The Funnelholic

When I was running around Silicon Valley as a consultant, I heard quite a bit about Howard Sewell and and how he was one of the best in the business. Well, he is.

He is president of CDI (Connect Direct ) Inc., a full-service agency with offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle specializing in turnkey, integrated demand generation and lead-management strategies for high-tech vendors.  In 2007 and 2008, CDI was named one of the nation’s Top 100 Agencies by BtoB magazine.  Plus, Sewell’s blog, Direct Connections, is a must-read.

I am very happy to have Sewell in the thought-leadership mix here, and, as you can see below, he’s a great resource.

1.       What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009?

In my opinion, the biggest trend will be a continuing move toward marketing automation and lead management — not a new phenomenon, to be sure — but I see 2009 as the year when marketing automation really gains momentum and becomes as much a must-have as CRM.  This will be driven by companies’ need to ensure that no leads or inquiries are falling through the cracks, and that they’re squeezing the maximum potential out of every marketing dollar.

In a down economy, when companies are competing for fewer buyers, the most successful marketers will be those who figure out how to be in the right place at the right time, capturing and engaging potential customers while they’re in the research process. I think we’ll continue to see more and more innovation in online advertising, with new tactics, vehicles and strategies that enable marketers to find active buyers more effectively. For example, vehicles like RSS sponsorship (e.g. Pheedo) should gain traction because they’re a relatively uncluttered medium and early adopters are gaining the advantage.

I suspect mobile marketing may be poised for a breakthrough. The larger opportunity is still squarely in the consumer domain, but at CDI we’re starting to test mobile response (texting) as part of integrated B2B campaigns, and though it’s early yet, the potential is there. The fact is that more and more of our audience is working on mobile devices, and so it’s only a matter of time until B2B marketers follow suit.

2.       What are the biggest challenges for 2009?

The keywords for 2009 will be optimization and efficiency — making the most of the programs you have in place and maximizing return from the dollars you spend. The good news is that for most companies, there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement. A good chunk of the work we do as an agency these days is improving existing programs — whether it’s a Webinar invitation, a landing page, a PPC campaign or a lead-nurturing process. The challenge for clients, however, is having the insight to know what needs fixing.

3.       What are three metrics that B2B marketers should care about and why?

A few short years ago, measuring ROI (return on investment) from B2B demand-generation programs was a pipe dream. But with the growing adoption of marketing automation systems, and the ability to track not just leads or even qualified leads but actual deals (and assigning those deals to specific programs), more and more of our clients are looking at ROI as the ultimate measure of marketing success. It’s really the only metric that matters.

4.      What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?

• Good landing pages. Most B2B landing pages stink. Sorry, but that’s the ugly truth. Companies know better, but too often landing pages (or registration pages or microsites) end up being an afterthought in campaign development, and results suffer for it. SEM (search engine marketing) is the obvious example. Where most SEM campaigns fail isn’t in selecting the right keywords or optimizing bid strategy, but in failing to convert clicks to leads.

• Lead management. A recent Aberdeen survey reported that sales doesn’t follow up on fully 28 percent of qualified leads, which sounds horrible until you read that only three years ago the figure was 60 to 70 percent. Still, the fact that marketing can generate qualified leads at tremendous cost and yet 1 in 4 of those leads is ignored is alarming to say the least. Companies that don’t have formal lead-management and lead-nurturing processes in place are simply throwing money away.

• Offer strategy. Next to targeting the right audience, offer is still king. Yet so many companies either ignore the offer altogether, fail to sell the offer effectively (instead of focusing on the merits of their products) or cobble together offers that simply aren’t compelling. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on media or how fabulous your creative is; if your offer stinks, your campaign is going to fail. Period.

5.       What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

Look very closely and critically at the way you do things today. What programs and campaigns are really yielding results? Are there programs that just get rolled out every quarter without regard to metrics? Is your current lead-management and lead-nurturing process maximizing the value of every inbound inquiry? Are foundational programs like SEM operating at peak efficiency, or are there improvements — ad copy, landing pages, offer tests — that could make a difference? Before you try the new and untested, fix what you already have in place.

6.    What three Web 2.0 applications, cutting-edge technologies or lead generation sources do marketers HAVE to consider to be successful?

• Marketing automation, for all the reasons already stated, but primarily for being able to systematically and automatically respond to, follow up with and nurture all inbound leads.
• Web visitor identification. If you don’t know which companies are visiting your Web site on a daily basis, even if those individuals don’t fill out a form, you’re missing out. There are plenty of technologies that can provide this information at relatively low cost and even alert your sales reps automatically.
• On the media front, content syndication. It’s not new, but it’s a more competitive space than ever. In this economy, content syndication can be a very effective complement to SEM in providing a consistent stream of inbound leads at a fixed cost. Plus, unlike search, with most content syndication deals you can filter the leads by geography and company size to ensure that every lead you pay for meets your minimum demographic criteria. Syndication gets a bad rap sometimes for generating lower quality leads, but in my view, the problem is more often rooted in lead follow-up than lead quality.

