Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

I read the recent post in the blog of Morgan Stewart, Director of Research and Strategy at ExactTarget, (a Market2Lead partner and all around good guys!) They just released a fascinating report they created with Econsultancy, on "Marketing Budgets 2010: Effectiveness, Measurement & Allocation". Great stuff and worth looking at the snapshot of the slides on Morgan's blog.  One slide in particular caught my attention:

So in their survey, 79% said increased Sales was a key metric for measuring marketing effectiveness, followed by traffic to the website at 71%. Wow. Yes I know increased sales is a goal of marketing, but it is a measure of the effectiveness of the entire company. Every other department could be doing awful, marketing is knocking the ball out of the park and gets a bloody nose because sales are down! And website visits - a measure of marketing effectiveness? So the increase in visits to Bank of America's website because of their notoriety over paying large bonuses after the bailout means Marketing is doing a good job (I hope they got bonuses for that).   My point is that an effective metric has to demonstrate a strong causal relationship to the thing it supposed to measure. Sales revenue is a good measure of the effectiveness of the channel, and the product/service. Website visits are a good measure of the brand awareness (both good and bad). Neither are good measures of overall marketing effectiveness.

Some good measures of marketing effectiveness

So what are some good measures of marketing effectiveness. Remember effectiveness is defined as doing the right things, and efficiency is doing things right. You combine both to get greater productivity. Let's measure effectiveness based on where you might allocate your marketing budget:

net new lead generation: Effectiveness measure is cost per "Sales Accepted" marketing lead

Notice that I am less interested in cost per "new" lead because anyone can drag in a bunch of garbage leads at a low price. A "sales accepted" marketing lead means that Sales is telling you that it is acceptable quality.

Lead nurturing: Effectiveness measure is velocity of leads through the funnel, or number of new opportunities from marketing leads. You can also look at your on going response rates to campaigns, how many open, clicked downloaded, although you have to be careful not to confuse this with the asset performance - A/B testing!

Awareness: Effectiveness measure could be brand recognition, website visits, social media mentions, traditional media mentions, etc

Loyalty marketing: Customer retention, satisfaction as mentioned in the report

Asset performance: Web pages per visit, asset downloads, form completion rates, event attendance.

A single measure of Marketing effectiveness?

I don't believe there is a single good measure of marketing effectiveness. All the ones I mentioned measure specific areas of marketing. Marketing ROI you say? So everything marketing does fits into nice little programs that are time bound, produce revenue in the near future and can be measured easily...not! Marketing ROI is good for specific campaigns.  So, anyone out there have any ideas for a good single measure of marketing effectiveness?

-Kevin

The Sales and Marketing Chasm

It appears that every Marketing and Sales product vendor has a panacea for the chasm between marketing and sales. They don't.  So let's get an agreement on the forms the chasm takes, and list the areas of improvement that can bridge the gap.

Lead Generation is fundamental to marketing performance

The purpose of the marketing demand generation group(s) is to:

• Generate many new high quality leads
• Nurturing the in-house database to drive more opportunities out of it sooner
• Increase the velocity of opportunities in the funnel
• Maintain the loyalty of the installed base

To accomplish these we leverage a mix of awareness, assets, and programs through a variety of media: web, events, webinars, partners, in house database emails to opt-ins. We need to balance awareness and brand building against lead generation. We need to create training materials and sales collateral for multiple channels. The output from marketing from a Sales perspective, and by which they measure marketing, is:

1. Marketing Qualified Leads
2. Assets (collateral, Website)
3. Lead nurturing programs
4. Brand equity (awareness, attributes, loyalty, perceived quality)
5. Channel training (competitive info, product info, target market info)
6. Partner relationships

Whilst the relative priority of these things may vary from firm to firm, most sales folks would put leads at the top of the list. The 2009 CSO report indicates that Sales generate 52% of their own leads ( a significant increase in the past few years) and that marketing contributes just 24% (a significant decrease).  If you want to align marketing and sales, first and foremost measure your marketing team on that number. If you are producing lots of high quality leads for Sales, many of your other weaknesses can be overlooked. If you are failing to produce leads, or nurture leads into opportunities, the chasm from a sales perspective is that marketing does not understand what Sales needs - warm qualified leads.

