Join Matt Heinz on May 15 at 10AM PDT or watch his presentation on demand anytime in the window below! hashtag is #Demand2013
Best Practices for Highly Effective Demand Generation: #Demand2013 feat @heinzmarketing
May 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Critical trends in demand generation feat. @heinzmarketing
May 14, 2013 by 1 Comment
In this short video segment, Matt Heinz answers the question: “What are the biggest trends in demand generation?” He is always fun and always thought-provoking.
If you want to hear more from Matt, join him on May 15 for a full presentation on what works in demand generation. You can ask him anything! RSVP here: 
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter
Social Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing campaign
October 25, 2012 by 2 Comments
This post stars Jason Miller and his company Marketo. (no relation to Jon). The story is about their social campaign for the Definitive Guide to Social Marketing. There are some great ideas and take-aways as we continue to try to answer the question: “Does social marketing work”?
Facebook worked, here is why:
Facebook is controversial in b2b since it is such a personal, consumer-driven social network, but Marketo was and has been successful there. The key to Facebook: Get people engaged in order to stay in the feed. I found some interesting takeaways:
1. Visual, Visual, Visual — to be successful in Facebook you have to have great visuals. Think about it, Facebook is a massive image sharing feed (pls see Instagram purchase), so you have to consider how your visual will compete.
2. Be fun — Facebook is a place for fun. People go to Facebook to break away from their day-to-day and have fun. Your promotions need to compete with the funny anecdotes and personal stories in everyone’s feed.
3. Juice the amplification with promoted post — Remember the key is to be in the feed. Promoted posts are a small amount of money to help you achieve that goal.
3. Your buyers are on Facebook, you just have to approach them correctly — Here is the prevailing irony in b2b Facebook marketing: “My buyers aren’t on Facebook” is a common b2b refrain yet there are a billion active users on Facebook. In other words, the odds tell you that you are wrong…they are on Facebook.
See some of their ads below.
Twitter worked, here is why:
Twitter is not controversial but results have been elusive for many. There some important things to learn from this campaign:
1. Leverage promoted tweets — Marketo is averaging about $37/prospect* via their paid Twitter activities. Many marketers are unaware of the power of the promoted tweet — Jason recommends buying both for search (you will show up when people search a keyword or hashtag) and timeline (you can designate the target “interest” and the promoted tweet will show up in their timeline)
*Prospect for Marketo is defined as “right person/company”, engaged with Marketo, and fits target profile.
2. Advocates and employees — I think a lot of marketers are getting good at using their army of employees but many marketers are still getting around to building their army of advocates (influencers, customers, etc).
3. Take a value based, serious tone on Twitter — You can see the copy below. The copy here is more classic copy.
Brand Influencers were key to the campaign, here is why:
Marketo ran a “Share to Win” contest. For every 5 referred downloads, brand influencers earned a printed copy of the Definitive Guide and t-shirt.
And the winner is….
Does social marketing work? Here are some results that should tell you “yes”:
1. Facebo0k — 1000+ downloads
2. Twitter — 300+ downloads
3. Average share resulted in 25 clicks
2 key take-aways:
1. Each social channel is unique — Similar to your more traditional multi-channel campaigns, make sure you understand what the community in each channel will respond to and test it. The Facebook approach versus Twitter approach seen above is a great example.
2. Paid is working — People ask me all the time about paid social campaigns, they worked here so add it to the mix
Stay classy social media. Until next time
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter
Account based marketing: How to hit a handful of needles in the haystack
August 7, 2012 by 7 Comments
Today’s post will feature a targeted, account based marketing strategy aimed at driving pipeline from a very specific set of accounts. First, understand “who” your buyer is and if target market is narrow (example: Fortune 500, specific industries,etc), then you have consider account based marketing aka outbound marketing. I can give you another example: I have a friend in the business (I am not naming names to protect the innocent but lets just say he is a thought leader and one of the best in the business at demand generation) who had created a 24-7 always-on demand generation machine. He was filling pipeline via a combination of inbound marketing, lead nurturing, content, etc. However, when it came time to get to the Fortune 500, then he had to put together a plan that required outbound tactics in order to succeed. He was smart because if he sat around and waited, he would have failed. Outbound marketing is not a popular topic with the marketing glitterati because it conjures up images of cold calls and direct mail campaigns.
