An interesting post by Chris Koch introduces a phase to precede the four traditional buying process stages of business-to-business marketing and sales …
Awareness > Interest > Preference > Commitment
Chris uses the “epiphany stage” to describe the activity that comes before the interest phase, and the revised buying process looks like this:
Epiphany > Awareness > Interest > Preference > Commitment
As Director of Research and Thought Leadership at ITSMA (IT Services Marketing Association—the trade group for marketing execs at companies providing technology-related services and solutions), Chris and his colleagues found that marketers were not paying attention to people in this phase because they weren’t yet sales leads:
“This is the stage that occurs long before any discussion of products, services, or RFPs—indeed, it occurs before customers have even begun to think about a purchase. However, there is something important that happens at this stage: It is the point at which customers come to the realization of an important business need.”
He notes a task of the marketer in the epiphany phase is to engage people and generate demand by conveying thought leadership through the use of social media:
“These people are prospects, not leads. The way we turn prospects into leads is to gain their trust. We gain their trust by reaching out to them with smart, engaging, educational content.”
Chris and his team recommend three steps to successfully connect with those in the epiphany stage, and the most important for me is the suggestion to refocus thought leadership toward “revealing future trends and articulating the business challenges and opportunities that will likely result from those trends.”
We all agree on the importance of meaningful content for demand generation, and it’s good to see Chris shining a light on what should drive that content: thought leadership around trends, business challenges and opportunities for prospects to improve their business outcomes.
I would be remiss if I didn’t add another perspective on the epiphany phase. We are strong advocates for using social media both in our client programs and our own marketing initiatives, and we continually see positive results in generating demand.
But we also have a lengthy and successful track record of deploying outbound sales lead generation programs to proactively reach out to, identify and engage with sales prospects in the epiphany stage. This timely market canvassing not only identifies opportunities that are business need and business project “seedlings”—proactive contact programs go a long way toward building relationships for our clients and establishing roles for them early-on as trusted advisors.
Two killer apps: FaceTime and face time.
The former is new: FaceTime is the name of the iPhone 4’s two-way video calling feature.
The latter leads all sales best practices: face time is meeting face-to-face with qualified business sales leads to understand their needs and move them toward your solution.
Both FaceTime and face time share great people-to-people stuff: connecting and spontaneously participating in conversations that range from stories about what we’re thinking, feeling and doing in our lives to more focused, task-oriented discussions.
One feels more B2C: FaceTime is pitched as a friends-and-family tool for staying in touch and sharing.
The other is more B2B: face time conversations—by addressing challenges, buying processes, differentiators and objections—deepen business relationships and move them on to the next best action steps.
I continue to be astonished that some people in charge of sales and marketing strategy are not engaging sales prospects personally—either via phone time or face time—and instead relying heavily on virtual tools and virtual relationships to tell them whether or not a prospect is interested.
I really appreciate these comments from a recent blog by Chris Koch, Director of Research and Thought Leadership at ITSMA (IT Services Marketing Association):
“We all know that B2B decisions take a long time and are made by committee and logic rather than individuals and impulse. It’s hard to imagine that kind of a complex, long-term, multi-person relationship ever happening entirely or even mostly in social media. At the C-level especially, face-to-face remains the killer app for everyone involved.”
Imagine that: the real killer app for sales lead generation is getting together and talking.
The mandate to clean up and use in-house databases is grounded in a rock-solid objective: leverage existing customer and prospect data to drive cross-selling, up-selling and new sales.
So while a scrub is a valid objective, a mere clean-up falls short in uncovering the potential of your database. Traditional clean-up programs simply replace dirty or missing data with fresh, correct data. What they usually don't do is incorporate segmentation. Your list is now clean but you're consigned to continue an expensive shotgun approach to marketing.
With a clean list that is also segmented you're able to:
- Focus your resources on the best-performing segments.
- Implement database marketing that lets you strategically target high-priority prospects.
- Reduce your marketing spend.
- Learn more about your prospects and your market through continual testing.
I encourage clients to tap the potential of their databases. Clean them, certainly, but segment them as well and you'll reap more opportunities. For more in-depth information download How Relational Segmentation Techniques Help Achieve Higher Sales at Lower Cost
The crowd thinned out a bit on day three, partially due to travel schedules and partially because there was, apparently, a lot of celebration going on after the fiesta following day two.
Here are the final day's bullets and an observation:
- Inside sales or telesales to increase dramatically between now and 2015.
- Capable inside sales support will increase in value due to availability of the resource and timeliness of follow-up.
- Remote, closer to the client, "Demand Centers" will replace centralized marketing functions.
- Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence platforms will explode (as with marketing automation) to empower sales with information.
- While content will still be king (in marketing communications), clean, segmented data will be "co-king" (for database marketing).