Marketing has a finite budget to spend on these 6 areas. It behooves the VP of marketing to win agreement with the Sales peers on the relative importance of these marketing deliverables in the coming year. Sales and marketing alignment starts at the top. But this is only half of the bridge over the chasm.

What does Sales need to deliver to Marketing?

Marketing wants:

1. Follow up to all marketing qualified leads
2. A feedback mechanism that gives a measure on where the best and worst leads are coming from
3. Support and attendance at prospect events and training
4. Persistence with regard to prospects who are not quite ready to buy
5. Adherence to process
6. Clean and complete contact and account data in the CRM
7. Behavior that aligns with the brand
8. Accurate forecasts

As with the marketing list, the first one is very important. Lead generation can consume a large portion of the marketing budget, and the idea that Sales ignores 80% of these leads drives marketing crazy. This problem is resolved with a rock solid lead management process, an agreement of what a Marketing Qualified Lead is, and a process in the CRM/SFA to track timely sales followup to new marketing qualified leads (typically <2 business days). It also requires that Sales management step up and hold their team accountable for lead follow-ups.

Sales is arguably the most accountable organization in a company. Where else are up to half of the team turned over every year if they don't meet their goals? Marketing in B2B companies has probably been the least accountable, with the exception that the VP of marketing gets ejected after 22 months. My point is this. Don't expect what you don't inspect. Sales is very accountable because we have put systems in place to measure everything they do as it relates to closing business. Following up on marketing leads, quality and completeness of the data in CRM, accurate forecasting are important Sales metrics too and need more scrutiny from Sales management.

On the marketing side, Marketing Automation provides the measurability tools required to measure net new leads, lead quality, asset quality and usage, and efficacy of lead nurturing. So start measuring them, and holding marketing accountable for their deliverables to Sales. The facts will crush the finger pointers.
 

Measuring The Influence of Marketing - ROMI

I am delighted to see the B2B industry move towards greater accountability and metrics for Marketing. But the use of marketing automation systems, email platforms, web analytics, and online advertising is flooding marketers with lots of raw data.  I suspect that many marketing folks who didn't have to worry so much about ROMI in the past are struggling to organize the mountain of data in a way that helps them make better decisions, and demonstrates their positive influence on the business results.

Over the coming weeks I want to focus on one marketing KPI (Key performance Indicator) in each post, and elucidate the benefits of it. I want to start with a KPI that shows total responses in the period.

What is Total Marketing Responses Per Period?

A few months ago Megan Heuer from Sirius Decisions gave an excellent presentation on Marketing KPIs, and in it she said "Never confuse activity with results." 

So whilst you may send lots of emails, and host webinars, and attend trade shows, counting the responses to these programs is a good measure of the results! Marketing is tasked with creating demand (lead generation is just a portion of this). An effective measure of demand, in addition to actually linking opportunities back to marketing, is to measure the program responses you are getting. With a marketing intelligence business intelligence database such as the one included with Market2Lead's enterprise edition, one can segment out all responses by contact type. In this way you can tell at a glance how much of your efforts are going to net new lead generation, versus lead nurturing, vs installed base loyalty marketing.

How do you measure it?

What constitutes a response? Is a website visit a response? Is a card swipe at  a trade show a response?  If I register for a webinar, and subsequently attend the webinar is that one response or two? Is downloading a case study which doesn't require an registration a response? The important point here is that you decide these things at the outset, and stick to the definitions, because you want to see the month to month trends. Here are my recommendations:

