Thought Leadership Interview #16: Fearless Lead Gen from the Fearless Competitor: Jeff Ogden

I don’t know how I got connected with Jeff Ogden, but he’s the author of the hot white paper “How to Find New Customers.”  He asked me to read it and I liked it a lot. There is so much being written about demand generation, but most of it doesn’t make demand gen simple to understand. Ogden’s white paper does just that. That makes it a must-read, and Ogden a “must-interview.”

Ogden’s claim to fame is helping companies acquire customers.  You can get his point of view via his popular blog, Fearless Competitor.  He’s a sales and marketing expert, but also an entrepreneur that has founded two companies.  If you’re going to CMO Club summit, he’ll be there as a thought leader.

Here’s his interview:

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

  • Innovate or die: New companies will emerge and former leaders will fade.
  • Marketing evolves into a leadership role above sales.
  • Customer empowerment: Those who accept it prosper.  Those who don’t go bankrupt.

2.    What are the biggest challenges for 2009?

  • A study of military history reveals that all wars begin by fighting the last war; the United States Civil War, for example, used Revolutionary War tactics. Fast German Panzer tanks enabled Germany to defeat the Allies, who were using World War I tactics, in the early part of World War II. Similarly, marketers today are mainly fighting the battles of the last war. The biggest challenge is to turn around that archaic mindset.
  • Economic fears and cuts: Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to take market share, most execs are cutting too deeply and in the wrong places.
  • Lack of process: There’s too much focus on tactics. Buying is a process.

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

  • Number of qualified sales opportunities being generated
  • Marketing spend vs. revenue delivered
  • Percentage of leads delivered vs. closed

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

  • Lead nurturing: This is the biggest problem because customers are in control.  Lead nurturing must be personalized and interactive; as behavior changes, nurturing needs to change.
  • Customer personas: To sell to me, you must know me. Not just superficially, but very deeply.
  • No one cares about your product but you. The focus must be on business results.  But too many marketers focus on what their company offers.
  • Failure to understand the buying cycle: A deep understanding of how people buy helps companies sell.

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

That they read my white paper, “How to Find New Customers: The Definitive Guide to Driving Demand for Your Company’s Products and Services,” and apply its lessons.

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

  • Customer persona and techniques with services firms like  Bulldog Solutions
  • Marketing automation like Marketo
  • Trigger event knowledge like InsideView

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

  • Marketing and sales become one. From product development through long-term support – it is one continuous process.  Break down the walls.
  • The customer is in charge. We begin to listen by using social networks.
  • Patience. The era of 90-day startups is over.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

How to Use Social Media in B2B Marketing

Social media: Nothing is hotter with B2B marketers.  I mean, if you want to get traffic, talk about social media … it’s uncanny.  The problem is nobody knows what to do with it — particularly where to start.  That’s why we decided to do our Webinar, “Using Social Media in Your B-to-B Marketing: The 5 Best Practices for Building Dialogue & Demand.”

For our Webinars and offers, we are very big in providing as much “real” value as possible. It would be easy for me to get the reg by just saying “social media,” but when we produce content, we want viewers to derive real value.  To do that for this Webinar, we’re trying to help B2B marketers make sense of social media and leave with some tangible action items.

I hope you get a chance to join and even more so, I hope you get some real value.

Click here to sign up.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Marketers Re-“Joyce”: Thought Leadership Interview #15 with Market2Lead CMO Kevin Joyce

It’s amazing the type of talent and, ultimately, content being driven from the marketing automation industry. This is a real market with real competition brewing. Net-net, I love having these guys come on The Funnelholic and “spit game.”

This post is no different. Kevin Joyce is the CMO of Market2Lead Inc. , one of the vendors vying for marketing automation supremacy.  He is clearly experienced, with 26 years under his belt. He also has marketing automation chops — for seven years Joyce has worked with many companies on their demand-generation strategies and on marketing-automation solution selection and deployment, particularly as CEO at Rubicon Marketing Group.