One of the presenters has been working with SiriusDecisions for over two years and states that fixing what is broken is a journey, not a destination. And, as quickly as you master one technology it will be replaced with a new, better one. In the words of Isaac Asimov:
"The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be."
My take on the SiriusDecisions Summit? Without wanting to sound too dramatic, it was perhaps the most important, valuable, game changing event I have ever attended. I would recommend it to anyone.
A very interesting day at the SiriusDecisions Summit with a focus on the conference theme: Measure, Align, Transform
Here are some bullets and an observation:
- Siemens PLM has reduced marketing expense and increased revenue working with Sirius on a number of things including marketing and sales alignment.
- Tony Jaros spoke about the new "critical task families": Seed, Create Demand, Enable (sales), Accelerate (pipeline), Nurture—the "sea change" is that marketing must move from only creating demand to owning pieces and parts of the entire waterfall (Inquiry, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Accepted Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Closed).
- Tony referred to the never-never land between SAL and SQL as Lead Purgatory and stated that this problem was a critical one to fix.
- Tony also spoke about the great nurture debate—who should nurture opportunities? He emphatically recommended that marketing should be the owner of this important task.
- By 2015, 75% of all leads will come from your company's website—according to SiriusDecisions.
- Leads should have a "born on" date and if they don't move to SQL by a certain date (60 days was suggested but then thought to be too long) they should go back to marketing for nurturing.
I spoke with SiriusDecisions' co-founder John Neeson during the evening reception (glass of wine in hand) and suggested that his firm put more and more responsibility on marketing (including knowledge management, document management for proposals and on demand collateral and market intelligence). His point is that marketing must move from throwing leads over the fence (creating demand) to an active role from the beginning to the end of the waterfall. I expressed my concern that until we hold sales accountable, no amount of investment is going to pay off. I added that today's marketing automation solutions are a faster, less expensive way to waste leads and that unless sales accountability issues were fixed, companies should expect the same results.
More tomorrow!
At any given point in time, roughly 5% of your target audience is in the market for your product or solution. So, if you have 1,000 targets, 50 of them are in the market to buy your product or solution—or a competitor's solution, now.
Many companies treat all of their targets exactly the same, marketing to them equally. Smart marketing execs, however, know how to apply relational segmentation to more effectively and efficiently ferret out the 50 and save money to boot.
If your average lead rate is 5%, that means among some segments the rate is as low as 1% and as high as 9%, so figuring out which groups of targets have an average lead rate or higher and focusing your energies on them is the best way to be effective and efficient with short-supply resources.
So how do these marketing execs avoid the shotgun approach and pinpoint the 600 or so targets that will yield the best results? Testing. By SIC code, by size of company, by decision maker level, by annual growth percentage, by geography, by offer, by media ... there's almost no end to the variables you can test to reveal your best prospects, at a fraction of the spend.
Take a look at the chart below and see how relational segmentation can work for you.
Download How Relational Segmentation Techniques Help Achieve Higher Sales at Lower Cost for more in-depth information.
Please join Mac McIntosh and me as we host a webinar on Wednesday, April 28 at 2 p.m. EST. Mac is the President of Mac McIntosh Inc., a leader in B2B marketing consulting. We will be discussing the topic "Webinar Leads Demystified".
During the discussion you will learn how to optimize webinar investments and avoid common mistakes. One of the key mistakes that reduce the return on this marketing investment is sending the entire batch of registrant and/or attendee names over to sales immediately for conversion.
Instead, learn how to maximize the value of these prospects with:
- lead evaluation strategies
- data collection ideas for additional qualification
- nurturing best practices
- tips for perfecting the sales hand-off process
We look forward to sharing this valuable information with you.
For more information and to register, click here.
My favorite stories are about client successes. The best one of these is work we did for a global consulting company with BPO offerings across a number of verticals. On one project we deployed one of our people for a full quarter and they were tasked with making contact with the CFO at the nation's top 50 utilities.
Most people I tell this story to, particularly C-level and senior sales executives, feel that anyone contacting them as many as forty-two times would not only never get their business—they might end up putting us on the wrong side of a "nasty-gram"...
First, let me tell you what our associate actually did, and then how it worked out for our client.
A b2b lead generation touch cycle at the C-level frequently includes the following:
1. Navigation calls to confirm CFO contact information and administrative support (sometimes this can take as many as three contacts).
2. A series of attempts and discussions with administrators to first sell them on our client's solution and then sell them on helping us get it front of their boss (this could take up to another three contacts—and it does not always work).
3. Multiple cycles of contact that include calls, voicemails and immediate email follow ups—a cycle can include as many as six attempted calls, three voicemails and three emails over 10 business days.
4. On the last cycle of attempts (three or four cycles usually) our voicemail explains that we do not want to pester the individual we have targeted, that we would like to talk, but won't leave another message and the emails follow suit. Approximately 30 percent of all opportunities created for clients are as the result of a telephone call or reply to an email from our prospect.