• A website visit is a single response independent of how many pages were viewed
• Registering for a webinar and subsequent attendance represents two responses
• Downloading "free" assets from your website are not additional responses beyond the website visit
• Downloading premium assets that require registration are each a response
• Every registration is a response, but not every response requires registration
• Card swipes at a trade show because people want to put their name in for a free iPod raffle is not worthy of a response
• Responses from anonymous visits to your website, are real responses.
• Importing a list of contacts who have had no inbound interaction with your company, does not constitute responses.
• Unsubscribes and profile updates are not responses
• Email opens are not responses, but email click throughs are responses
• Telemarketing "connects" are responses
• Incoming calls to telemarketing, and contact us form submissions, are responses
• Syndicated content downloads are responses
• Comments added to a company affiliated blog are responses
• Re-tweets of your twitter content are responses

Don't forget to tag all your contacts with a contact type (prospect, customer, analyst, media, competitor, ex-customer etc) so you can slice and dice the data and figure out who you are really marketing to!  I am interested to hear your responses!

-Kevin

Why is supporting duplicate contacts based on email address important?

Recently, in a conversation with Marketing Automation analyst David Raab, we discussed why anyone would actually want to support multiple prospect records with the same email address in their marketing automation system. This may be a religious war right up there with Captain Kirk vs Captain Picard or Emacs versus VI (ok, maybe I'm a nerd...).

Some marketing automation systems do not support multiple contacts with the same email address.  As a marketing purest I agree with the concept, but unfortunately the buying public does not! Here are three reasons why you will benefit from supporting multiple contacts with the same email address in you marketing automation system.

3 reasons why marketing automation systems should support duplicate email addresses

1. Salesforce.com is notorious for permitting duplicates. Sales people simply add new contacts and leads without hitting the link to check to see if the person already exists in the database. Why is this a problem? Consider this scenario.
   Lead exists in database, synched between Marketing Automation and CRM. Sales gal adds a duplicate contact, same email address.Marketing automation system that only supports one contact per email address cannot synch the duplicate over. Marketing continues to record interactions with the original contact whilst sales records their interactions in the duplicate copy. At some point thecontact tells the rep they want to unsubscribe. Sales gal unsubscribes the non-synching duplicate in CRM.Trouble looms.
2. Many companies think of Leads, not as people, but as early stage opportunities for products. So one person, may represent several leads (interested in several products). In my naive marketing state some years ago I attempted to tell customers what abad idea this was. Telling billion dollar firms to rewire their sales process and CRM, and re-train the global sales team, to accommodate purest marketing concepts...ahhh not such a good idea. This is one of the leading reasons marketing automation systems that cannot support multiple contacts with same email address are often not integrated with a CRM!
3. A slightly different twist on #2 is when different divisions of the same firm, may have contacts who are interested in different products, and have different contact owners. If a person expresses a different product interest by registering for a document or event for a different product, the marketing automation system should be able to create a new contact record for that person, because the CRM will assign ownership to a different individual in a different division. You can still create "fatigue" rules to ensure that the person doesn't get overloaded with email from multiple divisions, but their contact records for each division can be unique. This is considered a very cool feature by some of our Market2Lead enterprise accounts.

Bottom line, life is much better, and data quality is higher if you have a marketing automation system that lets you deduplicate on any combination of fields you choose, but still maintains a separate master opt-out database so that if any of the duplicate contacts opts out at a global level, no email goes to any of the contacts with that email address. It goes without saying that our global customers drove us to develop Market2Lead this way, and we thank them for it! Marketing listening to Sales.

-Kevin

PS sorry I neglected my blogging for a few weeks we were finishing up our new website. Check it out! Lots of lovely new short video demos of the application.

When marketing automation goes awry

Some time ago I reviewed an RFP for Marketing Automation. It included items which immediately signaled to me that the company in question may be headed down a path that would drive them crazy. Here are some of the sample questions from the RFP:

• Must provide the capability to identify all the lists a given contact is on
• Requires list permission management
• Must be able to set time based usage limits for a list. For example, maximum usage is once every 2 months

Do you recognize the pain this company will face if they go down this road? What they want is data entitlement and fatigue management functionality, but they are going after it by looking for a vendor that accomplishes this via static lists. "That's gonna hurt!"  An example will help explain why (or perhaps you already know the pain). Let's start with how it should work.