Good work Kevin! Here’s his interview:

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

  • Greater acceptance of social media by B2B as a means to increase brand equity: I believe in the last few years many B2Bs were waiting in the wings to see if the blogosphere could really have an influence on their business outlook. There was some awareness that it was good for Search Engine Marketing results, but it seems many corporations didn’t understand how the added transparency of social media could affect them. Perhaps it came from the sneaking suspicion that they were losing control of what was said about them. No amount of traditional PR budget could clean up nor even catch up to a runaway controversy. I believe that in 2009 “the wisdom of crowds” will take center stage and marketing at B2B firms will start to learn how and why to influence opinion leaders (amateur journalists) via social media vehicles.
  • Greater adoption of marketing automation: I believe we are watching the marketing-automation industry “crossing the chasm.” The early majority will start to flock to this software to help save marketers time and make them more productive. The target market will move from being the high-technology early adopters to the more mainstream finance, healthcare and media companies. The number of consulting organizations that offer services around these products will blossom. It will start to get easier to hire marketing employees who have experience with one of these systems.Adoption will also increase in the existing customer base. The number of marketing users per instance of the software will grow as existing firms expand their use of the systems and marketers get more familiar with the power at their finger tips. It’s rather like buying a new 46-inch LCD TV with a manual as thick as the tax code. At first you just turn on the TV and watch it, but after a few months you start paging through the manual and figure out how to turn on a few “automatic” features that make your overall viewing experience increasingly better.
  • Marketing operations comes of age in B2Bs: I don’t believe that right brain, creative, marketing communications managers are going to wake up anytime soon with greater analytical powers. We enjoy their strong right brain creative talent — that mastery of transforming 1,000 words into a single image and knowing just how to distill complex messages down to a crisp sound bite. I wouldn’t try to change these people a bit. But there are increasing demands on the marketing organization to become more analytical when it comes to demand generation. What is the ROI of campaigns, how many qualified leads did you deliver from that unbelievably expensive trade show and your dimensional door drops? Yes, marketing automation provides the tools to collect and present the data but humans still get to analyze the data and make better business decisions as a result. Marketing operations will become more prevalent in an effort to centralize many of the left brain activities in marketing — reporting, budgeting, planning, project management, marketing technology management, data quality stewards and so on.

2.    What are the biggest challenges for 2009?

Accelerating the rebound from the recession: It’s easy for CEOs to cut marketing budgets during a downturn if they don’t understand where leads come from. This is especially true if marketing executives have been unable to paint the picture that 10% of the business closed last quarter came from marketing spend in the same quarter, an additional 30% came from marketing spend that happened in the prior quarter and 60% was influenced by marketing activities in the two quarters before that! Without this clear linkage, a CEO can cut marketing’s budget and see sales in that quarter drop only 10%. “Woo hoo! What did we spend all that money on marketing for?”

Of course, the next quarter, the results will be down 40%, but the marketing budget cuts will have been six months previous and a distant memory. “So why are the results so bad? It must be the economy.” The following quarter, the results are even worse and someone realizes that the competitor is actually doing well. “Time to put some money into marketing and the results had better increase by more than 10% this quarter as a result.” Right! So, our biggest challenge is to demonstrate the linkage between the opportunity funnel and marketing investments and to be able to show CEOs how every dollar they put into marketing impacts the business and how long it will take to see those results. For B2B companies with long sales cycles, marketing activities are not a light switch that can shine abundance on an empty sales funnel. So we must analyze Q1 results and determine exactly when the marketing influence took place for each and every deal that closed, and then project that forward so we can prepare our CEOs for the realization that the marketing cycle is probably twice as long as the sales cycle and that recovery needs to start now.

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

I am going to ignore the obvious ones, such as total net new leads by lead source, and mention three others that may not be so obvious.

  • Form completion rates by unique form: You need one chart showing the weekly historical trend for all of your major forms on the Web site (info request, newsletter sign up, free trial, download, partner sign up, PPC form, etc). Web leads can be very economical and are usually a good indicator of interest. I find it fascinating that so many people focus so much attention on getting more visitors to the Web site and so little attention on the “last mile” —getting the visitors to complete a registration form. Form completion rates can vary depending on the offer, but in many cases it will be a lot easier to double the form completion rate than it is to double the number of visitors to a Web site!
  • Marketing conversion rate by lead source: This one might produce results that will freak people out, but it’s very important. What is it we all want to do in hard economic times? Cut the 20% of marketing programs that are not working. It’s usually easy to recognize the campaigns that are pulling their weight but much more difficult to determine what is the bottom 20%. One way to really measure the efficacy of campaigns is to figure out the lead-conversion rate by lead source. (A lead conversion happens when a salesperson elects to convert a lead into a contact/account and is usually a good measure of lead quality). Remember that you will want to have a good handle on your average lead age before it converts so that “young” campaigns don’t get dinged simply because the leads haven’t had time to mature to a conversion-ready state.
  • Responses by contact/lead type: Marketing spends a lot of the budget on generating out-going touches. It’s nice to be able to measure the incoming responses and codify them based on the type of person that responded: Net new lead, existing lead in system, existing contact but not a customer yet and lastly customers. By graphing the responses you get each week by contact/lead type you have a rough idea of how much you are spending on marketing to your installed base (loyalty marketing), on nurturing prospects, or on net new lead generation. The results may surprise you!