The reality is we are so much smarter today than we have been in the past and have the ability to create highly effective multi-channel campaigns directed at tight targets. For me the key is relevance. The ITSMA seems to be one of the champions of ABM (Account Based Marketing). They did a study of executive decision makers with some interesting results:
- 75% of executive respondents said they would read unsolicited marketing materials that contain ideas that might be relevant to their business
- Of those respondents, 92% would pay attention even if it is from a company they have never done business with
Understand and define your buyer then deliver relevant content to that buyer over time. That’s the rule. Follow that and you can win in outbound.
I just did a webinar this week with Inxpo entitled the 7 things b2b marketers need to do differently in demand generation. I wanted to talk about account-based marketing because it is getting lost in the marketing blogo-talk. I stumbled upon work by Lauren Goldstein from Babcock and Jenkins on a campaign they did with Nuance. I loved it so I called her called her to talk about it. It’s awesome and we can all learn from it.
Background: You want targeted, I’ll give you targeted
209 companies, 685 contacts, 12 key verticals, 2 core segments
The plan was to start with 7+ customized touchpoints and then nurture. Below are some of the key campaign elements.
Element #1: A Foam Finger (that’s right a foam finger)
Oh boy, I can hear the “haters” now…Yes, it is a chotchke but before you go blasting away…understand that a chotchke becomes a memorable marketing tactic when done in combination with other touches. In the old days, we would send the “gift” and then sit there and hope they would call us back. In other words, the foam finger WAS the campaign. In this case, think of the finger as the kick-off to your relationship with the prospect. A memorable, personalized element to the outbound program, it helps you with recognition as you go through your sequence of follow-up touches. Conversion comes later.
Step 2: Uber-personalization — custom microsite for each prospect
All communications via email and phone led the prospect to their own personalized microsite. The microsite was designed to contain only content that was important to them and their particular industry. Furthermore, sales had the ability to modify content in the microsite for even more relevance. I love the reminder of the foam finger as well…nice touch. I like the touch of having the prospect’s name at the top.
Element 3: Nurture till the cows come home.
One of the things that is important to very targeted outbound campaigns like this is a tight integration with sales. An example of this is all the emails were sent from the sales reps themselves. Communications with the prospect were mixed between calls, emails, and direct mail. Everything was focused on offering the prospect something. Pictured above was a key element to the nurturing campaign — a book on customer service that was sent to the prospect.
Analysis: The ROI on this program is currently 19-to-1. The engagement rate was 46% which is fantastic. In other words, this program is a smashing success.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, but here are mine:
1. Relevance is everything – All of the writing and talking on content marketing, social media, and the “changing buyer” boils down to one thing: be relevant to that individual. This program has incredible examples of relevance and personalization we can all learn from.
2. Old campaign tactics can work but as one of the touches, not as the only campaign element — The foam finger or the book would not have nearly the effect as a stand-alone campaign, but they were extremely effective as part of a long-term marketing program. In the old days, marketers would rent a list (for people under the age of 35, we used to rent lists in the old days) and a direct mail house would mail our stupid gimmick. We would sit back and wait OR we would have a tele-marketer follow-up in order to get a meeting. “We gave you this really funny pillow…can we do an hour-long call?”
3. Give to the buyer and one day it will pay off — We used to just find a way to “take” from the buyer. If you look at this campaign, all Nuance did was give and the results were fantastic.
4. Understand your buyer – This program began with a thoughtful, well-researched understanding of the targets. After that, carefully crafted, precise messaging was created for each buyer persona. Really cool.
5. Sales and marketing alignment is key to account-based marketing — Targeted, account-based marketing is a joint operation between sales and marketing. Sales outreach is interspersed with marketing outreach and vice-versa.
6. It worked — see ROI numbers above. Even for those of you that think I am an idiot, the numbers speak for themselves. Copy success.
I had fun researching this campaign. Thanks to Lauren Goldstein for spending time with me on this, she is the bomb.
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter
Modern B2B demand generation is failing, seriously.
January 16, 2012 by 2 Comments
I never do book reviews, but it is interesting how many times I get asked: “What should I be reading about b2b marketing?” That is why I am writing today about Adam Needles’ book: Balancing the Demand Equation – it is worth passing along to everyone.
Asterisks:
1. Adam Needles is a friend but we have no commercial relationships with each other.
2. Would I write a frivolous blog post supporting friend’s work? No, not really. I really enjoyed it and decided to write about it, but am definetly a little uncomfortable because I don’t really shill. (some people may disagree, but I don’t)
Truthfully, there aren’t very many books out there for b2b marketing or b2b demand generation. I always and will continue to recommend Ardath Albee (I am an unabashed reader of all-things Albee), Jill Konrath (easy to read and fun) and Digital Body Language (not easy to read but a pre-cursor to the Adam’s book in many ways). Basically, I have been taking BART into work which means I get to read, and I really dug into Adam’s book. I am writing because I like it AND I think it’s important. Why? It’s a study in the creating a demand generation platform. No, not just technology, but a organizational process that delivers an always-on, highly efficient, highly effective b2b demand generation platform.