Effective Marketing Automation System:

Let's say you are going to roll out a webinar program. You will email an invitation to a list, have the webinar, and update your database. In the process you create a production list for folks you want to invite, a seed list of internal people, and an exclusion list of people you always want to exclude (all competitors, leads marked as junk or disqualified etc). The list segmentation to build these lists only has to draw on contact records for all the information needed to build lists. And if you want to set up a fatigue rule to control how often someone can be emailed, you simply build a dynamic exclusion list that excludes everyone in a chosen segment who got a alternative offer in the past 10 days.

The registrations for the webinar automatically update the contact record, so a reminder email to registrants, and a last minute 2nd invitation to non-registrants can be sent automatically. After the webinar the attendees are flagged as having attended in the contact record. And you are ready to start all over again in another program! This is how Market2Lead works for instance. There is NO behavioral data (such as attended or registered) stored in static lists, because that would create pockets of behavioral data outside the contact record in static lists that have to be searched every time you build a new production list.

Ineffective Marketing Automation System structure:

For the same webinar, you had to create new static lists containing the people who registered or attended. This is where their behavioral information is stored for this event, instead of in the contact record itself. As a result, when you need to make production lists for new programs you have to segment based on the demographic data in the contact record and know all the static lists (data pockets) that need to be invoked to see what behaviors they include. Pretty soon you are going to have thousands of lists. What happens if someone accidentally deletes a list? How do you organize and maintain all these lists so you can find them? Is there any way to know what lists a contact is in?  How do new people in the organization know which existing lists to add new registrants to when they have a new response?

What the Marketing Automation RFP should have said:
The headaches would be much less for this company if the RFP read:

• Must be able to see all contact activity in the contact record including web visits, registrations, attendance etc
• Must include data entitlement to restrict marketers in one division from marketing to contacts from another division
• Must provide facility for fatigue rules so that contacts are not "over marketed"

Behavioral data, such as campaign responses,  belongs in the contact’s record, not in static lists or data cards or anywhere else. One database please. One place to look for data! FYI Market2Lead's contact record looks like this:

-Kevin

Who cares what you're selling, what are customers buying

Too often we get so wrapped up in what we are selling that we don’t pay enough attention to what people are actually buying. Sales people do this constantly. It is a useful exercise for your marketing team to compare what your website (and those of your competitors) says you are selling, to a list you create on what you believe your prospects are buying. The differences may surprise you.

I’ll go first, with the product being marketing automation.

What are people really buying with Marketing Automation?

Here is what prospects tell us they need, and what we find in marketing automation vendor websites:

• Save time, do more with less (productivity)
• An ability to execute effective automated drip campaigns (efficiency)
• A means to focus marketing budget and measure ROI (measurability)
• A way to improve the quality of leads passed to sales (quality)
• Ability to generate more leads with better response management (productivity)

And here is a perspective on what many are probably buying with Marketing Automation software in addition to the things listed above:

• Marketing accountability
• A way to justify their marketing budgets
• Job security, personal career success, recognition
• A way out of the chaos of trying to manage campaigns manually
• A way to ensure sales are following up on marketing leads
• An improved relationship with Sales
• A way to keep their data cleaner
• Early adopter credentials
• A boost for their resume and future career prospects
• Less overtime, no more working on weekends
• Best practices in lead nurturing and demand generation
• More revenue or profit
• A competitive edge
• A smart partner that will help them through a rough patch
• Buying better teamwork for geographically dispersed team members
• Buying down risk in achieving annual goals
• Head room to grow

Here are a few more thoughts, not germane to Marketing Automation. Perhaps your customers are buying peace of mind, an outside firm to blame if something goes wrong, a get out of jail free card (they are following the law – SarBox), or they are buying a better world for their children.

You could take this down to the next level and break it out by each of the four buying influence roles – economic buyer, technical buyer, user and coach. Okay, your turn, what are your customers buying? Is that how you and your sales people communicate with them?