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

The primary oversight I have seen over the years is in finding the balance between creativity and science in lead generation. If you head to either extreme the campaign will not live up to its full potential. Successful demand generation requires a balance of both art and science. The art is in the communication, the science is in list segmentation, the measuring of campaign efficacy and heuristics. It is nearly impossible to find individuals who have both communications creativity and analytical leanings, so firms have to marry these individuals in program teams to get the best results. Some firms look to agencies to provide the creativity whilst they in-source the analytical element; for other firms it is just the opposite. Driving a balance in these skill sets in program teams is what’s most important.

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

Don’t get too hung up on “lead source.”A lead comes to your Web site from a referring link because of some successful PR, and he or she fills in a form to download a white paper. So what is your “lead source” field going to say? Is it the offer name, the form name, your Web site or perhaps the referring Web site URL? Further, this person is the research assistant to the director of the department and only one of 10 people that will be involved in the final purchase decision. All 10 people will each have five interactions with your firm before the deal is close, for a total of 50 interactions. So what makes the very first interaction, the “lead source,” that important? It isn’t, and neither is the most recent interaction before the opportunity was created. What is important is to understand the mix of interactions that happened, and in what order and by title so that you understand how prospects that eventually become customers want to engage with you. If you get too hung up on looking for the lead source, you miss the bigger picture!

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

Of course I have to answer that marketing automation software from Market2Lead will be the most vital addition to any marketing department! As I mentioned in response to the first question, I feel marketers also have to engage with social media because that’s how prospects have already chosen to engage with them. So kick your blog into high gear and start learning about feedburner, chicklets, RSS, Twitter and so on because the conversation has started without you. Lastly, consider the many tools for cleaning up your data, presenting a centralized view of your marketing data and stopping poor quality data from entering the system. There are many products out there to help with data hygiene; it’s time to start using them and stop making excuses for data odor!

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

I think it’s a fantastic time to be in marketing. When I left engineering for marketing some twenty years ago, my poor mother feared that my career had taken a turn for the worse! I am more excited to be working in marketing now than ever before because the number of tools at our disposal has exploded in the past five years. The possibilities for measuring our influence on business outcomes have never been greater. I hope this is the year we attract more left brainers into marketing because the tools and processes exist to make marketing more measurable and successful — we just need the people and the skills to fulfill the dream!

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Thought Leadership Interview # 14: The World According to Garth: Garth Moulton, Founder of Jigsaw

We landed a big one: Garth Moulton, co-founder of Jigsaw Data Corp. and pretty famous for having founded one of the hottest Sales/Marketing 2.0 companies in the valley.  I met up with Garth last week for the first time (thank you Twitter).  He’s very smart and a good guy-perfect for the Funnelholic Thought Leadership series.

Garth Moulton is now called the “Jigsaw ambassador to the community”  after previously leading the business development function. Before he founded Jigsaw, Garth worked at several technology firms.  He has a great blog on Jigsaw and Sales 2.0 you should follow as well.

Check out this great interview:

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

Designer jeans with suit coats in business meetings. It’s the new cool guy uniform. Sorry. Let’s see …

I think the biggest trend in B2B sales is not necessarily “emerging” in 2009 but becoming more mainstream. That is the trend toward sales teams going “inside and online.” Salesforce.com and other early SaaS companies pioneered the way for reps to close six figure deals without ever setting foot in the prospect’s office using new (Sales 2.0) technologies and communication methods. Even the big boys (IBM, Oracle) are replacing their “silverbacks” that do business in the board room and the golf course with hybrid professionals that can prospect online and on the phone in the morning and present the business case in person in the afternoon.

Similarly, successful companies are blurring the line between sales and marketing both in process and personnel requirements. They’re sharing lead generation responsibilities. They’re integrating their formerly stovepipe data systems or replacing them with marketing automation platforms to manage leads throughout the funnel. Salespeople still think that marketing doesn’t send them enough good leads and marketing points back that the salespeople don’t adequately follow up on the ones they get, but there is a growing transparency that makes finger pointing more difficult.

