Successful lead management relies on warming up the right prospects and customers with short and sweet communications, says Craig Stouffer, vice president of Pinpointe On-Demand
Long sales cycles. Complex products and services. Limited brand recognition. These are a few of the top challenges that B2B marketers face that B2C marketers usually aren’t saddled with on a daily basis while trying to fill the proverbial lead funnel. Here are a few tips for B2B marketers to follow to improve lead quality while growing a company’s digital footprint.
1. Date before you propose
B2B sales cycles are extended and complicated. Often, especially for small and mid-sized enterprises, recipients don’t know a company or its products. Yet, far too often B2B companies drive their entire campaigns around a series of disjointed, tactical, singular communications taking a specific special offer/buy now/transaction approach. Marketing communications should be orchestrated like a courtship, not a one-night stand. Most people usually don’t propose to someone after a first date. Similarly, prospects aren’t going to make large, complex purchases based on a single ‘special offer’ email or outreach. Prospects need to warm up to a company over time, feel comfortable and get to know the company before buying.
2. Give, don’t take
Instead of ‘asking a customer for an order’ in a series of tactical outreaches, give the recipient something of value – educational content to help get them up to speed on the market, company, product and specific solution. Give third party validation of the solution: customer case studies that demonstrate why and how peers have used the solution or industry reports that demonstrate how the product compares with competitive offerings.
Use content-based marketing to educate prospects about the company, product, general market trends (that may of course lead the prospect to the conclusion that the product is the right solution for their needs). Take prospects by the hand and lead them down a decision path.
3. Short is good
Keep communications short – especially in email outreach. Given the complexity and longer sales cycle for most B2B products, it is tempting to send email campaigns, for example, that are long and detailed with cool looking designs. The best performing B2B communications are 50 lines long with a subject line less than 50 characters. Avoid graphics unless they’re required to make a point. Graphics are blocked by default by about half of all email clients, so your cool graphic designs may never be seen.
Instead, your well-targeted recipient sees only a blank box with a red ‘X’ in the corner (Tip: use the ‘Alternate Text’ tag to display informative text when images are blocked). Emails should remain short with clickable links to additional details because people – particularly in a business environment – will skim key points and headlines, and only drill-down to read more if the content is of interest. Video is the exception: Linking to video in email still has a ‘coolness factor’, and watching a well produced, short and relevant video clip can communicate more information more efficiently than words or (blocked) images.
4. Make objectives measurable
The days of fluffy objectives and basing marketing ROI on ‘marketing spend divided by revenues’ – are over. We have more marketing automation tools at our fingertips to measure, monitor and track results than ever before, so use them. How does a sales manager determine a new sales rep’s quota for a new territory? They make a good guesstimate, set a number (quota), measure against it, then adjust each quarter based on results (raise the quota). A quota is both measurable and, for most businesses, very meaningful.
5. Ready, aim, fire
B2C marketers have thousands of prospects at their disposal to use for target practice, and they often have the patience, discipline and, at times, longer product life cycles to hold feedback sessions, run surveys, track respondents’ digital footprint and monitor feedback on social sites. B2B marketers rarely have such luxuries. Make the time to test the marketing message on a relevant audience before going broad. Running email campaigns? Most email service providers have easy-to-use split testing or multivariant testing tools that can be used to test campaigns before sending to a broader audience. It’s unwise to pull the trigger before aiming a pistol. Equally, don’t push the send button without testing to check if the message is on-target.
6. The customer isn’t always right
However, the right customer is always right. As marketers we’re often measured by the number of (qualified) leads that come into the sales funnel – a yardstick that tends to change in proportion to the number of days remaining in the fiscal quarter. Maintain discipline. Know the ideal ‘customer-product’ match and optimise the business, including funnel building and sales strategy around that ideal customer-product match. The sales team will see fewer leads initially, but over time, they’ll appreciate that they have to work less to generate more revenues before each quota re-setting dance.
A wise board member (and extremely successful venture capitalist) once said to me, “The number one reason startups fail, is lacking the discipline to know when to say ‘no’ to a customer that isn’t an ideal customer-product match.” Get the right prospects into the sales funnel and turn them into the kind of happy customers it’s easy to say ‘yes’ to.
