasing revenues. Are you conducting educational webinars demonstrating your expertise on various vital issues within your industry. Becoming known as an industry experts puts a huge fishing line with big bait for you and your organization.

Consider all the fishiing lines you could have in the water in your Outbound marketing strategy! So how’s your database looking these days? Do you have accurate and complete contact information including email addresses at least at all the influencer positions? Do you have a master SIC Code list that thoroughly reflects your customer database? Have you run this master SIC Code list against several list vendor’s database to see if you are missing prospect records. You need to get your database updated. Focus on both obtaining missing accounts and building your “contact database” because it’s those contacts you need to market to if you hope to increase revenues.

Promotional campaigns!! Everyone is looking for a deal. Do you have this line in the water? How many campaigns do you have going? How often are you running promotional campaigns. How are you getting the word out on your promotional campaigns? Many of these fishing lines in the water will catch fish and increase your revenues.

When I was attempting to implement Guerilla Marketing in my little technology company we gathered our key team members together weekly to brainstorm new and additional ways to drop more fishing lines in the water so we could increase our revenues. This approach was extremely successful in maximizing the number of lines in the water and ultimately increased our revenues beyond our greatest expectations.

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