-Kevin

How to budget For Marketing Automation Software in 2010

You know its October when the mornings get darker and damper, and the halls echo with whispered budget conversations.  The budget debates in marketing invariably settle into two areas:

• Disagreement over budget allocation between marketing groups
• Disagreement over where the budget cut line should rest

There is never disagreement on the things that clearly have to be done, nor the things that are outrageous “nice to haves” destined for the circular filing cabinet in the corner of your office. Many of us are facing flat budgets or even reduced budgets in 2010 over 2009, and at the same time there is an expectation that the company can grow next year.  This means that in order to add something new, like Marketing Automation Software, above the cut line, something else may have to move below the cut line. It is not sufficient to prove that Marketing Automation is worthy of being considered, you have to prove it is more worthy than something else!  In addition, you have to posit that it can help you increase your results over prior years’ performance.

Which Marketing Automation results will drive company growth in 2010

Mature marketing automation systems offer plenty of functionality for Inbound Marketing and for Outbound Marketing. If the bulk of the outbound marketing is in automated lead nurturing campaigns then consider that:

• CSO Insights reported that more deals closes faster, and more reps made quota when lead nurturing was involved
• Aberdeen reported that best in class companies who nurtured leads increased revenues by 28%
• Sirius Decisions’ finding that currently only 20% of Marketing leads receive Sales follow-up

So did last year’s budget spend of gazillions on awareness and lead generation, result in Sales ignoring 80% of the leads? This is something you can measure and prove for yourself if your company has a CRM. If Sales reps are ignoring many of the leads, then you have a case for automated lead nurturing.  If you shift a little budget away from lead generation and stick it in automated lead nurturing, and give the Sales folks better quality leads, the cash register will ring more often.

 B2B leads typically cost $50-$150 each to generate, whilst automated lead nurturing typically costs less than $1 per lead per year. So it is not going to take much of a decrease in the lead generation budget to add in some automated lead nurturing.  One trade show, or one direct mail campaign is all it takes. 

Perhaps last year you spent 50K or 100K on a data append and cleanup. Mature Marketing Automation software has data validation and standardization in the Inbound Marketing functionality. Perhaps you wouldn’t have to budget so much for data hygiene projects if only clean data got into the system in the first place.

The Inbound Marketing functionality with dynamic progressive profiling forms and landing pages can also result in higher productivity for your website - ie generate more web leads. So you can consider budgeting for Marketing Automation shifting dollars to more web lead generation.

Happy budgeting.

-Kevin

Untangling B2B Marketing Campaigns ROI

I’ve been preparing content for a webinar next week with NetProspex – 4 steps to measure marketing success and “ROI”. The topic is on how to measure the marketing influence on the Sales Funnel.  Because of the difficulties inherent in measuring B2B marketing campaign ROI I recommend that people focus on measuring influence instead. Here is the issue with Campaign ROI in a nutshell.

Let’s start with a definition, and examine the challenges involved in measuring it. ROI for a single marketing campaign can be computed as:

Total share of all opportunity dollars that can be attributed to a campaign in a finite period

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Total costs of the marketing campaign within the same period

The first challenge is the definition of a finite time period.

When to measure the ROI of a Marketing Campaign
So the campaign has been running a month, you sum up all the costs, add up your share of all the closed deals, and find that you have a negative ROI (at t=1 above). No surprise there, your sales cycle is 6 months or more! So you wait a year, do the same calculation at t=2, and the ROI is 10x. High fives all around. And you wait another year, and now the ROI is 25x. Pop the champagne. How do you ever decide what the real number is?  You can decide when the campaign ends, but its influence could extend out a year or two thereafter, depending on some deals in the sales pipeline. The best approach is to establish a rule for your firm and follow it for all campaigns. Something along the lines of: the final Campaign ROI will be established at 2x the average sales cycle duration after a campaign has ended. After that, no share of the opportunity dollars are attributed back to that campaign. This brings us to the second challenge - share of opportunity dollars.

