Executives
Guide To
Building A Lead
Generation
EXECUTIVES GUIDE TO BUILDING
A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE
Is your team having trouble with the following lead generation challenges?
• There is far too much ebb & flow in your sales pipeline
• Your senior sales executives are too reliant on cross-selling & upselling
your existing client base, and neglecting hunting for net new business
• Your sales team feels inbound leads are unjustly distributed, and some
sales reps feel neglected
• You’re nervous as you approach traditionally slow business development
periods in your fiscal year, where will the opportunities come from?
• Your cost-per-lead is becoming unprofitable, you need a cost effective,
scalable process
• Marketing is unable to demonstrate an ROI for their efforts
• Sales & Marketing do not define a “lead” the same way, creating a riff in
your organization because both departments have different KPI’s.
Did You Know:
Studies show most 70% of the qualified
leads that hit your website will buy from you
Introduction
Sales 1.0 “smiling & dialing” died as the primary business development tool with the advent of social media. Sales 2.0 was born in 2007 as a way to describe the way technology, marketing and sales have merged to drive fast, relevant information to the market. Companies all across North America have invested in marketing automation as a means of connecting and nurturing prospects through their sales cycle. Marketing automation has become the cornerstone for lead generation, but many problems have arisen from initial campaigning success:
• Customers no longer want information sold to them, and companies have struggled to adapt to understanding their prospects buying process
• Companies are struggling to deliver relevant content to their prospects on a consistent basis, and their marketing automation programs have broken down
Sales 2.0 companies are building a marketing automation process that speaks to their buyers and delivers relevant content – this powerful combination has the ability to:
• Reduce your cost-per-lead • Reduce your human capital costs
• Increase the predictability & scalability of your inside sales process • Increase lead flow to complete consistency
How will this guide help me?
This guide is going to help you develop a strategy around how your customer buys, not how you currently sell. This could be a departure from everything you are currently doing, but this process is exactly what leading Sales 2.0 companies are doing today.
• Help you become customer focused
• Build a machine that is scalable and predictable
• Provide you with a barometer for success and areas of improvement • Indicate the buttons you can push to generate more horsepower • Identify “gunk” and the solutions around removing it
• Reduce your cost-per-lead & cost-per-sales
• Help sales & marketing think as a team, aligning their KPI’s
Put the right gears in place
Building your machine will require the following steps: • Identify who is your buyer and how do they buy
• What steps do we need to take to address their buying process • What actions are required to drive them to a call-to-action
• Make sure the actions a prospect goes through are logical and obvious • Define how to qualify prospects
• What motivates your customers to drive a call-to-action • Who will be responsible for the tasks & milestones • What Sales 2.0 tools will you need to execute your plan
EXECUTIVES GUIDE TO BUILDING
A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE
1.1 Who is your buyer
All lead generation campaigns need to start with “Who”. Who are your ideal customers and why do they buy from you? Expand on your “who”, by outlining your customers sweet-spot:
• Industry & Verticals • Geography
• Number of employees, Revenue Size, Marketing Spend potential • NASIC Codes
• The functions within the company that are involved in the buying process
• What are the trigger events, pain-points within these buyers (think the company and the people within them)
Defining your ideal customer will help reduce your sales cycles (eliminate non-ideal prospects) and increase your ROI.
1.2 Where do your customers go to address their needs
The buying process has changed dramatically in the last 5 years. Customers no longer require you to educate them on a concept or solution, they already know a solution like your exists. A customer will want to collect information on a solution on their own accord, then engage a sales person during their evaluation phase. Knowing this vital piece of information will save your sales reps time and energy fighting to educate a prospect long before their buying process has begun.
You need to identify where your customers are going to do their homework. Identify the blogs, news rooms, associations, trade applications your buyer uses as their trusted resource. You need to place your information within these areas to be seen as a thought-leader and an authentic contributor to that community.
1.3 How does your customer buy
This is mission critical – take out a notepad and pen and draw out your understanding of your customers buying process. Without this map, you are selling, rather than helping customers buy.
Your buyer is most likely to follow this linear path (but the time they spend in each stage will require your constant attention):
Status Quo -> Acknowledge Problem -> Define Problem ->Evaluate Options ->Score Vendors -> Choose
You need to think of a process that will speak to each of these stages:
Thought Leadership -> Lead Capture -> Lead Nurture -> Build Value -> Demonstrate Success -> Win
EXECUTIVES GUIDE TO BUILDING
A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE
Now outline the materials used to provide relevant insight to your prospects: • Thought Leadership
Press Releases, YouTube videos, BrightTalk, BrainShark and/or blog posts that are distributed via Linkedin, Twitter & Email
• Lead Capture
Webinars, “How-to-Guide”, Videos, Whitepapers all with lead capture forms • Lead Nurturing
Use datasheets, infoGraphics, case studies, news articles to keep your brand top of mind. This helps your prospect think more about how to utilize your solutions
• Value Building
Use guides, video demonstrations (solution specific), branded messages to help a customer understand why you are the solution of choice.