He uses a lot of data points, something that a lot of us in the blogosphere DON’T do (me included). That helps keep me interested. If what I am reading is just another one of us shouting about the buyer changing than I am not interested, but providing unique data points I like and this book does a good job of providing that. There are some real-world examples – another piece lacking in a lot of the b2b marketing blogosphere’s writing (me included) is examples. There are examples in here written from the view point of the practitioner. I enjoyed that, and frankly, wish Adam provided more.
The quote at the top of the post is from the book and I loved it. So there you have it, add another one to your list.
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter
Don’t Miss Focus B2B Marketing Week, July 11-15
July 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment
From Monday, July 11, through Friday, July 15, Focus.com is presenting Focus B2B Marketing Week, rolling out a bunch of webinars and roundtable panels that will bring together the top experts in their fields to discuss the state of B2B marketing today.
Couple things to note:
- Wednesday at 10 am PT is a webinar with Ardath Albee and me. Everything else is a roundtable.
- You can catch all the action by clicking here.
- Ask questions before, during and after the event in the event interfaces.
For speaker details and to attend, click the event links below.
Monday July 11
1 pm PT/4 pm ET: How to Set Up an Effective Marketing Organization
Tuesday July 12
11 am PT/2 pm ET: B2B Marketing Tactics That Work (And the Ones That Don’t)
1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Modern B2B Marketing Strategies
Wednesday July 13
10 am PT/1 pm ET: The Four Types of Prospect Attention and How They Affect Demand Generation
1 pm PT/4 pm ET: B2B Lead Generation: How To Use the Phone to Drive High Quality Leads
Thursday July 14
9 am PT/12 pm ET: The Key to Sales and Marketing Alignment
1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Expert Best Practices in Content Marketing
Friday July 15
11 am PT/2 pm ET: B2B Marketing 3.0: What’s Next for B2B Marketers?
1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Tips on Generating Leads for Yourself
Sign up to attend now — it should be awesome.
Sue Hay of BeWhys Marketing
November 8, 2010 by 2 Comments
Today, The Funnelholic wraps up its series of interviews with the industry thought-leaders who contributed to the Focus Experts’ Guide: Sales and Marketing Pipeline and Funnel Models.
Meet Sue Hay, author of the blog 21st Century Lead Generation and founder of BeWhys Marketing, a full-service lead generation consultancy with managed services. The BeWhys team has helped midsize to enterprise organizations increase revenue by creating and implementing targeted lead nurturing campaigns using marketing automation. BeWhys incorporates lead process management best practices, lead scoring, persona building, content creation and mapping to achieve results.
The Funnelholic: Explain your approach to the funnel.
Sue: The relationship between marketing and sales has significantly evolved over the past several years, as is evidenced by the Sirius Decisions research.
What has also changed significantly is the buying process. Potential buyers can educate themselves expeditiously from a myriad of channels: websites, blogs, webinars, tradeshows, eGuides, analyst reports, customer reviews – you name it, it’s out there. All to help them make an informed and intelligent buying decision. So I tried to visualize where it all starts and where it ends. And there are different factors to consider – such as people who are not ready to buy but still interested in engaging with you; prospecting specific target accounts; the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers – that need to be taken into account. It’s a continuous flow, yet being static picture, it doesn’t really show the movement that is predicated on the buyer’s cycle. So the funnel you see is the lead management process that sits over the top of buyers’ cycle.
The Funnelholic: Besides your own, were there any other funnels that resonated with you?
Sue: I enjoyed looking at all of them, because they come from very unique perspectives. It was fascinating. I thought Barbra Gago’s and Matt Heinz’s both touching on the community perspective highlighted the human element. In particular the evolution and creation of evangelism; that’s a very powerful concept. Funnels are just diagrams of a process, but at the core are humans, and they are our customers. We need to understand what they like; what they are looking for; how do they feel comfortable communicating; how they react, interact and engage with us, and vice versa. Ardath Albee’s buyer-experience funnel captured that thinking. Michael Damphousse’s Demand Gen Cloud was fun and rings true that buyers really do put themselves in the funnel where and when they want, and there is a lot more movement than ever before. And I also enjoyed Carlos Hidalgo’s methodical stage-by-stage process – that thoughtfully overlaid the nurturing of the relationship with the buyer, and the reality of metrics, conversions and making money.