Take the three navigation calls and add six more calls to the administrator, some calls early in the morning, lunch time and early in the evening to try to reach the decision-maker before and/or after hours—and three cycles totaling nine calls, nine voicemails and nine emails (and throw in a package sent overnight that contained a magazine with an article about our client's success with the CFO at another utility) and it does not take long to add up to forty-two touches.
So here is what happened:
1. The CFO called us back after the 42nd touch and said "don't stop calling me... you are my conscience. I have listened to and saved your voicemails and I have saved some of your emails and I want to talk to you—I have just been extremely busy. Call me back in two weeks on Tuesday at 10:00 AM and I will take that call".
2. Two weeks later we generated a high quality opportunity for our client.
3. It closed in six months for $1,000,000,000. Yes, a billion.
Is 42 touches too many? Hardly!
♪ Take this lead and shove it
♪ I ain't following up no more
♪ My innocence left, and with it went, all the reasons I was working for
♪ You better not try to stand in my way
♪ As I'm walking out the door
♪ So take this lead and shove it, I ain't following up no more
With apologies to David Allan Coe, this is how many sales reps feel about the leads they get. They don't feel they receive sales qualified leads that are going to help them build their sales lead pipeline.
Like you probably, I'm tired of hearing about (even talking about) the lack of alignment between marketing and sales. However, the poor results from this lack of alignment are going to continue, if not get worse, unless some very specific changes are made.
I was talking to a prospect last week; and they described their process as follows:
Raw Leads (100%) → Marketing Qualified Leads (25%) → Sales Qualified Leads (25%)
In that situation, for every one hundred raw inquiries or "leads" the company generates—sales ends up with 25 of them. Sales reps then work the "leads" down to about six qualified opportunities. That is a lot of work for a sales rep, especially if they are involved in active sales cycles and don't have an affinity and/or aptitude for prospecting (and most don't).
According to CSO Insights, just about one out of two salespeople achieved quota in 2008; and quotas went up in 2009! Worse yet, 65% of companies report that their 2009 marketing spend will be equal to or less than 2008. So, it would be unrealistic to expect results to improve this year—in fact we expect them to be substantially worse.
There is a way you can change the outcome! First, let's look at the three most common "lead" handling scenarios:
Most Common
Inquiries and "leads" are sent to sales, end up in a black hole, finger pointing ensues between marketing and sales, inevitably someone is fired, and there's no return on investment.
Somewhat Less Common
Inquiries and "leads" are pre-qualified by an internal or outsourced inside sales team, 25% result in "marketing qualified leads", these are sent to sales; sales works about half of them (at best) and identifies three opportunities that they will invest time on. The other, roughly twenty-two, companies are never nurtured and are squandered.
Not Common
Responses are pre-qualified by internal or external inside sales team. Sales qualified lead criteria is established and a process for identifying and handing off sales ready leads is designed and executed. Effective multi-touch, multi-media and multi-cycle processes yield six leads that are sales ready (without sales having to work twenty five opportunities—giving them time to do what they do best which is sell) and nineteen longer-term opportunities go to inside sales for nurturing.
Remarkably, senior managers do not understand why the sales force should not work "marketing leads" and why the cost of having sales do any filtering of leads is expensive (both from the standpoint of real cost and opportunity cost). The cost of mishandling leads is so high that it is senseless not do something about it. The roadmap for best practices in lead handling is the "Not Common" scenario above. How likely are you to change your processes to match that scenario?
If you find that your sales force takes your leads and shoves them, maybe you better find out why.
As obvious as it might seem, there are some basic questions to ask about marketing spend when developing your marketing strategy—and you will be surprised by the answers:
1. How much will each marketing campaign really cost?
2. Does each have a clear objective (awareness, interest, response)?
3. What are the expected results (best and worst case)?
4. On what basis are those results expected?
5. Would you approve a campaign if you knew in advance the results would come in "worst case"?
6. What were the results of previous, similar campaigns? If the answer is "not very good," why is it being done again?
7. If a campaign has never been tried before, has it been tested? If not, why not?
8. How critical is it to do this campaign now?
9. What process is going to be used to qualify, distribute and measure follow-up on responses?
10. When and how will you assess the results of each campaign?
How many low-yield marketing campaigns is your company about to execute? Take a look at what is planned for your company, division or department, and then ask the questions above.
If answers to these questions set off red flags for you, then stop the spending carousel in which dollars are going out with certainty while resulting revenue is coming in with less certainty. The tendency of most managers is to keep the carousel going. They fear jeopardizing short-term sales if existing or planned programs are reduced or eliminated. Using marketing best practices allows you to avoid the problem of spending money without return.
The reality is that this faulty thinking is costing your company tens of thousands of dollars. Keep in mind that you can always reinstate a campaign later, but money spent today is gone forever. Cash is king. Spend yours wisely.