ViewPoint | The Truth About Lead Generation

Day #1: Pardot Users Conference—Lead Management Live from the ATL

  

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According to Pardot’s entertaining co-founder and COO, Adam Blitzer, Pardot is a popular word in Latvia; and he says his using it for social media research brings in all sorts of interesting Latvian hits. He blamed co-founder David Cummings for the name, but as it turns out David must have known what he was doing because Pardot is Latvian for “SELL”.

Highlights from Adam Blitzer’s presentation:

1. I can’t go into the details here, but the use of competitor names on landing pages linked to Google ads is a sweet idea.
2. If you don’t use a suppression list, start.
3. Make the email templates static and have the landing pages where they are pointing the place for fresh copy.
4. I was impressed that Pardot “manually” inspects each lead. They don’t depend entirely on scoring and he said that many would find it funny that an automation company would say “scoring is not everything”.
5. Pardot measures marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads and the number of searches that had the word Pardot in them (they want that increasing).
6. Pardot uses, effectively, lumpy mailers (yes, snail mail—and I am hearing that more and more).

Also on the platform today was Andrew Gaffney, founder and editor of DemandGen Report. Andrew’s list has skyrocketed to over 24,000 subscribers and that is due to the quality of the content. Here are highlights from Andrew’s comments.

1. Sales is more interested in visibility into pipeline today than they have ever been before. Sales better understands the importance of marketing in larger companies, though there are still communication issues in small to medium (and some large) companies.
2. Andrew provided rough statistics related to the SiriusDecisions waterfall: Inquiry to Marketing Qualified Lead: 5%, MQL to Sales Accepted Lead: 60%, SAL to Sales Qualified Lead: 55%, SQL to close: 25%. (Personally, it amazes me that 1,000 inquiries might yield as few as four deals—yet companies push for leads at the lowest possible cost, clutter the pipeline with low-level, unfiltered, poor-quality leads which leads to lower acceptance rates by sales, dissatisfaction and even fewer closed deals. Andrew made the point that large companies are finding success following SiriusDecisions guidance and I see the same.)
3. Andrew recommended Guy Powell’s book “Marketing Calculator” and referenced a few social media tips that made me want to own the book.
4. He stated that leads should have “freshness dates” and that older leads should be enhanced routinely.

That’s it for Day #1.  More after Day #2.  Signing off from the ATL.

Follow the conference on Twitter with #Pardot2010.