7.       What do you hope for in B2B sales and marketing for the new year?

As a service provider, my fondest wish (admittedly with a large dose of self-interest) is that companies get off the proverbial sideline. Judging from the conversations we have every day, there’s a huge pent-up demand for lead generation currently, but companies are just nervous to spend money because they don’t know where the economy’s heading. The optimist in me says that if the economy can just achieve some measure of stability, perhaps helped along by the proposed stimulus package, companies will come back into the market with a vengeance.

Having worked with Mike Damphousse over the last couple of years, I can tell you this:

• He has a value-added opinion on anything and everything.  Check out his blog and you’ll believe me.
• He is the expert in one of the hardest things to do in lead gen: Getting an appointment for the sales rep.

Damphousse is the founder of Green Leads LLC and is known as a smashmouth marketer with a heart — he believes in bringing value to people. I know this because he’ll offer his take to anyone, including his competitors. He’s building Green Leads from scratch. The company has already grown tremendously by focusing on quality and pay for performance marketing programs, helping it emerge as a big player in appointment setting, lead generation and market research for B2B marketers. And, as par for the course for anyone successful in providing value to marketers, Damphousse has 20 years of sales and marketing experience and was the CMO of two software companies.

Here’s what Damphousse had to say about marketing and lead generation:

1.    What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009?

• More outsourcing of critical demand-creation functions
• Lead Gen 2.0
• Social media impacting the B2B lead gen world

2.    What are the biggest challenges for 2009?

The economy does make us a bit timid, but use it as an opportunity to play offense. Competitors will be cinching their belts. It’s an opportunity. Buyers are still out there, and the ones that are active will respond to your marketing programs. Don’t be shy; market with courage!

3.    What are three metrics that B2B marketers should care about and why?

• Percent of leads converted to pipeline. Sorry “funnel.”
• Percent of pipeline that closes
• ROI of that program

But don’t be afraid to invest in some hard-to-measure marketing. Social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are hard to measure, but look at trends. If the investments you are making in those programs are paying off, you will see increased inbound activity.

4.    What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?

Don’t get caught up in the noise. I don’t quite remember the stats verbatim, but SiriusDecisions Inc. has some great stats on how much unsolicited marketing a typical executive receives over time. It’s incredible. Be different, be sincere and stand out from the crowd.

I also see a great deal of marketing dollars being spent on advertising, search engine marketing, etc.  It’s great to get the hand raisers, but have you looked at the price of quality keyword clicks on Google AdWords lately?  We’ve had some of our keywords bid up as high as $15 a click.  Try to pay that bill with any real traffic.

Oh, and lead scoring. Isn’t a lead either a quality lead or not? Why measure the in-between?

5.    What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

Don’t spend the budget on every idea you know. Diversify, but stay focused. Pick a handful of effective programs as opposed to all of them. Use experts, use technology, but DON’T use your sales team. Serve the leads to them in a quality package that’s ready to be sold to. Don’t inundate them with names, numbers and email addresses. They shouldn’t be doing the marketer’s job.  They should be face to face with prospects that have real issues to solve.

6.    What three Web 2.0 applications, cutting-edge technologies or lead generation sources do marketers HAVE to consider to be successful?

My top three are:

• Salesforce with marketing automation tools and integrated call-center software.  You’d be amazed what you can do with Eloqua and an integrated VoIP call center.
• All the crowd-supported sites such as LinkedIn and Jigsaw (check out the unlimited Jigsaw license, by the way).
• Google apps. Integrated with Salesforce or stand alone, just use it. Share data and reports with your sales team, marketing vendors, management; provide sales-enablement tools — you name it.

7.    What do you hope for in B2B sales and marketing for the new year?

Courage. I’d like to see marketers pushing management teams to invest in the top line. If it weren’t for the top line, there would be no bottom line. Prove what we can accomplish. Evangelize your programs. Then get results. Marketing should be leading an organization, not responding to it.

OK, I struggled to write what I consider to be my usual “witty” header with this one. I did, however, get a chance to look up what a manticore is.  According to Dictionary.com, a manticore is:

–noun
a legendary monster with a man’s head, horns, a lion’s body, and the tail of a dragon or, sometimes, a scorpion

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My second interview in this series is with the founder and CEO of ReachForce, Suaad Sait. The company’s B2B blog is one of the better ones in the business, and Sait is one of the smarter guys around. He is one of the marketing visionaries that are helping the industry find ways to benefit from everything 2.0.

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