In part 1 of this series, we noted from Sirius Decisions‘ recent research that the market leading companies, using the same number of leads are able to
- Close over 4 times the number of deals as “average” firms
- Close twice as many deals as “good” firms.
These are eye-popping numbers to consider, especially with economic times that demand that businesses make every opportunity count.
What does “Market Leading” Mean?
The market leading firms are adept at aligning their people around marketing-to-sales processes enabled with CRM and Marketing Automation tools that optimize their efforts and maximize target audience reach. The best B2B marketing organizations are almost exclusively focused on lead quality. They emphasize buyer behavior and compare to well defined buyer personas in order to build targeted campaigns that move prospects through the buyer stages. They have metrics in place that clearly show management and sales the impact of demand generation programs on the pipeline, closed deals and corporate revenue. Marketing and sales are tightly aligned in terms of people interaction, lead flow process and the use of technology to support every aspect of client acquisition and retention. They practice Lean process improvement principles to eliminate waste in marketing and sales resources and optimize every dollar of sales and marketing spend.
What Should “Good” Firms Focus on to Become “Market Leading”?
In part 3 of the series, we detailed the steps required to move from “average” to “good” performance. With those practices in place, we can now turn our attention to the following programs to implement in order to achieve marketing leading lead management status
- Establish lead quality teams consisting of marketing, inside sales, sales admin and possibly sales team and conduct weekly lead hand-off reviews.
- Develop comprehensive buyer personas that profile key buyer types such as end-user, influencer, buyer/decision-maker and executive (CXOs).
- Develop progressive profiling programs that deepen the intelligence for each buyer type in your CRM/Marketing Automation database. Utilize prospecting tools such as Netprospex, Zoominfo, Hoovers, etc to automate the process of keeping contact information fresh and complete.
- Create comprehensive content maps for the key buyer types and for each buyer stage:
Awareness > Inquiry > Consideration > Purchase.
After mapping existing content, create and/or re-purpose content to fill any gaps. Ensure that content consists of whitepapers, webinars, short articles, case studies, videos (2-3 minutes) and podcasts (5-7 minutes).
- Develop lead nurturing campaigns that segment by buyer type and buyer stage. Deliver personalized value propositions by these segments to deepen engagement and optimize buyer stage conversions.
- Develop metrics based on corporate objectives such as revenue growth and customer retention. Use marketing dashboards and reports to present marketing’s contribution to revenue and pipeline to senior management on a monthly/quarterly basis.
Comments from others on the earlier installment in this lead nurturing series jave highlighted other resources and approaches to consider. I will wrap things up with a final post that links to these resources.