• Demonstrate Success
Customer references/testimonials, ROI calculations – tools that can help a prospect empirically choose your solution over a competitor.
1.4 How will you drive a call-to-action
Simply put, are all of your marketing messages driving a call-to-action to the next marketing asset? When a prospect is reading your blog, does it suggest they review a “How to Guide” that talks in greater detail about the blog post? The purpose of marketing automation is to create progress throughout a prospects buying cycle. Create a link between each marketing asset that moves prospects in a positive direction.
1.5 How will you know when your ideal customer is “HOT”
You are probably experiencing this right now – the disconnection between sales and marketing. Sales say they aren’t receiving enough “qualified leads” and marketing complains that sales lack an effective follow-up process. You need to bring sales and marketing together to determine your ideal customer and what defines a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Start by defining this prospect at a macro level – industry, size, B2B versus B2C. Then begin moving into BANT (Budget, Authority, Need & Timing) criteria. Remember marketing can only control a portion of BANT, but determine where in that equation is it ideal for marketing to push a lead to sales. After defining your ideal customer, now think of what actions that prospect would need to take to appear “HOT”. Are they on your solutions page, attending
webinars specific to their industry, how often are they reviewing materials from our company – and in what condensed period of time?
1.6 Why will your customer be interested in your thought-leadership
This requires you to walk a mile in your customers’ shoes. To gather excellent insight, perhaps contact 2 customers and understand:
• What concerns do they have on a day-to-day basis?
• How are they measured, what KPI’s are they accountable for?
• Where do they turn for solutions? Magazines, Blogs, what companies do they follow?
• What motivates them to make changes? How will you evaluate and measure solutions?
EXECUTIVES GUIDE TO BUILDING
A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE
Tip – Remember there are usually multiple functions within your customers’ ecosystem
that are involved with your solution. On a high level, there is the Key Decision-Maker, the
Champion and the End User:
• Key Decision-Maker
the C-Level executives that require a solution to a problem but view the solution from a 30,000
foot vantage-point. They care about ROI, costs, risks. Speak to them in terms of ROI, not
functionality.
• Champion
this might be the Director or Manager that has suggested your solution. They are looking for
a solution that helps their department become more efficient, so they can look like a hero.
They are less concerned with pure dollars and cents (typically not their money), but they
need everything to be justifiable and work. Risk Mitigation and Cost Reduction can be key
motivators.
• End User
if your solution is a technology, it’s the IT team or employees that are using your solution.
They care very little about cost, but ease-of-use and functionality are priority #1. They need
something that makes their job that much easier.
You need to speak to these various departmental functions very differently, otherwise you risk alienating (not motivating) one of them to suggest your solution.
1.7 Build a Marketing Matrix and assign tasks/milestones
Execution. No idea or strategy is worth your time unless there is a pragmatic execution plan. To help organize your team, develop a Marketing Matrix that will keep your team on time, on budget, on point.
A Marketing Matrix is your prospecting lifeblood. This is a working document for your team to determine:
• Assignment: which team members are involved, what are their roles, how will they be accountable?
• Who: Marco overview of the ideal customer + who are the key influencers in an organization we’re going to prospect to?
• When: is the campaign, what is the frequency of the next campaign? What is my follow-up process?
• How: are we executing? Blog driving to a webinar? How are we executing post-webinar?
• Where: are the pain-points and trigger events? What message will we have for these problems?
• Why: do we have client success stories in the vertical we’re going to solicit?
EXECUTIVES GUIDE TO BUILDING
A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE
This document can be very simple for one sales rep, but truly becomes a matrix with multiple sales reps in various verticals and/or have multiple products to sell. A Marketing Matrix is an exercise that your team needs to complete as frequently as you’re executing marketing campaigns. Assuming you are executing a marketing campaign to each buyer persona (key influencer within a company) 1x a month, you may have multiple
Marketing Matrix reviews each month.
1.8 What Sales 2.0 technology will fuel the fire
The baseline of technology with be your CRM, the repository of all your suspect, prospect and client information. A cloud-based CRM like Salesforce.com will provide you with the flexibility and robustness to manage any marketing automation platform. You will want to find a Marketing Automation vendor whose product will have a direct integration into your CRM – this makes reporting and analytics much more valuable. Marketing Automation vendors range in price and service offerings, so review their solutions carefully to ensure they solve your particular need. Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Web Analytics – these are functions that you will need to review.
