Marketing Interactions

Q and A from 3 Must-Haves for Successful Lead Nurturing Webinar

Scott Mersy, Brian Carroll, Craig Rosenberg and I had a great time presenting the webinar, 3 Must-Haves for Successful Lead Nurturing. Thanks very much to the several thousand people who attended!

We didn't have time to get to all the questions you asked, so I wanted to follow up with some answers to a few of them. Thanks for asking!

Q: Ardath, would you agree that sales people are educators as well?

A: Absolutely! However, for a complex purchase, salespeople are coming into the conversation farther downstream. It's likely that by the time a sales conversation takes place, the buyer knows quite a bit about the problem they're solving, the product and company and is now looking to see exactly how it will apply to their specific situation. This is why salespeople need to know as much about their buyers as their products and solutions.

Q: Are there tools i.e questionnaires or templates to aid in developing lead nurturing programs?

A: Yes. My book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale is written to be a guide for creating lead nurturing programs and content strategy. For instant gratification, you can also download The Essentail Marketing Automation Handbook that I wrote for Genius.com. Brian Carroll's book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, is also a resource you'll want to have on your shelf. 

Q: Does the time delay re response time & engagement apply equally to higher value products/services that may have longer sales cycles?

A: This question is in response to a statistic that Scott Mersy shared about engagement opportunity declining after 30 minutes from when a lead visits your website. I think the answer depends on your perspective. In a longer cycle, you'll want to follow up with something useful - "I noticed you're interested in [topic] and wanted to let you know that we also have a white paper on the subject. May I send it over?"

The point in a longer sale is to be helpful, build your company's credibility and share expertise that has them coming back to your company for more answers to questions about how to best solve their problem. We talked about responsiveness in relation to increasing a prospect's level of engagement. So, in a longer sales cycle, don't think of following up as a sales call, think of it from a nurturing perspective.

Being helpful and not "selling" will keep the prospect from feeling stalked. And, a follow-up could also be an email with a link to related content - doesn't have to be a phone call. This is when knowing the prospect's stage in the buying cycle can be helpful. For example, you could set up auto responders for prospects with scores below #X who access specific content and set up an alert that notifies you to call them if their score is closer to sales qualification.

Q: What are your thoughts re using "networks" like Linkedin to promote content and generate leads?

A: LinkedIn can be a great network for generating leads. It's all in how you do so. Be respectful of the groups you belong to. Post links to your content in the News section. Make sure the information you share is relevant to the group. Don't do blanket posts across your groups. Many people belong to multiple groups on related subjects and it's irritating to see the exact same thing posted everywhere. The message that sends is similar to spamming people.

The other thing about networks like LinkedIn is that you need to participate as well as post your stuff. Be generous, gracious and respectful. 

Q: How do you recommend adjusting your prospect scoring algorithms based on environmental circumstances? (i.e. economy... a lot more "tire kickers" out there these days may show responsiveness, but are a long way away from buying)

A: This is a great question! My recommendation for this is that you adjust based on feedback from sales. If, in the past, marketing-qualified leads were in the right place for sales to step in, but now your salespeople are returning them to the nurturing program because their buying timeline is too far into the future, then you need to increase the score.

Lead scoring is not perfect and, as you say, environmental circumstances can impact the buying process. This is why we need to continuously monitor and update our processes. A couple of suggestions are:

• Audit some recently acquired customer profile histories to determine what behaviors they exhibited at the end stages of their buying process. Check your scoring to ensure that these "conversion" events are indeed factoring in properly.


• Solicit feedback from sales about triggering events and specific circumstances that precipitated a customer's choice to buy. Is there a content opportunity gap you can address that will shift your scoring toward better accuracy?


• Revisit the qualified lead criteria that you've agreed to with your sales team to see if adjustments are necessary and then update your scoring to match.

Q: Several people asked what the acronym WIIFM, on one of my slides, means. My apologies, I must have forgotten to clarify.

A: WIIFM = What's In It For Me? And it's definitely a WIIFM World from your prospects' perspective.

Q: What factors do you use to determine if lead nurturing is the best tool? Is price the primary factor?

