25 May |
The Missing Link in Lead Qualification Systems: Sales |
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Demand generation marketers often spend countless hours designing and fine-tuning their lead handling systems. Complicated flow charts are created, lead questionnaire content is debated endlessly, forms are designed, and telemarketing and email scripts are reviewed ad nauseam. Yet, many of these sophisticated marketers overlook the single, most crucial element of a successful lead qualification system. What is it? Field buy-in is crucial For some reason, the sales force is often left “out of the loop” when it comes to lead planning. This only adds to the age-old distrust and outright enmity between marketing and sales organizations in so many companies. No matter how sophisticated your lead handling and qualifications systems are, they won’t achieve optimum results unless your sales force is empowered to take ownership of the process. To make this happen, good demand generation marketers need to follow these simple guidelines: Explain your objective upfront— Make it clear that your lead handling system is being designed to make the sales force’s job easier, not so marketing can “look over their shoulder” or take the credit for their success. Solicit input, accept
Read more...19 May |
Social Media Success Won’t Fix a Broken Sales Funnel |
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If you are a B2B marketer looking to use social media as a way to generate more sales leads, by all means test and experiment with it. However, first be sure that your CRM and lead handling systems are working properly. Otherwise, you will only make a bad situation worse. All leads should be qualified and nurtured A lot of social media gurus are telling us that, since social media is different, its success should be measured differently. This is complete nonsense. Whether you generate inquiries from social or “conventional” media, they should all be treated the same way and measured with the same metric. In practice, this means: Qualify every lead— before you pass it on to your sales people for follow-up, no matter where the lead came from. Leads that aren’t ready for follow-up should be nurtured until they are. Track and source conversions accurately— This is especially important when using social media, because its “free” nature can make any leads it generates look far less expensive than inquiries generated from “paid” sources. However, this can be especially misleading with social media because you can’t always control where and to whom your message
Read more...10 May |
A Humorous Look at Social Media |
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I am off to the B2B Summit in Phoenix, Arizona and while I am gone, I thought you would enjoy this short video that we put together.
Read more...04 May |
Social Media for Demand Generation….Is it more of a B2C than a B2B phenomenon? |
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My most recent post on social media’s pros and cons drew a lot of feedback. So, I thought we should continue the “conversation” by offering a few more opinions from this admittedly old-school but open minded marketing professional about the value (or lack thereof) of social media as a demand generation medium. As always, I welcome your continued comments. Better for Small B2C Marketers? If you look at the biggest and most successful users of Twitter and Facebook, they seem to be B2C marketers. For example, Starbucks (@Starbucks) and Zappos (@Zappos) are using Twitter apparently to not only engage consumers with their brand but also to drive direct sales and distribute promotional discounts. Now, it turns out that small businesses (B2C) have also jumped on the Twitter bandwagon in a big way. From pizza parlors to independent and specialty retailers, small businesses are increasingly using Twitter to publicize special discounts and promotions and solicit customer feedback and many report they are quite happy with the results. From my perspective, Twitter as a marketing tool actually makes perfect sense for small businesses two reasons: (1) they have limited ad budgets,
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