It doesn’t matter whether we’re in global meltdown or economic boom – the greatest challenge for any B2B marketer is in creating and maintaining a strong and well-nurtured lead pipeline.
Furthermore with an increase in online use to investigate products and services, as well as changes in buyer behaviour, today’s marketers need to ensure that they dedicate time to nurturing prospects at the earliest possible stage.
The starting point has to be detailed planning and strategy, before launching into tactical campaigns – a step that is often overlooked. Ad-hoc, demand-generation activity might result in creating short-term spikes in demand. However the quality can often be questionable and it will never deliver a sustainable pipeline which can be nurtured over time, with prospects tracked at the earliest possible stages and mapped through the buying cycle, from non-awareness, to awareness, interest, early sales engagement to qualified lead.
Below are some simple steps to start your preparation in order to ensure a strong and sustainable lead pipeline:
Know your market
The first area of focus needs to be the database – or target community. This is your key tool for a successful campaign. Understand your market, their issues and challenges, what solutions they need and what will make them interested in your offering. Learn how they buy from you and what behaviours increase their propensity to buy. And when segmenting your target market, focus on what they do, not what they say – extend your buyer profiles to go beyond company size, industry and geography to look at roles, needs and behaviours.
Target wisely
Having the correct leads on the database at the start of the campaign is paramount to successful targeting. It’s critical to spend the time profiling your decision makers – both buyers and influencers. Research the relevant job titles and companies carefully and with reason. Prioritising your list is also vital so that you can focus on your top tier accounts first and give others in your team guidance as to where to concentrate their efforts first.
Communicating with the community
Your next action is to create an integrated, multi-touch programme to ensure you draw your target community in with a series of regular and compelling communications. By sending out value-added communications you begin to understand your market better; who showed interest in the communication and what topics resonate well within the community. It also positions you as a thought leader and keeps your name on their radar – so when they are ready to buy, you’ll make the short list. Other options can include invitations to relevant thought leadership events, webinars and links to social media functions.
Furthermore, this will keep your community ‘warm’ and ensure regular cleaning of the database can take place before strategic lead generation (enhanced telemarketing) begins. There is a fine line between over communicating with your market, yet still keeping them interested, so plan your communications carefully and create a content calendar at the start.
Keep it relevant
Make sure the messages to your market are relevant and credible. Demonstrating a deep rooted knowledge and understanding of their industry and the key issues they are facing, with opinion, thought and insight will create a powerful marketing dialogue – which in turn will build over time to establish brand trust. Ensure you have an ‘unsubscribe’ feature available to eliminate any non interested parties.
Creating your AIDA community
The basic AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) scoring exercise of your market is one of the most effective ways to monitor how you are moving your prospects through the buying cycle, from non-awareness to awareness, interest, desire (early sales exploration) right through to action (sales engagement). Ensure you can measure the position of each prospect within the buying cycle and monitor how you are gaining market traction at each stage – this will ensure you keep total visibility of marketing ROI.
Know the process
Understand that this process can take time. Decisions to ‘buy’ in today’s market, and with today’s choices, are not taken quickly and often involve input from various parties. You need to penetrate your target companies across many levels and roles to impact the decision-making unit. All of this can be tracked using the method outlined above so you can measure not only the marketing ROI in terms of sales funnel, but also the market share and traction you are gaining within your target market.
Invest in a good lead management system
This is more than just a CRM solution. You need to invest in a system which allows you to track responses at the very earliest stages of engagement – at first point of interaction, and not just when leads hit the sales teams’ radar. Automating lead management with an efficient and clear system takes the guesswork out of measuring marketing ROI. This will allow you to gain complete control over your marketing activity and provide 100% visibility of responses and results. This can provide huge insight into buyer and influencer behaviour to enable powerful marketing analytics, used to form your future marketing activity.
Maintain relationships
Don’t take a short-term approach. In order to sustain your lead pipeline, time needs to be taken to create, build and maintain on-going relationships so that your prospect community is continually nurtured. The investment in building these relationships will pay dividends over time. Ensure follow up is conducted in a timely manner – don’t let those invaluable leads slip through the net. Analyse which prospects are ‘stuck’ at level one (awareness) and look at creative ways to nurture that relationship through the sales funnel – perhaps you can connect with a target company by working in collaboration with third party organisations (partners, industry organisations) – and leverage their position.
Summary
Before you embark on a sales and marketing campaign, it is key to conduct the right planning and preparation. Investing time and effort at the start of the campaign will ensure not only a targeted sales pipeline is created, but that it is sustainable and able to grow over time. Once you have the basics in place, you can move onto the next stage and begin incorporating more sophisticated analytics to measure and grow your pipeline. Furthermore, you can begin to incorporate predictive modelling to measure the sales pipeline for the following month or quarter based on historical data and response – therefore ensuring your pipeline remains both strong and sustainable.
For more information, please go to www.mcdonaldbutler.com or contact Charlotte Holden on 020 8875 2000.