The Funnelholic: What did you learn from the exercise?
Sue: No one funnel is right or wrong. It’s an iterative process – the buying environment can change, so your funnel/process should be flexible enough to adapt. Be open to incorporate new or alternate ideas, while simultaneously focusing on “keeping it simple.” Try not to over complicate – keep the vision clear and focused.
The Funnelholic: If everyone needs to create a funnel to model their business, what are best practices for creating it?
Sue: Mapping the process out and brainstorming on a whiteboard is particularly helpful. Having representatives of both marketing and sales in that session is essential – at the end of the session both have to agree on what that funnel looks like, the definitions of each element and what the lead management process is – otherwise it won’t work. It can be a painful process but well worth the undertaking. A few things to consider going through the process:
- Try to understand the person who might buy your goods or services. Create a persona, describe what they may look like, what they do, what they read – as well as all the typical demographic information.
- How will you begin to develop and foster a thoughtful and trusted relationship? What does that look like, how does it map out into a integrated nurturing program?
- What does the funnel look like from a sales perspective and from a marketing perspective? Identify the differences.
- Overlay a lead management process to match that understanding, so that you don’t miss any opportunities.
- What are the benchmark conversion rates at the various different stages of the lead management process?
- Identify the goals that both marketing and sales are working to achieve.
- Meet on a regular basis, once per quarter, to review your goals, conversion rates and optimize. The numbers will give you a good idea if you are on track.
- Identify the right tools and resources you need to help you achieve your goals. Marketing automation and sales-force automation tools can really help in this area.
Join the conversation: ‘Is the funnel still a relevant metaphor for the b2b sales and marketing process?’
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter
Don’t Tug on Superman’s Cape: 5 Tips to Help Marketing Deal with Sales
April 14, 2010 by 11 Comments
Last week, I went to Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University. As I have blogged before, I don’t write about conferences unless I can write about something interesting. This event was awesome — the content was great (not your typical BS), 180 people were in the audience, and the questions were engaging. I was having writer’s block going into the event, and I left with three posts (coming soon). Props to Silverpop.
OK, so during Malcolm Friedberg’s presentation, someone in the audience asked for advice on how to handles sales. (The actual question is not important, but it had something to do with convincing sales to let marketing nurture instead of passing the leads to them directly.) Anyway, I was sitting there thinking that, here we have Malcolm on stage talking about marketing automation processes, etc., and one of the questions that comes up is the age-old issue of the sales-marketing divide. Boom. Funnelholic blog post.
One thing I have noticed as Marketing 2.0 continues to gather steam is that all of us in the marketing blogosphere can act like dealing with sales is easy because we are all in marketing-dominated companies. But in the real world, sales is the powerful and dangerous entity. That’s not an insult. That’s reality. Sales is on the front line — they are type-A, aggressive, unforgiving folks. It’s rare to find a place where marketing is in the catbird’s seat.
If you don’t have sales on board, however, you will have NO ROI. So act, don’t complain.
So, here is how you know you have a problem with sales:
- Sales tells you that you suck — Do I need to explain?
- Sales ignores you completely — Sales is a “you are either helping me or in the way” type of crew, so if they view you as being in the way (fairly or not), prepare to be ignored.
- Sales tells everyone you suck, but not to your face — It’s amazing how many sales leaders are passive-aggressive, but I see it all the time. Which leads to …
- Sales is really nice to you: Beware of smiling sales management.
Here is how you tell you have a good relationship:
- When leads don’t convert, they look into what they can do about it. Good.
- They ask for more of your leads. Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!
Here are 5 things you should do to foster a healthy sales-marketing relationship:
1. Have a meeting: I know this sounds obvious, but here is my point. If things are bad, then have a meeting. If you are starting the relationship, have a meeting. In the meeting, tell sales the following:
- MARKETING will create an infrastructure (nurturing, phone) to pass qualified leads to the sales team. (Again, stop passing raw inquiries to sales.)
- MARKETING AND SALES will AGREE on a unified lead definition to live by.
- SALES will sign an SLA that, if MARKETING hits the unified lead definition, they will follow up an agreed amount of times.
- MARKETING AND SALES will meet at least biweekly to optimize the program.
- MARKETING AND SALES WILL get along.