A: If your sale is transactional, then lead nurturing may not be the best tool. If your sale is more complex and takes consideration and education, then nurturing will work for you. Take a look at the problems your products and solutions solve. How much education is needed for your prospects to choose to buy? How long is your sales cycle? What will it take to get your prospects to consider your company as the expert they want to partner with to solve their problem?

See more questions answered over on the Marketing Genius Blog

There are a lot more questions and I'm sure Brian, Craig and the discussions over on Focus.com will also tackle them. If you have a specific question for me that I haven't addressed, ask it in the comments and I'll be sure to respond.

You can also listen to the on demand webcast replay.

Thanks again to all of you for attending and participating! You made the experience memorable.

Whose Reputation is Your Marketing Content Building?

B2B marketing departments are often pressed for resources. The increasing demand for content to drive eMarketing programs can create a "hamster on the wheel" type of pressure that's overwhelming when added to already filled plates of marketing responsibilities.

So marketers commission 3rd party content to fill the gap. They also count on the fact that the reputation of the 3rd party they hire will help them gain awareness, generate more leads and facilitate the desired buying behavior. 

But companies are selling themselves short. They're not becoming known as experts in their field, but as a resource people can count on for access to information they want by exchanging contact information instead of shelling out the big bucks these 3rd parties charge for their work.

The perception of the value of the report or white paper is higher than the cost of having to endure the likely sales call that will result. And usually it is.

However, what I find worrisome is the perception cost to the companies who rely on them for the bulk of the information they employ in their nurturing, newsletter and lead generation programs.

One of my clients has recently undertaken the creation and execution of a thought leadership nurturing program. Unfortunately they aren't perceived by their prospects as thought leaders. But they are noted for supplying relevant and useful 3rd party expertise.

The nurturing program isn't yet hitting the same engagement levels as the eNewsletter program that uses 3rd party content.

Why not? Because the company doesn't have any credibility for the provision of this type of content. Instead, their marketing programs have built credibility and trust for those experts they're paying to promote.

The problem is that they've only committed to a proof-of-concept program for one quarter. Three months isn't enough time to change market perception. It's a start. Progress is being made. But if they cease the program at the end of three months, they'll lose the traction they're building.

Becoming a thought leader is harder than it looks. It takes time, patience and perseverance. 

This doesn't mean they can't continue to use 3rd party expertise. What it does mean is that the combination of the two is a better approach. This way the company can keep providing what their database expects as they begin to set new expectations. As they build credibility for their own content, they can reduce their reliance on the 3rd party content.

In this world of online word of mouth, peer referrals and conversational exchanges, companies need to recognize the benefits of becoming relied-upon experts in their field. So the next time you plan your editorial calendar, pay attention to whose reputation you're building and make sure it's heavily weighted to your side. It may take some time, but it's an investment well worth making...and sticking with over the long term.

Prospects who only interact with you to get other people's expertise are not going to buy from you without a great deal of coaxing. Marketing programs are intended to help put salespeople into conversations with those who have demonstrated an interest in actually buying what your company sells.

Company authored, thought leadership content can play a critical role in shortening sales cycles by building your credibility, showcasing value delivery and helping your prospects see a clear path to success with your help.

So, why would you want to give those benefits to someone else?

27 Benefits from B2B Lead Nurturing

Many B2B marketers will tell you they have a nurturing program. If you ask them what benefits they hope to gain, they'll likely talk about the goals for the program in relation to the number of sales opportunity conversions or revenues produced from marketing-driven customer acquisition.

Those are great goals, of course, and ones we need to realize for our companies, but we also need to think about the other benefits our companies can derive from consistent and relevant nurturing programs that help to produce those big payoffs.

