What is Lead Management?

February 28th, 2010

If you increase automation in Marketing, you can generate more sales leads, make more sales and earn more money.  You can achieve scale.  In this post I look at Marketing Automation, and at one specific example of automation known as Lead Management.

Lead Management and sales funnel

Lead Management and sales funnel

Marketing units in business-to-business companies spend a lot of their time trying to identify and obtain the contact details of people who might be interested in their products or services – this is ‘lead generation’.  They pass these contacts to Sales who pursue them and try to convert them to customers.

But the way Marketing units generate and handover contacts is often badly automated and inefficient, and these contacts are often not processed effectively.  Business-to-business Marketing Automation is a broad term referring to the use of technology to improve the generation of demand for products and services and the subsequent management of that demand to increase sales and revenueLead Management refers to the specific processes around generating leads and managing them as effectively as possible to drive sales.  (Other areas in Marketing Automation include Campaign Management, Marketing Resource Management and Customer Analytics).

But how can you automate marketing?  Isn’t it all golf umbrellas, brochures, t-shirts, and tradeshows?  Well, there is a creative and branding element, but a lot of business-to-business marketing can be made more structured.  For example, to generate a contact, you can use traditional methods like tradeshows and telemarketing, but now we also have contacts coming in over company web-sites, through Google pay-per-click ads and from email marketing campaigns. 

Once these contacts have been captured, you can automate a lot of what happens next:

  • Qualification, which means figuring out how likely the contact is to become a buyer based on information about her company, her location, how often she’s come to our web-site, other online behaviours we can observe etc.
  • Routing to sales: you can apply sensible rules about which sales guy should get what lead, you can specify how quickly a lead should be acted upon, and you can provide your sales staff with much richer background information on the contact.
  • Monitoring: you can see which sources tend to generate high quality leads, and what kind of leads are more likely to convert to customers; this helps you learn how to spend your marketing money with greatest effect.

Using this kind of automation will help you:

  • Generate more leads, faster
  • Pass better quality leads to Sales, so they don’t waste time chasing someone who has no real interest in your products
  • Cut down wasteful spend

There’s a clear return on investment from automating lead management.  A CMO Council Survey estimated that 80% of leads are either lost, ignored or discarded.  MarketingSherpa also estimated that around 75% of leads generated by most companies are not followed up if they’re not a short-term opportunity (i.e. going to close in this quarter).  With the average lead costing about $100 to generate, that can quickly add up to a lot of money.  Or to put it another way – calculate the proportion of your marketing budget you spend on lead generation; how much is 80% of that?

So, if you want to scale up your sales, you’ll have to scale up demand generation and that in turn means you should to start looking at marketing automation technologies.  Luckily, there are a lot of technologies becoming available, most of them delivered as software-as-a-service, with low entry costs and no installation or desktop deployments necessary.

 

Social media and snake oil

February 16th, 2010

Who’s legit and who’s fake when it comes to social media? Two contrasting views on the topic come from Olivier Blanchard with his article “Is your social media director qualified?”, and “Attacking the social media lynch mob” by Jay Baer. 

Olivier has high standards and trenchant views on who’s qualified to set the social media agenda.  He says there are three types of social media directors:

  1. the first type are “super smart, talented, experienced in a broad range of disciplines, have an established foot print in social media space”, are recognized as thought leaders and are passionate about what they do.
  2. type 2 “isn’t quite as savvy but isn’t lacking in talent, smarts and enthusiasm”.
  3. type  3 is “the bad type…. con artists… shams”. You get the picture.

I’ll let you self-diagnose.  Olivier goes on to provide some tips on how to spot your ideal candidate, including “applicant can tell a personal story involving either Digg, Seesmic or both”.  Scary stuff.  There doesn’t seem to be much room for the amateur enthusiast in this definition.

Jay Baer has a different outlook.  His view is “just because someone takes a more tactical approach to social media, just because they don’t measure ROI the way you do, just because they focus on small business and you don’t, does not mean they are charlatans… And this notion that you can’t be good at social media unless you’ve been doing it for years is utter crap.”

I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Baer.  There are a lot of bright people out there who are just beginning to turn their attention to social media, particularly those working in B2B marketing.  I don’t expect their lack of previous experience is going to prove much of a barrier, given the speed with which they’ve adopted and exploited a host of other technologies to date. 

Anyway, I’d like your views on other categorizations of prospective social media directors. I’d particularly like to see some that are funny (humour wasn’t prominent among Olivier’s list of preferred characteristics).

A manager’s guide to Digital Marketing

February 15th, 2010

This is a presentation I gave recently on Digital Marketing, aimed at business managers.   The presentation lists the online tools you can use before describing each digital marketing technique in a little more detail.  Topics covered include web-site design and landing pages, Google pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, email marketing, online PR and various forms of social media.  You can find this and other more detailed guides on the main DohertyWhite website too.

View more presentations from DohertyWhite.

10 Trends for Social Media in 2010

January 28th, 2010

A great presentation on 10 Trends for Social media this year from C. Edward Brice, brought to my attention by the B2BMarketingZone newsletter.  There are a lot of stand-out slides highlighting the move of budget to social marketing, the convergence in mobile internet access with the growth of social media and touching on topics like augmented reality and social gaming.  As mentioned in my last post, there are lots of implications for B2B marketers.  For example, if people begin moving most of their personal communications to Facebook and Twitter, what happens to email marketing as a way of reaching them?  If more people learn about products and services from social networks how does this effect search engine optimization and pay-per-click?  With the prediction that more people will access the internet from their mobile device than from laptops or PCs by 2013, how does this effect social media usage and general online habits?

Global time spent on social networks rises 82%

January 27th, 2010

A news item from MarketingCharts today reports an 82% rise in time spent on social networks, based on research from the Nielsen Company comparing December 2009 with December 2008.  Global consumers spent an average of 5 hours 35 minutes in December 2009, compared with 3 hours 3 minutes a year previously, and unique audience figures rose 27% from 242 million in December 08 to 307.4 million in December 09.

Facebook had an almost 100% increase in unique visitors from December to December, while Twitter recorded 579% growth from 2.7 million visitors to 18.1 million.

The MarketingChart piece also cites a recent survey by Prompt Communications of 300 consumers in Boston. This showed that 96% of them used Facebook to communicate with friends and family on a regular basis, which trails the phone (at 99%) but beats text messaging (93%) and email (91%).  We saw something similar during a recent client engagement. As part of the assignment we helped create some ‘buyer personas’ for digital music consumers and validated some of these personas on a college campus in Ireland.  The 10 students we interviewed rarely used email, and stayed ‘within’ Facebook for the majority of the time they were online each day,  using it almost exclusively to interact with classmates, friends and family, partly driven by their wish to keep their mobile phone bills as low as possible. 

I’m note sure what the takeaways for B2B marketers and sales teams are just yet – this will depend on the social media usage of decision makers and influencers at your target customer organisations.  But based on this research you can assume a lot if not all of your target buyers are active on the social networks. Combined with a predicted surge in smart phone sales (which means more people accessing Facebook and Twitter using these devices while on the road) there are obviously implications for your 2010 promotional plans if you want to be noticed by your prospective customers. One big long term impact could be on email marketing strategy – will email begin to decline in importance as a promotional tool over the next 5 years, replaced by intra-social network messaging?