2. Create a unified lead definition: I give Brian Carroll the credit for this term, but gurus like Stu Silverman have been making the lead definition the key to sales and marketing success for years. Here is the essence: sit down with sales and AGREE on the definition of a lead — what marketing passes to the sales team. Look, sales will forget — particularly when one an account executives complains — but you can always refer back to it. When sales comes back and says, “none of your leads are closing,” offer to revisit the lead definition. Keep in mind that the lead definition dictates volume, and when you discuss definitions, you have to make sure sales understands the volume implications.
3. The sales SLA: When you agree to a unified lead definition, you also need to agree on sales’ activities after you pass them a qualified lead. Do this. It’s only fair.
4. Have weekly sync-up meetings: You can do this biweekly, if necessary. Just don’t let it slip. Don’t just talk about the numbers, talk anecdotally. Remind everyone that the meeting must be honest but not accusatory, because the wheels can fall off these meetings very easily if you are not careful. On the other hand, they can’t be a meaningless rubber stamp either. Optimization is a two-way street.
5. Just try to get along: I hate to say it, but if you are the marketer, you have to lead this charge. Sales is always moving, so have a plan and instigate peace. Both sides will win as a result.
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter
26 Reasons Your Leads Aren’t Converting into Opportunities
March 25, 2010 by 5 Comments
I got the band back together: Tom Scearce (aka @TLOTL) and Chris Jablonski (aka @cjablonski). These are my partners in crime when creating long(er) list posts, and they certainly helped me here. We have put together a list of 26 reasons your leads are converting, and, as usual, we had some fun with it.
Before you read on, I want to make one point. There is typically one major issue to overall lead conversion: lack of lead management, also known as passing raw leads/MQLs directly to sales reps. I have yet to find an organization with legit lead management processes that can’t convert leads. They can convert co-reg, content syndication, you name it — because they have built an always-on lead management process to convert leads or inquiries into qualified leads.
One other point, this assumes you are producing at least reasonable leads/inquiries/MQLs.
With that in mind, here are the 25 reasons your leads aren’t converting:
- You’re passing them directly to the sales team without an intermediate step or two (i.e., lead development or lead nurturing).
- You don’t have dedicated resources (i.e., lead development or an inside sales team) connecting with and qualifying leads.
- You haven’t tried to optimize what the lead development team is doing to convert your leads.
- You aren’t leveraging scoring.
- You aren’t leveraging nurturing.
- You haven’t created a unified lead definition with the sales team (the term “unified lead definition” was coined by Brian Carroll @brianjcarroll).
- You don’t have an SLA with your sales reps for what they guarantee they will do when you pass them a qualified lead.
- Sales doesn’t care about you anymore and won’t follow up on anything you send.
- You’re considering the wrong metrics when looking for optimization.
- You don’t look at metrics at all.
- You look at too many metrics.
- You think your job is to get the most leads and the lowest CPL (cost per lead). Right answer: your job is to create the highest conversion at the most efficient CPO (cost per opportunity).
- You don’t have “conversations”— optimization sessions with your lead vendors.
- You don’t have “conversations” — optimization sessions with the sales team.
- You dump leads from different sources into an identical lead development path (@cjablonski).
- Your shotgun marketing approach gives you a lot of quantity at the expense of quality (@cjablonski).
- Sales disqualifies leads because they deem the leads too early in the sales cycle (@cjablonski).
- Your value proposition is diluted, unreinforced, or at worst, forgotten as the prospect moves from inquiry through nurturing to sales follow-up (@cjablonski).
- Marketing has no process for filtering raw inquiries and disqualifying those that don’t fit (at least closely) the ideal customer profile (@cjablonski).
- Your sales team already has so many good leads on its plate, and sales reps would rather close those leads than sift through your mixed bag of suspects and prospects (@tlotl).
- Your leads are going to inbound contact-center sales reps, and answering the ringing phone is always more important than calling out on your Web-captured “handraiser” leads (@tlotl).
- Your leads were captured at a trade show two months ago and haven’t been nurtured or called since (@tlotl).
- The first 100 leads tagged with campaign code “XYZ” were unreachable, unqualified or not ready to talk to a sales rep, and now any lead tagged with that campaign code is effectively blacklisted in the sales team (@tlotl).
- You haven’t educated your leads with vendor-agnostic, third-party-sourced content that validates your solution in the marketplace (@tlotl).
- You’ve purchased a targeted list of contacts or names, didn’t market to them and delivered them to sales — under the (false) pretense that they are actually leads (@tlotl).
- Your leads are great leads, but they’re best suited for a product that your sales team is not properly trained, compensated or experienced enough to qualify. For example, your sales team is world class at selling a point solution, but you’ve delivered them (expensive) leads for a bundled offering (@tlotl).
Are there more? We’d love to hear yours.
Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter
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