Tuning your machine
Like any new machine, there will always be room for improvement. What is critical in your evaluation is the focus on actions that are sales drivers, rather than marketing drivers. As an example, web traffic is a nice-to-have; web conversion into prospective buyers is a need-to-have. Don’t allow SEO noise influence the most important aspect to any campaign – “does this drive sales?” The first step you will want to take in your evaluation process is Reverse Engineering Goals:
Thinking backwards:
• What goal did we set for Sales Qualified Leads in 1 Quarter?
• What was our conversion rate of Sales Qualified Lead from Marketing Qualified Leads?
• How many MQL’s did we create, what % of these MQL’s could met our criteria of “ideal customer”
• How many unique prospects found our information valuable and filled out a subscription form?
• How many prospects did we solicit too during this quarter?
Reverse Engineering these goals will help you realize that to achieve X SQL, you will require Y prospects engaged in buying cycles. If there is a discrepancy in these findings, you need to address where the gaps are in the conversion rates.
EXECUTIVES GUIDE TO BUILDING
A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE
2.1 The importance of measuring success
• You want to understand our conversion rates on each stage of the buying process. This evaluation can help you see shortfalls early on in the process, so you’re not surprised by results 180 days later.
• Data is your fuel for the fire; do we have enough data (contacts) to drive our revenue goals?
• Begin analyzing the costs and returns of each campaign. How does this compare from one campaign to the next? How has your overall cost-per-lead change?
• Where is our marketing dollars best spent? Is this with topic specific webinars? Blogs? Which data source is providing us with the highest touch-point return? Data.com, Linkedin?
Remove “gunk” from your machine
Even the greatest marketing automation systems have “gunk” in the system at some point. A typical “high class headache” becomes a surge of MQL’s that are not properly followed up by sales. Sales begin to cherry-pick hot leads by using their own prioritized list - Demo Request, Pricing Request and Info Requests. Sales reps forget that while not all marketing leads are of equal value, the ability to touch ALL leads means long-term growth explosion versus winning only a fraction of market potential.
3.1 How to spot “gunk”
You will have an initial feeling that changes need to be made. Only empirical evidence will show you exactly where the disconnection is:
• Typically conversion rates are a telling sign, if your process appears to look like a shrinking funnel (huge top end delivery, with small output), you will need to experiment and become more creative with your execution.
• With the inverse, as an enormous demand surges, how will your sales reps (and post-sales account management) deliver? Are you sales reps dropping leads off to quickly and cherry picking? Do you notice their forecast reports churning account names quickly as they’re focusing on the quick wins only?
3.2 How can I solve “gunk” problems
Many times the fall-out from a prospect is a lack of interest in your solution. This is because your process is still designed from your vantage point and not the prospects. You will need to breakdown each part of the buying cycle and evaluate how you can make this segment more engaging, and more client centric. Any easy step you can take (similar to re-reading a document later to uncover mistakes), is to go through this exercise:
• List your customers concerns • List your customers motivations
• What tools can we use to expand our reach? Press Wires, Social Media?
• Experiment, try changes for each motivation and track changes
EXECUTIVES GUIDE TO BUILDING
A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE
Example on solving the “gunk” problem
• Concern – don’t let the prospect to feel they are on a marketing list. • Motivations – education, keeping abreast of all solutions in their market.
• Tools Available – offer them something extremely value once they register. This tools value highly outweighs their concerns. Perhaps they do not register until further into the buying process – ie. Download your product for free, yet only register AFTER they have completed the download process. • A/B Testing – simply put, take 50% of your prospects through scenario 1, and 50% through scenario 2.
Conclusion
Create a machine that is systematic at identifying prospects, connecting with thought leadership, and driving them effectively though their buying process. An effective lead generation machine will allow for:
• Scalability – grow the machine at a pace your team can manage
• Automation – remove intensive human capital costs once the machine is running properly • Reports & Dashboards – have 360° vantage of your system, in real-time
• Cost-per-Lead & Cost-per-Win – scalability is achieved once you understand the machine’s ROI • Integrate sales & marketing – connect sales & marketing to attack your prospects together
Sales 2.0 has evolved from calling campaigns to delivering a system to authentically speak to your customers during their buying process. The fastest growing technology companies have already mastered this science, showing their ability to attract rapid attention. These companies also have their sales reps focusing on the most imminent sales opportunities, and allow the machine to drive more leads.
EXECUTIVES GUIDE TO BUILDING
A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE
Why choose us?
Sale for Life was founded in 2004 and built by
sales professionals who have personally sold millions to North America’s top start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. Our ability to bring best sales practices “People. Process. Technology.” to clients makes as the “go-to-agency” for sales success. Whether it’s sourcing great sales talent, building sales processes, generating leads, training sales people, building Sale 2.0/Web 2.0 initiatives - Sales for Life offers a completely integrated solution for sales success. We are the complete sales agency solution – “We Get Sales!”
For more information, please visit www.salesforlife.com to see how we have developed inside sales plans for various clients.