Also, 15 years after Al Gore gave us the Web, companies are finally starting to capitalize on all the customer data they have to do more intelligent marketing. This involves placing more helpful information in places where customers can retrieve it, rather than just clobbering them over the head with new products.  But there is still a long way to go.

2. What are the biggest challenges for 2009?

With the economy in the dumper, chasing exclusively small, “net new” direct deals is risky for B2B salespeople. The large companies are likely to have the resources to weather the bad times, so B2B sales efforts need to be aligned toward enterprise offerings and up sell opportunities to current clients. Also, partnerships become more important because of the need to leverage established relationships with big companies and channels. With the severely restricted direct market, the challenge of rising above the noise for both sales and marketing is as important as ever.

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

I don’t pretend to be a marketing guy, but looking in from the B2B sales end I would say any metric that deals with speed should be the top priority. In sales we have pipeline velocity and time to close metrics – how about time until the lead is in the sales guy’s hands? I’m sure lead scoring has a place in sophisticated programs, but I would take 10 leads of any sort one hour from when they came in over one lead that made it through two technologies and a handful of human analysis three days later. This is Internet Age – customers want what they want and they want it now.

That said, I’m not suggesting that we abandon quality metrics to just focus on quantity. In fact, driving down to a true cost per lead is extremely important for running a successful business.

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

I think the main oversights marketers are making match those of every other department – lack of communication throughout (and after!) any process. Before embarking on a new lead generation program, there needs to as much communication as possible with management and with sales to make sure that everyone is targeting the same thing. Is there even an agreed upon definition of what a lead is before the money is spent and resources allocated? No technology in the world can decide that one seemingly simple detail for you. Once a program is finished, everyone should reconvene and honestly do a post mortem instead of rushing onto the next Webinar, trade show or viral video shoot.

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

Try to diversify as much of your spend as possible to take advantage of as many different potential lead sources as possible. Fowler and I had exactly zero experience with PR being anything but a huge waste of money until we founded Jigsaw. But in the first year, PR was our second leading source of leads next to word of mouth, which it helped drive. Test and invest in a variety of ideas. Don’t get so caught up in the latest craze or technology (ahem, AppExhange or Twitter) that you either ignore a valuable source of leads or, worse yet, waste a lot of your budget trying to keep up with the Joneses.

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

Jigsaw, Jigsaw and Jigsaw. In that order.

Seriously, the top of the funnel data component of lead generation is enormously important, and sales and marketers need to gather that data from wherever they can – Google, social applications like LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and in instances where the ROI is carefully examined, the data aggregators or niche providers.

Also, I can’t see a B2B company getting very far without an online CRM system. As much as I love poking fun at Salesforce.com, we run our business on the platform and the fact that they are making it so easy to pipe in other business applications and report so effectively.

I guess the final key application would be some combination of email marketing, Web analytics and marketing automation. The line between these guys is certainly blurring through M&A and technology expansion. But there needs to be a system for tracking all lead generation functions, and in a Web 2.0 world you simply have to be able to analyze success.

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

I hope that sales and marketing can fight off the lemming-like instinct that most companies have to batten down the hatches and grind to a halt all commerce, even if their bottom line hasn’t been affected yet. To me it’s just as irresponsible and stupid as the drunken growth “strategies” during the boom times.  Money spent on sales and marketing programs with calculable and predictable ROI should be immune from “everyone on this side of the boat” budget cuts.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Power to the People: Why Billy Beane Has Never Won the World Series

I know what you’re thinking: Another sports analogy? But hear me out – this one is near and dear to my heart.

Look, I love metrics. Metrics have helped me run my business, made me more efficient and added scale to my company. I love them. In particular, I love Billy Beane’s approach to baseball stats: focusing on nontraditional statistics like on-base percentage versus straight batting average. I believe his methodology translates well to lead generation: Love metrics, but make sure you’re focusing on the right ones.

On the other hand, we can’t forget one core issue: people, not computers, win the World Series. Billy’s process keeps his team in the running every year, but he has never won the World Series. This is interesting from a business-building perspective. I used to say, “Billy Beane has never won the World Series,” as we built Tippit and we made gut decisions that ran counter to the data. It became a part of my lexicon.