Share of opportunity dollars

So if a closed won $100K opportunity can be shown to link back to 100 marketing campaigns, trade shows, white paper downloads, and website visits, do they all get an equal share of the opportunity value? Each gets $1000 credit in this case. Or are some campaigns considered more important than others (unequal weighting)? Perhaps tradeshows are worth 10x more than website visits but only 2x the value of a webinar attendance. And are webinar registrations worth less if the contact failed to attend?  This could get messy very quickly. My advice, start simple, give all incoming responses an equal share. Out-going touches (such as sent an email) get nothing. Some CRMs assign 100% of the opportunity to each campaign in their campaign influence reports – how messy is that?

Attributing opportunity dollars to Marketing Campaigns

How do you attribute opportunity dollars back to a marketing campaign? Perhaps you have gone down the path of trying to specify a primary campaign source for each new opportunity. You will probably discover, as many have, that this method is fraught with problems and is unreliable.  Most importantly, in the case of ROI, it vastly under represents all of the marketing campaigns involved in any one opportunity. So let’s start at the other end: link all campaigns to contacts and then link the contacts back to opportunities. Your marketing automation system links contacts to campaigns. Linking the contacts to the opportunities is not as straight forward. You want to be able to link all the relevant contacts on an account back to opportunities.  Some folks may choose to only link back contacts associated with the opportunity, whereas others, recognizing that Sales folks often do not associate any contacts with an opportunity, may grab at all the contacts on an account. To pull this off accurately, you will need a marketing BI engine, because for every opportunity you have to be able to connect back to every relevant contact, and attribute a share of the opportunity dollars to every campaign they responded to. The BI engine relieves you from depending on good Sales behavior for connecting marketing campaigns with opportunities.

So the top line of the ROI equation has its challenges, and we haven’t even started the conversation about cost allocation to marketing campaigns. Let’s save that for a future conversation.  In the webinar next week, I will discuss a better, more expedient method of measuring marketing influence on the Sales funnel.  Chances are good this webinar will be available as a webcast in our resource center shortly thereafter!

-Kevin

Pull versus push for more effective lead nurturing campaigns

I just read Ardath Albee’s interesting post on "Lead Nurturing is not about campaigns."

It reminded me that I wanted to comment about “Pull Lead Nurturing”. Let’s face it, many lead nurturing campaigns pour out offer after offer in the same sequence to all recipients. I would describe these as “push lead nurturing” campaigns. They fail to encourage the recipient to engage in any other way except to download or unsubscribe. Pull Lead Nurturing on the other hand encourages prospects to interact, offer feedback, to offer up more information about themselves in return for more relevant offers, and more control of the course of the lead nurturing program.

Relevant content is not considered junk

When I look inside what is left of my US Mail box (the City of Portland recently sawed off the front half with a roadside vegetation trimmer) and find a direct marketing piece about linens, I immediately categorize it as junk and into the big blue recycling bin it goes. Clearly the linen store knew very little about me and did a “spray and pray” mailing. The very next piece of “junk mail” is an astronomy accessory catalog. These folks bought their list from a magazine that knew something about me. The catalog avoids the big blue bin fate of the linen Direct Mail piece. The point is that the more you know about your target, the better you can segment and the more relevant you can make the content. So, ironically, the more you share about your interests and needs, the less “junk mail” you will receive! Your challenge is to convince prospects of that.

So let’s map this concept over to email based lead nurturing. We want to encourage our prospects to engage with us, to interact, to tell us what they are interested in, and what they are not interested in. If they do this we will offer them more relevant content and assist them in pulling more relevant materials from us.

Encouraging prospects to interact more and pull content from you

There are several things you can do to encourage prospects to interact and pull content from you:

• At the end of every offer, place a link to the next most relevant piece with a line such as “People who enjoyed this document also enjoyed that document” – shades of Amazon.com in there! Of course you should tag the links so you can see exactly how many people clicked, and on which links.
• As part of your next offer email, ask them to rate the previous offer – read it and liked it, read it and disliked it, didn’t read it, cannot remember, etc. You can do this with a single link for each rating in your email, so it is a one click feedback mechanism (Netflix does this for movie ratings).
• Add questions to your dynamic profiling, early in the sequence, to enquire about the prospect’s preferred cadence – how often do you want us to send you offers? Design your campaigns to use the prospect defined cadence.
• Ask questions about their areas of interest; are they more technical or business; are they in management or individual contributors?
• Ask them questions about the media they prefer: webcasts, webinars, whitepapers, seminars, etc.
• Allow them to opt out of a nurturing track and opt-in to a different one instead.
• Design campaigns that adapt to every new behavior, new download, new information
• Don’t offer someone something that they already got before - you don’t want them to think you are not listening.

As Ardath points out, lead nurturing can extend beyond the typical sales cycle length, so why not let the prospect have more control over how you interact with them. Think about how to encourage them to pull content from you. It will tell you much more about them, and your content quality.

And now here is my one click survey! What did you think of this blog post?

It was garbage
It was insipid
It was ok
It was interesting
I really liked it

See how easy that was,

Kevin

Lead Nurturing the C and D leads in your CRM with Telemarketing

Three events coincided this week that provided the inspiration needed for this post.

1. I met with Susan Linman, President of Dunthorpe Marketing, and we discussed the role of Telemarketing in lead nurturing, especially for C and D leads.
2. I read Craig Rosenberg’s thought provoking post suggesting that marketing “sells the connect” not the product. 
3. I read the release notes for Market2Lead’s upcoming call center module for our marketing automation system.

Telemarketing is not the same as appointment setting

Do you use telemarketing as part of your lead nurturing? What is the most effective way to use it and when?  I must confess I am not a big fan of appointment setting services. Yes, I am sure they have their place, and there are businesses for whom getting an appointment for $750-$1000 is a ‘good’ deal. I simply have not been in a position yet where I thought this was a good deal for generating new leads.  In a past life I examined the opportunity connect rate for these leads and it was no better than website leads or PPC leads, so why would I pay 10x more for them?  But using telemarketing to connect with prospects and nurture them, now that is different than attempting to sell to them.

Telemarketing is not telesales

We are talking about telemarketing, not telesales. I don’t want savvy sales people in this role, who know the product inside out, and are slicker than clean socks on a linoleum floor. I want people who know how to listen more than talk. Their role is to not waste the prospect’s time; they need to figure out where prospects are in the purchase cycle, what they need, and offer them relevant help.

Use telemarketing to nurture C and D leads

Telemarketing can be a very powerful part of your lead nurturing strategy. Let’s say you have a marketing automation system, and it scores your leads. All the A and B leads are shipped off to the various Sales Channels, but the Cs and Ds are retained in the Marketing hopper. Does your system assign them to a lead nurturing track that pumps out unsolicited whitepapers, webcasts, and webinar invitations every two weeks for months on end until such time as the prospects surrender, unsubscribe, or sideline you with their junk filter?  Inoculation of your prospects is not a good idea unless you are practicing medicine.  An alternative is to engage them in Pull Nurturing, and you can also use telemarketing in the middle of this lead nurturing track to coax more Cs and Ds out of their shells, and into an actual relationship with your firm.The Market2Lead system enables you to include programs with telemarketing scripts in the middle of a lead nurturing campaign.

The telemarketer's role in effective lead nurturing

The effective telemarketer will, on the first call, introduce themselves as part of the Marketing team, they are NOT in a sales role.  Their role is to:

• Initiate the relationship with the prospect
• Help the prospect in their research, find relevant information
• Make them aware of upcoming events that might be of interest
• Collect feedback on the events or offers the prospect already accepted
• Update the prospects record, and influence future automated nurturing behavior
• And when the prospect wants to talk to a sales representative, make an appointment

Run a test; take a random selection of your C and D leads that your are actively nurturing and have some telemarketers call on them for a month or two in addition to the regular nurturing activities. See what percentage you can convert into Bs and As, and compare this to your control group. You may be surprised at the results. The purchase cycle behavior of prospects is evolving so that the Sales person may not be welcome until later in the cycle. This does not mean that the prospect doesn’t want some human engagement. Connect with your prospects!

-Kevin