adding, “that’s when lead manage- and lead-generation platform, which ment takes over.” focuses on “Intuit-Quickbook-style”
As part of its marketing platform, user interface simplicity. “Every Aprimo offers customers their own competitive product out there takes
“marketing portal.” Panek observed the point of view that the marketing array of lead-management capabili- that without dedicated software to department comes in on Jan. 2 and ties. “Every one of our customers manage leads, most marketers work graphs out a program for the year uses us for lead management,” said with whatever tool they’ve got, such and pushes it out,” said Phil Fernan-Eloqua’s CEO Joseph Payne. A par- as Salesforce.com, or a front-end de- dez, Marketo president-CEO. “What ticular focus for Eloqua is integrating mand-generation platform such as an we said was, ‘No, marketing is a se-multichannel campaigns and data e-mail provider. While those sorts of ries of unpredictable, episodic into the lead-management pro- “The question is, events. Marketers need to deploy cess, Paynesaid. programs quickly and then go
“We’re one of the only guys do you look at watch theresults.’” that truly is multichannel,” Payne leads as a fairly Tracking large numbers of said, spanning Web, e-mail, RSS, marketing, and events and activiSMS, fax and many other chan- sophisticated ties in the lead-management pro-nels. To measure and track actions business process. cess is one thing; turning that into from all those different sources, something actionable is often the Eloqua platform manages an One size definitely quite another for marketing de-average of about 7,500 transac- doesn’t fit all.” partments, Fernandez said. “If tions per second, compared with you think about marketing, on about 5,000 transactions per sec- B.J. Morgan, director of b-to-b one level all that counts is the lead. ond for the NASDAQ stock mar- market segments, Unica On another level, though, lots of ket, he noted. events [contributing to that lead]
are too small. We help the marketer define and score what are the interesting events over time.”
Vendors Continued from page 4
“I’m a big believer in reactive marketing and trying to empower the marketing department to build the right offers,” Payne said. “ Marketers need to automate the process of capturing information, and routing great content and making sure they are completely aware of all the people that want to be sold to.”
Aprimo also focuses on lead management “as part of an overall b-to-b marketing process; upfront demand generation is also a big part of what we do,” said Dave Panek, Aprimo director of product marketing. During the marketing engagement process, which includes generating lists, targeting e-mails, creating landing pages and tracking click-throughs, “we are able to score customers and prospects, and nurture them and move them along,” Panek said,
systems enable marketers “to start the lead-generation process,” Panek said, they aren’t connected to other systems and, so, “typically there’s no nurturing getting done.”
“Like CRM, lead management can mean a million different things to a million different people,” said B.J. Morgan, director of b-to-b market segments for Unica. To meet those different needs, Unica offers basic lead-management capabilities as part of its MarketingCentral.com on-demand marketing platform (which it acquired last year) as well as enterprise-class, analytics-fo-cused lead management on its core Affinium Suite.
“The question is, do you look at leads as a fairly sophisticated business process,” Morgan said. “One size definitely doesn’t fit all.”
Marketo took that reality to heart when it built its b-to-b marketing
Whether it’s dealing with data overflow or trying to define and automate the right lead-nurturing processes, marketers must rely on themselves first and software second.
“Marketers need to think more about the definition of lead management and how to tie it into the sales process,” IDC’s Gerard said. “There’s definitely strong technology to support a lead-management process. But too many marketers buy technology and how it drives their processes. That’s where they stumble horribly. You’ve got to get your own processes right first. Software platforms help, but there’s also a lot of analytic and process rigor, and a bit of art, still required to get it right.”
Best Buy
Continued from page 6
“We have these highly segmented groups,” she said. “We’re able to score prospects using modeling techniques for who is likely to be best served by each of the [marketing] channels.”
This datacentric lead-generation approach also enables marketers to leapfrog past the step of qualifying leads manually.
“We have a system where leads are constantly created because of the fact that we now have such rich information that exists without having to go through lead qualification,” Rubio said. She added that this process skips the standard way that b-to-b does lead generation where you qualify the lead with the usual questions: Are you in the market to buy? What kind of product? What is your time frame? What is your budget?”
Another plus is that the database approach provides much more robust data to the marketer.
“The problem we’ve had as database marketers for so long is we’ve never had enough data to build robust models,” Rubio said. “You’ve got SIC codes and number of employ-
ees—and maybe you have geography and the title of a person—but the data is constantly changing and people leave companies, so the only thing you can build on is those core variables.” She said a framework based on behavior that can be tracked across multiple sources of that data is much more robust and accurate.
In February, Best Buy for Business launched a direct mail effort created by Engauge to 250,000 customers and prospects. The effort also included phone and e-mail. Best Buy declined to comment on its spending for the campaign.
“It was really an integrated effort,” Samuels said. The idea, he added, was to try to understand which vehicles—print, electronic, direct mail, microsite or phone—would be most effective to reach customers.
One set of customers received a direct mail piece. Another segment received a direct mail piece plus one e-mail. A third set received one direct mail piece and two e-mails, and a fourth group got three e-mails. Each of those segments contained a subset that also received follow-up by phone. The company also set up another segment
that received only the usual monthly e-mail communications.
In addition, variable data printing was employed so that personalization appeared several times in each piece of direct mail.
Test results showed that all the groups that received a phone call showed a positive ROI. The groups that received the direct mail piece and more than one e-mail but no phone call were break-even. The group that received the e-mails alone also broke even.
“The telesales and electronic mail combination showed the strongest results” in generating leads, said Samuels.
This information was in turn shared with the sales force.
“That is where Microsoft CRM comes in handy, because we’re able to push the information out to the reps,” Samuels said. Reps are now aware of which customers received which marketing piece; the CRM also creates specific tasks for reps to follow up on with customers.
“We’ve never been able to run an integrated campaign like this before,” Samuels said. “Now we can, supported by the datamart and the tools available to us.”
Media choice
depends on
lead-generation
objectives
MORE LEADS? Higher-quality leads? Lower-cost leads? Which of these lead-generation objectives would you choose?
My guess is that you want all three: more qualified leads at the lowest possible cost per lead. Who wouldn’t?
However, wanting all three is like looking for an ul-tradependable luxury car, say a Lexus LS series sedan, guest for the price of a Toyota Yaris. Easier said than done. Or column being able to buy a large custom-built home on a few ooded or beachfront acres for the price of a small BY M.H. ‘MAC’ tract home on a postage stamp–sized lot. Sounds McINTOSH great, but difficult to accomplish in any economy.
E-mail was the magic bullet for a while. It delivered high response rates from quality prospects for a low price. But that was a couple of years ago. Yes, e-mail can still generate some high-quality leads, but only if you can get it past the e-mail filters. “Nearly 18% of invited e-mail lands in junk/bulk folders,” says Lyris in its recently released report on e-mail deliverability.
And getting more than your subject line read by busy businesspeople as they are trying to wade through way too many e-mails each day while still getting their real jobs done is a daunting task. Today the cost of creating and sending e-mail that gets through and gets read is climbing rapidly. Combine those facts with response rates that are headed in the other direction and you’ll understand why e-mail isn’t delivering like it used to.
Search marketing tactics, both paid and organic, have been generating lots of clicks, visits, leads and sales at a relatively low cost. But as more marketers compete for those coveted spots at the top of the search-re-sults pages, costs go up and results go down. And what about those prospects who are not actively searching? How do you reach them?
Blogs, podcasts and corporate videos look promising, too. Unfortunately—with a few notable exceptions, such as Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” videos on You Tube, which went viral and generated some significant results in the b-to-b arena, according to the company’s marketing director, George Wright—it is hard to find any b-to-b marketers that can brag about all the low-cost, high-quality leads they generate as a result of their blogs, podcasts or videos.
Virtual events and webinars come to mind as options for generating leads, but you first have to drive attendance with other media.
See where I’m going with this? There is no single media format,
online or off, that is the solution to all your lead-generation problems.
So what’s a b-to-b marketer chartered with cost-effectively generating lots of quality leads to do? Here are some suggestions learned by observing some of the most successful lead-generation practitioners in action:
■ Use a mix of media and tactics, both online and traditional, to get your lead-generation messages through to prospective customers.
■ Make sure prospects find you when they are searching and proactively reach out to prospects who aren’t actively searching with online, print and broadcast advertising, and PR as well as e-mail, direct mail, telemarketing and exhibits at key trade shows.
■ Make sure that all your marketing—even your brand advertising— makes lead-generating offers or calls to action.
■ Whenever possible, make multiple offers or calls to action, each designed to appeal to prospects at a different stage of their consideration and buying process. For example, offer a white paper, a webinar and an on-site assessment, all addressing the same subject.
■ Make it easy for prospective customers to respond. Include Web addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Include all these and reply cards in direct mailers.
■ Reallocate a chunk of your lead-generation budget to nurture the leads you’ve already generated until they are sales-ready. Research shows again and again that your longer-term prospects represent up to three times more sales opportunities than the leads who plan to buy sooner.
■ Invest a small percentage of your lead-generation budget in market research to learn more about the needs, behaviors and hot buttons of your prospective customers; then refine your media, messages and offers accordingly.
■ Earmark dollars—say 10% of your lead-generation budget—for testing of new media or tactics for lead generation and to have funds available when unplanned opportunities arise.
■ Track and measure your lead-generation activity and results; then, using what you learn, concentrate your investments and efforts on those media and tactics that work best.
M.H. “Mac” McIntosh is a b-to-b marketing consultant who specializes in helping clients design, implement or improve the results of their sales lead-generation programs. He can be reached at mcintosh@sales-lead-experts.com.
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