I heard two quotes over the last couple of months that retriggered this thought process:

  • “Don’t forget that all these tools are great, but you need great people to be successful.”
    - Rich Blakeman, sales vice president of Miller Heiman, speaking at the Sales 2.0 conference.
    When he said this, all I could think was, Billy Beane has never won the World Series.
  • “The way to pick the winner of the NCAA basketball tournament is … what team has the most future NBA players.”
    -Skip Bayless, ESPN morning show commentator.
    This was interesting to me. In college basketball, coaches are the stars and are portrayed as “master strategists.” But at the end of the day, the team with the best players wins. Yes, they are supported by a highly effective system (process) – but to win the big one, your players have to execute.

For all the metrics and processes a colleague or I put in place, I am reminded all the time that that the data is there to help make great decisions – decisions that need to be made by people who then need to go execute them. People have to make gutsy calls, decisions with the data and decisions DESPITE the data. They alsy have to execute on a daily basis, outwork competitors and more. Metrics alone simply can’t do that. Power to the people!

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Recessionary Marketing 101 Taught by Charles Schwab

Sorry about being gone a week – I have been inconsistent lately and I apologize.

I look for inspiration everywhere, and I found some on a billboard overlooking highway 101: The Charles Schwab  “Do Something About It” campaign. It was great timing for me to see this ad; a couple weeks ago I did a Webinar with Netprospex and, as usual, I was ranting about the importance of understanding new-age buyers and how they are unduly affected by the recession (broke, no budget,yadda yadda). I got a couple comments from the crowd like, “Did this guy’s dog die?” and, “Do buyers really think like tha?t”, etc. I realized that I wasn’t entirely making my point: The buyer has changed, and the recession is bad, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should cry about it.  You need to embrace the change in the buyer’s environment and craft your message accordingly.

Enter Charles Schwab’s  “Do Something About It.” Here’s what I like about the campaign:

1. It captures the current mind-set of the consumer.
2. The “it” inspires.
3.  It needs no other explaining; when you see it, you know what they’re talking about.

I actually wrote about seizing opportunity in this time of economic crisis in a previous post, When the blood flows in the streets, it’s time to buy real estate. Again, my point was that the economy is terrible, but the opportunity is great.

As a matter of fact, my buddy recently sent me this quote from Rhonda Abrams in USA Today:

History bears me out. When times are bad for the economy, it can be a great time to start a business. In fact, 16 of the 30 companies that make up the Dow industrial average were started during a recession or depression. These include Procter & Gamble, Disney, Alcoa, McDonald’s, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson.

So, go do something about it.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Thought Leadership Interview #13: Engagement Marketing 101: Will Schnabel from Silverpop Engage B2B

Let me start out by saying that I’m on a streak of great thought leadership interviews. I may put these interviews into an e-book and distribute it. The content in the Thought Leadership interview series has gone well beyond my expectations with rich, thoughtful responses that I have learned a lot from.

My latest interview is with Will Schnabel, Vice President of International for Silverpop and co-author of Silverpop’s new e-book, “Lead Management Workbook: Advice and Worksheets to Develop a Strategic, Results-Driven B2B Marketing Program.” Before his current position, Schnabel was responsible for overall operations and product direction at Silverpop’s Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz).

I think you’ll enjoy this one — I did.

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

  • Engagement marketing moves front and center: The rise of Web 2.0 has ushered in a new age of marketing that respects the power of the informed customer and catapults marketing to a whole new level of effectiveness and influence. Marketing has always been about relevance and relationships, but engagement marketing takes this one giant step further into a world where customers assert more control over the brand and fully expect companies to participate in dialogues with them. As such, the tipping point from traditional marketing to engagement marketing seems to be close at hand. Though traditional, interruptive-based advertising will still be with us for a long time to come — and can be a critical first element in the complex relationships marketers forge with their prospects — it will no longer enjoy its privileged position as the primary influencer of consumer and business preferences and buying decisions.
  • Sales and marketing are now talking: I continue to be encouraged by the dialog and effort by B2B marketers to define and implement integrated lead-to-sale processes. Agreements on information flow, business process, organizational structures and measurements are being hammered out by sales and marketing organizations around the world, with a growing understanding of the tremendous benefit that can be gained in terms of increased opportunities and business revenue. This has now allowed integrated lead management to move from a nice-to-have to a must-have for many B2B sales and marketing organizations.
  • B2B marketing practices become standard marketing practices: There seems to be a growing realization of the different approaches used by B2B and consumer marketers. With this realization, various organizations, industry analysts, technology vendors and a growing set of key influencers are emerging to develop and push new B2B marketing concepts forward. It is exciting to see this industry rapidly develop, spawned by the use of social networking and Internet-based marketing approaches.

