The Funnelholic

I promised myself I wouldn’t make predictions, year-end lists, Christmas wish lists, New Year’s resolutions and so forth. Then I was forced to answer the question: “What do you see for b2b marketers in 2011?” I was asked twice: in an interview with Maria Pergolino from Marketo, then while considering predictions about b2b marketing trends for 2011 on Focus.com.

Here is my 2011 sound-bite: Live boringly.

From 2008 to 2010, it was basically a “content bubble” for marketers. All of us in the blogosphere have been riding high; talking about lead scoring, lead nurturing, content marketing, social media, sales and marketing alignment. So much sizzle and sexiness, it’s been a fantastical ride as marketers ate it up. Everyone in the world of marketing had endless new toys to talk about, and talk we did. But now, marketers must live boringly. Not to be a sensationalist, but our survival is at stake.

How to Live Boringly

Focus on execution and how to get it done, or said another way: Stop talking about it and just do it. I love this article by Carlos Hidalgo (Funnelholic all-time fave) on marketing automation. As Carlos mentions, in the case of marketing automation, less than 25 percent of us have implemented marketing automation to its full potential. In other words, a lot of hype and nothing to show for it. Create simple goals for next year, let sales and the C-suite know what they are, and hit them. Just as a VP of Sales must hit his or her metric, marketing does too. All the social media, lead nurturing and so forth are means to an end. An example of a metric might be pipeline-created qualified leads, appointments or revenue. I don’t care, but all the really “bright shiny things” have to align with achieving goals that the organization cares about.

Do This, or Else

Do you really want marketing to end up back where you started before the Marketing Content Revolution? The marketing automation vendors are trying to help you now. Look at market leaders Marketo and Eloqua. Their marketing has switched from tactics and techniques to revenue. Marketo’s Jon Miller likes to say, “More marketers are getting a seat at the revenue table.” This may be true, but that seat is hot. The revenue table is a “you’re-either-helping-or-you’re-getting-in-the-way” spot. If you’re helping, you get to stay. If you’re in the way, you are gone and won’t be back.

So, take my advice and live by my 2011 mantra: Live boringly.

Sincerely,

The Bore-aholic

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:

1. You’re passing them directly to the sales team without an intermediate step or two (i.e., lead development or lead nurturing).
2. You don’t have dedicated resources (i.e., lead development or an inside sales team) connecting with and qualifying leads.
3. You haven’t tried to optimize what the lead development team is doing to convert your leads.
4. You aren’t leveraging scoring.
5. You aren’t leveraging nurturing.
6. You haven’t created a unified lead definition with the sales team (the term “unified lead definition” was coined by Brian Carroll @brianjcarroll).
7. You don’t have an SLA with your sales reps for what they guarantee they will do when you pass them a qualified lead.
8. Sales doesn’t care about you anymore and won’t follow up on anything you send.
9. You’re considering the wrong metrics when looking for optimization.
10. You don’t look at metrics at all.
11. You look at too many metrics.
12. 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).
13. You don’t have “conversations”— optimization sessions with your lead vendors.
14. You don’t have “conversations” — optimization sessions with the sales team.
15. You dump leads from different sources into an identical lead development path (@cjablonski).
16. Your shotgun marketing approach gives you a lot of quantity at the expense of quality (@cjablonski).
17. Sales disqualifies leads because they deem the leads too early in the sales cycle (@cjablonski).
18. Your value proposition is diluted, unreinforced, or at worst, forgotten as the prospect moves from inquiry through nurturing to sales follow-up (@cjablonski).
19. Marketing has no process for filtering raw inquiries and disqualifying those that don’t fit (at least closely) the ideal customer profile (@cjablonski).
20. 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).
21. 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).
22. Your leads were captured at a trade show two months ago and haven’t been nurtured or called since (@tlotl).
23. 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).
24. You haven’t educated your leads with vendor-agnostic, third-party-sourced content that validates your solution in the marketplace (@tlotl).
25. 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).
26. 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.

Here we are again. If you missed Part I, make sure to read it first. Once again, before we begin, I need to introduce the members of the band:

On the guitar, Tom Scearce (@TLOTL), and on the electric keyboard, Chris Jablonski (@cjablonski).

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Drumroll, please … Another ambitious post here: The Marketing Hipster Dictionary. When we started, I just wanted to create a post with some definitions of terms used in this blog and in the marketing space in general. Then we started having fun with some “originals.”

Before I go on, I must introduce my band. (Side note: I love when the lead singer introduces the band at concerts. I don’t know what it is — but I get excited.) On the guitar: Tom Scearce (@TLOTL). Tom is a brilliant marketer who understands marketing from brand to process. Follow him on Twitter. And on the electric keyboard: Chris Jablonski (@cjablonski). Chris can do anything. Period. And he does do everything, but he is not a dilettante. He does them all really well.

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