In no particular order, here are 27 benefits that came to me off the top:

1. Interest/Pain identification
2. Increased credibility (propensity to opt in)
3. Thought leadership recognition (higher trust)
4. Buying path (stage) definition
5. Segmentation opportunities
6. Market awareness
7. Strengthened company positioning
8. Interactive online dialogues
9. Conversation generation (online and off)
10. Idea transference
11. Ongoing storyline engagement
12. Prospect intelligence beyond demographics
13. Identification of industry trends
14. Peer-to-peer referrals (here's a link to...)
15. Longer reach (unlimited distribution potential)
16. Greater depth (reach influencers beyond decision makers)
17. Marketing and sales alignment
18. Seamless sales enablement
19. Customer retention
20. Increased customer lifetime value
21. Cross-sell and Up-sell potential
22. Increased customer satisfaction
23. Inclusion in closed-door conversations (when you're not there)
24. Agile response to market shifts
25. Consistency in relevance and value delivery
26. Acceleration in growth of pipeline
27. Shorter time to revenue

You may be looking at this list and wondering just how you'd realize and capitalize on all these benefits to get those big payoffs mentioned at the beginning. This is where marketing automation comes into play. Companies like Genius.com, Marketo, Manticore Technology, Silverpop, Eloqua — and others — are the engines behind nurturing programs.

Lead nurturing is as much an exercise in content strategy execution as it is in syncing the people and processes that drive your business' success. Technology is the enabler that pulls it all together.

Marketing is not just a stand-alone department within our companies. At least it shouldn't be.

Just in case you think you can get all of this by executing the same old marketing campaigns the way you've always done them, think again. Your buyers have changed. If you want to reap all of these benefits (and I'm sure I've forgotten some), you must focus first on getting to know your buyers and customers as well as you know your products and base your nurturing programs on that intelligence.

Because, after all, it's truly all about them.

Never forget that many of these benefits are based on how well you can learn to read your prospects' behavior over time and how prepared you are to respond when they ask you to. That's one reason why marketing will always be a combination of art and science — that human factor.

Feel free to contribute any benefits you see that I've forgotten and I'll add them to the list.

Do Your Marketing Emails LIE?

Every once in a while - as you who read my blog know - I get a bit irked at the irresponsible email practices of companies that play fast and free with their databases. So, here's my latest rant about bad email practices.

Although, this one is simple - Don't Lie to Your Leads!

The sad part about this is that it's from a marketing solutions company.

They start off with thanking me for visiting their booth at Dreamforce. Which I did not. And the message tells me they likely sent a blanket email to the entire attendee list.

Then there's this paragraph:

"I have appended a "Weekly Marketing Insight" below which I thought you would find interesting. Sent to your Inbox automatically, it helps uncover where you might consider saving marketing dollars, which of your online prospects should be followed up on immediately, and which web pages are viewed the most by your target markets."

I thought, Cool - something useful. And scrolled down. But what I found wasn't useful. Heck, it wasn't even truthful.

They proceeded to show me a few charts professing to reveal activity at my website. However, when matched against my analytics for the week specified, the numbers had zero correlation to reality.

The next chart showed what they said were statistics for the top 5 web pages visited during that week and asked me if my content was up to date.

The extensions for those pages included:

• Home
• About
• Leadership
• Pricing
• Careers

I only have 2 pages that correlate to those. None with the same name on the title or meta tags, or navigation - so I'm wagering this is a guess at matching to a stereotypical corporate website structure. As well, the numbers were laughable they were so far off. And, of course had to be counting ghost visitors for those pages that my website doesn't have. Too bad they missed Halloween.

Obviously the whole thing was a big joke. A bad attempt to fool me into thinking they had provided something valuable.

Did they think I wouldn't know? If I didn't know, do they think I wouldn't go to my people who do know and ask?

The big question is: Did they bother to think about the damage they'd do to their credibility and reputation when they sent out such schlock? Because, as far as I'm concerned, they just stuck a fork in themselves. They're done!

Do NOT lie to your leads. Not ever.

Do NOT make cheap attempts to fool them into responding to you, or clicking on the associated link for a free trial under false premises.

The truth eventually comes out. I can't imagine it would take longer than 5 minutes in this case. What a waste of engagement points.

Take 3 Steps Before Creating a Nurturing Program

I'm getting a lot of questions about how to get started with a nurturing program. Bravo to those marketers who are actively reaching out to get started!

I thought it might be useful to present 3 steps for evaluation that will help you create a baseline for building an effective nurturing program. 

First - About your customers:

• Who buys from us?
• Why do they buy from us?
• What do they need to know to make a purchase decision?
• Who influences our buyers?
• What could stop them from choosing to buy?
• Is one kind of customer more ideal than another? Why?
• What's your best foot-in-the-door sale?