2. What are the biggest challenges for B2B marketers in 2009?

I believe one of the most difficult challenges for B2B marketers in the current economic climate is to be asked to do more with less. Time and time again, I speak with organizations that are reducing their headcounts and consolidating their marketing efforts, yet they still have the desire to undertake new strategies, such as integrated lead management. Diverting funds from traditional marketing approaches to online lead management will continue to gain acceptance, but having the right people, with the right knowledge, to manage this internal change will become increasingly difficult.

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

  • Percentage of sales pipeline generated by marketing: This metric helps track the percentage of the sales pipeline, or opportunities, that marketing is generating based on lead generation/lead management activities. As marketers accept greater ownership for delivering sales-ready leads, it is important to show the sales teams that they too will sign-up for, and be measured on, delivering the company’s revenue targets.
  • Cost per opportunity: This is, in many ways, the opposite of Cost per Lead, or CPL. By looking at the costs required to generate a sales opportunity, rather than just a new inbound inquiry, different marketing approaches and advertising mediums can be evaluated appropriately. This is the core metric that allows marketers to focus on lead quality over lead quantity.
  • Average TTR (Time to Revenue): This is a measure of the average time it takes from spending marketing dollars on a new inquiry to booking revenue after a new sales win. While the TTR will vary greatly by industry, I believe marketing should understand the velocity by which a lead moves through the funnel. If generating sales-ready leads requires a lengthier lead-to-sales process, then the cost to achieve that revenue will inherently rise. A secondary metric would be to take campaign ROI and divide it by the average TTR. This would be another good indicator (and surrogate NPV calculation) of which marketing efforts provide faster ROI than others, which is of even greater importance in this difficult economy.

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

The first and largest mistake is to ignore the lead-management aspect of lead generation. By that I refer to the processes, as have been highlighted by many in The Funnelholic, of lead nurturing, lead scoring and lead routing, happening before they are passed to sales.

However, a key requirement of lead management is to provide clear visibility to sales regarding these efforts. If marketing isn’t 100 percent transparent in their lead-management efforts, sales will inherently be concerned that they are being denied access to possible revenue opportunities. Conversely, sales information and activities must be visible to marketing to allow them to monitor the process of the opportunities, fine-tune the scoring approaches, and recycle old leads as necessary. Overall, this transparency is key to building a collaborative and trusting working relationship between sales and marketing.

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

Given its importance, and with the risk of being repetitive, I encourage us all to be transparent with sales and management. Focus on providing key metrics on leads generated, opportunities created and revenues delivered. When asked by management, “What have you delivered?,” stay away from soft responses such as the number of conference and trade shows attended, ads placed or white papers authored. Report your successes, and failures, with the same level of analytical rigor as other departments.

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

There are a number of great new applications, such as TweetDeck, for staying involved in the growing social landscape. But, not to be too old fashioned, I think there are three core applications that all B2B marketers must master.

  • SFA (Sales Force Automation) or CRM: This is core to understanding the outcomes of our marketing efforts, and evaluating our sales cycles against our competitors. The information provided by our sales organizations is a gold mine for understanding the outcomes of our marketing efforts.
  • Marketing automation/lead management: I’ll admit this is a bit self promotional, but having a fully integrated platform that manages your lead database, nurturing efforts, email campaigns,and scoring rules, and provides real-time access to your lead-to-sales metrics, is critical to managing the stream of lead opportunities efficiently and effectively. This is especially true in this economy, as marketers must automate manual processes, and easily and rapidly share information with sales.
  • Google analytics: Last but not least, Google continues to move the needle by offering new features that dramatically help marketers understand online behaviors and optimize Web marketing performance.

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

I hope that, rather than just speaking to (or shouting at) our customers, we all focus on listening to their needs. It would be risky, in this era of user-generated content, to simply focus on traditional approaches to marketing which are based mainly on message reach and frequency.

In this spirit, I hope that new lead-generation approaches not only improve internal efficiencies and collaboration between sales and marketing, but help us enter into meaningful and relevant dialogues with prospects and customers, thereby improving our brands and driving greater revenue opportunities for our organizations.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter