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July 2009, Issue 65 |
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Lead-Generation Best Practices When You Reach Out to Prospects, Speak Their Language Q&A from Reach the Decision Maker: Building Calls to Action That Drive Sales Engagements, with Rob Solomon, CEO, Bulldog Solutions; and Naylor Gray, Global Marketing Director, Frost & Sullivan
Q: You mentioned you are seeing more activity before prospects actually move into the sales pipeline. Can you provide some examples of this sub-stream activity?  Naylor Gray, Frost & Sullivan: Some of these are fairly obvious. The simplest: You can log into Google and type in the company name to see what comes back. A lot of times buyers are starting off and they're looking for "solutions," so they type "solutions" and then find whatever comes back. They may be reading about it first on Wikipedia, or perhaps your Web site, or perhaps your competitor's Web site.
Beyond that we start to see a lot of activity of people participating in Webinars, reading white papers, and accessing these items either from aggregator sites or directly from solutions providers themselves. These are the types of things we see very, very early on in the process. Q: Rob mentioned a gap between the perceived value of a lead between Sales and Marketing. Can you address some of the ways you can close this gap? Naylor Gray: One of the most important things to consider is that in many organizations, there effectively exists a Marketing Qualified Lead, which means the marketing department has determined the quality of the lead. That doesn't necessarily mean that someone in the sales department would concur. What's important to do is go through a series of qualification processes, through high-value calls to action for example, to winnow that marketing lead down into a very qualified sales lead. Obviously if it's going to be a Sales Qualified Lead, Sales needs to have a voice in that process as well. 
 Rob Solomon, Bulldog Solutions: I think it's probably the lowest hanging fruit we see everywhere we go, all the time; that is, there's not really a formal definition agreed to by Sales and Marketing that describes all the stages from the marketing funnel to the sales funnel. The reality is, the tighter you make those definitions, the easier it is to target.
Q: You mentioned Digital Body Language in your presentation. Can you give some more examples of this that would help marketers understand when someone is ready to buy? Rob Solomon: This is a concept that really was introduced by a technology company, Eloqua. They're a marketing automation technology partner of ours. Their CIO is a great guy named Steve Woods, who recently authored the book, Digital Body Language. With digital body language you're using the advanced functionality of the Web as a means of sending and receiving data. Digital body language is using intelligence that lives inside the marketing program to get inside the head of your prospects when you're playing on the Web. In terms of how we use digital body language, we talked about implicit and explicit data points. It's easy to take data—your name, your title, the company you work for, how big your company is—but sometimes, the much more interesting data is, "Where are you going?", "What are you doing?", "Are you coming back?", "Are you forwarding this information to your colleagues?" In other words, giving us a "tell" on a) whether you're someone who is ready to be engaged in the selling process, and if you are, b) how do I get you engaged in a conversation? Naylor Gray: There's a difference between registering for a Webinar and then actually attending the Webinar. Those are the types of things that you really need to be paying attention to. Are people actually using your Web site, or are they dropping off? Are they attending your events or not? It's not necessarily about the number of visits to your Web site or the number of registrants to your Webinar. Q: What is a fair amount of information that marketers should be asking for to gain permission? Is an e-mail address enough? What are any additional minimum requirements? Rob Solomon: It depends. There's a tradeoff here. The taller you can make the gate of entry, the more people will enter the gate. On the other hand, it means you have more heavy lifting to do on the back end. There's a happy medium. In our world, we have different activities and different events that drive different types of audience that require very different types of gates. For example, sometimes we do activities that are really intended to help grow our prospect database They may not map necessarily to what we do at Bulldog. But really what we're trying to do is get more people to come and opt in to our newsletter, Marketing Watchdog Journal. There are other programs, on the other hand, that are much more targeted, and these are programs that are designed to attract a certain type of buyer. We're actually using the gate to be a little bit discriminatory because we want them to see our offerings to be something of value and we're looking to our prospects to give us something in return. To the extent that you have really good nurturing tracks and follow-on capabilities, then you need less: Name, address and company are then doable. If you don't have a complex nurturing queue with technology behind it and the content to support it, then unfortunately, you're probably forced to get more data at registration. Naylor Gray: Of course it really depends on your company and its business model. From my perspective: Here's Frost & Sullivan: We have 10 major industries and we have global coverage, with sales teams divided up by region. So, in order for me to get enough information, I need to know what industry is this company coming from; who am I speaking with in this organization, because that could also make a difference; and then, what region are they coming from. If you boil that down to actual data points in a CRM system, I need name, title, an account name, an e-mail address, and then some sort of an address or region, at the very least a country will do. Q: How do you map stages against a considered purchase where there may be several decision makers and influencers with different objections and content needs? Naylor Gray: Sometimes that's a common objection that comes up. Someone might say, "I don't actually have sole purchase discretion." I'm sure in some cases, that's probably true. In other cases, that's actually an objection. What they're saying is, "I don't have purchase authority to do this." So maybe you need to help build a consensus among those different people to take to the decision makers, or maybe there actually is a panel of decision makers…In my experience, at the end of the day it really does boil down to one person who has the authority. Rob Solomon: You have to be really deliberate, really understand who your prospect is: In BtoB, in complex companies that are selling complex things, there are technical buyers and economic buyers and influencers. Creating a messaging strategy that's the bait to drive these people to the registration process often dictates who you're driving. So when you're leading from a very technical message, you're probably going to engage with technical folks. When your message is more of a business topic, then you're going after the non-technical, business side of the house. But I think the content really drives the conversation and from there, it's figuring out who has budget authority. It has to be very deliberate; it's not a one-size-fits-all situation. Q: We've gotten a few questions about the media mix in developing a call to action. For the CTA framework, are you referring to both online and offline media, or does that vary based on the opportunity? Rob Solomon: For most companies in most industries, there's no magic bullet. The best practice is measuring everything that you do. I think that you constantly have to play with the different mix of media, channels, all the ways you drive people into your permission-based marketing database. You're ultimately going to serve up different calls to action. Naylor Gray: That's the crux of the issue for Marketing: What is my mixture of media? What is my mixture of spend potential? It really just depends on your industry. Some people rely heavily on tradeshows or offline events, and other people are very much online and have a very small presence at the offline side of it. It's really a matter of what is working for your organization, and the only way to know that is to measure it. Q: Can you give examples of buyer criteria that determine the calls to action that marketers can give? Rob Solomon: If I don't know you or know anything about you, my call to action would then be "Gee, I need to get permission to get to know you." The call to action is: Subscribe to my newsletter or register to become a part of my community, something like that. Once I know who you are, then I'm able to segment you; that is, figure out some construct I can use to separate you from other leads, on the basis of your job title, for example, or on the basis of your industry or the size of your company in terms of revenue. Once I build a relationship with you, and I'm able to qualify you, meaning, it looks like you exhibit all the qualities that we have already defined as being "qualified," such as industry, company size, etc. And then you have also participated in campaigns, and you are actively engaged with us, then and only then will we decide to put you into a track that will either take you to a high-value call to action; or, we'll cherry-pick you and have one of our sales folks, in a very micro-targeted hunting campaign, reach out to you with an invite or some high-value call to action. It might be an assessment, it might be an ROI calculator, it might be an executive-to-executive dialogue—something that feels like it's a good value trade for the person to have a meeting with us. Naylor Gray: If you don't really know much about your buyer, it's always helpful to build some kind of basic buyer profile, and you can do that in a variety of ways. You can engage in some kind of market intelligence mechanism, where you have insight into where this particular market or industry is progressing; you can speak to the challenges that are occurring; and also, with different job functions in an organization—if you have a good handle on who your average buyer is, you can start to build something of a profile. So when you reach out to them you're at least speaking their language. Return to MWJ Home Rob Solomon is CEO of Bulldog Solutions; Naylor Gray is global marketing director, Frost & Sullivan. Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing. |
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