Second - Evaluate your prospect database:

• Who's in it?
• Did THEY opt in or did YOU opt them in?
• How do the prospects in your database match up with what you know about your customers?
• How are you getting more prospects to opt in?
• When's the last time your database heard from you?
• What topics have they responded to?
• What's your opt out rate?

Third - Audit Your Website:

See my recent blog post about how to audit your web pages.

• How much information on your website matches the answers to the questions in the About Your Customers step above?
• What can be improved?

In case you're wondering, the reasons for auditing your website are to ensure that the messaging you're already sharing is in alignment with prospect needs. You also want to make sure that your nurturing programs are reinforced by your website content, not in conflict with it.

Nurturing programs are about so much more than just a continuous touchpoint program for prospects. They're about creating a consistency in brand and content and inviting interactions that reinforce and strengthen the choice of your prospects to continue to engage with you. Not to mention that a holistic presence will enhance your prospects' perceptions of your company's credibility and expertise for solving the problem at hand.

Nurturing and Engagement - Webinars and Book Giveaways

I'm excited to share some events coming your way. I'm participating in two webinars that will help you get a handle on designing nurturing programs that drive sales and how to integrate 3 "must have" components to make it happen.

How to Design Nurturing Programs That Drive Sales

Date: November 19, 2009
Time: 11AM Pacific, 1PM Central, 2PM Eastern

Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, and the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable are sponsoring this webinar where I'll share insights to help marketers create a nurturing program that parallels how your prospects move through their buying process.

I'll discuss:

• The Nurturing Cycle - which is different than lead generation activities.
• What's changed in the buying process, and how you adapt.
• Mapping content to buying stages - it's really not so hard when you answer questions.
• How a style baseline can help to ensure relevance with every touch.
• What you can learn from the content your buyers read.
• And more!

I'm also giving away a lead nurturing guide to all attendees and several autographed books to a few randomly selected attendees. Please join us!

But hang on, there's more!

3 Must-Haves for Successful Lead Nurturing resulted from a brainstorm with Craig Rosenberg and the Focus.com folks.

Date: December 8, 2009
Time: 10AM Pacific, 12 Noon Central, 1PM Eastern

This webinar is a panel discussion moderated by Craig that brings together 3 of us who spend a lot of time in the trenches to discuss the critical components B2B companies need to incorporate to develop and execute successful lead nurturing programs.

I'm, of course, discussing content. Brian Carroll is plugging in The Human Touch that's the hinge for complex sales and Scott Mersy from Genius.com is pulling it all together with the critical role played by Marketing Automation Technology.

The three of us are focused on helping you learn best practices for:

• Incorporating the evolving opportunities the Internet empowers for building relationships that shorten time to revenue.
• Developing contextual stories that relate to your prospect’s specific situations—their challenges, issues, and opportunities.
• Creating online content and communication strategies that promote offline conversations.
• Generating levels of responsiveness that build engagement across the buying process.
• Providing information salespeople can actually use in a way that’s intuitive for them.
• How to use contagious content to facilitate prospect progression.
• How to transform handing off sales-ready prospects so our sales teams can take immediate action to follow up.

And, you'll get more chances to win my new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, and some other fun bling I'm giving away in celebration of my book release. Sign up Right Now!

Is Your Marketing Content Ready for Step Backs?

As B2B marketers of complex sales gain traction in developing content across buying stages, they've got to remember that answering objections and correcting reversals is not just a sales activity. With sales conversations pushed farther back in the buying process, you can lose prospects before they ever speak with your sales reps if you don't remove any doubts that arise for them along the way.

Step Backs cause stalls to pipeline momentum. They tend to happen when your prospects have determined your company has a viable solution to their problem, but something pops up that causes hesitation. This can be a competitor's claim, a new ripple effect your prospect has uncovered that the solution will impact or something they've heard from a colleague or peer. There are a ton of things that can happen to cause hesitation.

Obviously, you can only address Step Backs if you learn what causes them to happen.

Some ways to do this include:

• win/loss reviews with your sales force
• customer interviews
• past customer surveys
• listening to and monitoring social networks

I've seen a number of questions asked on social networks lately about solutions. Someone posts a question asking for recommendations for a type of solution or what they should know about a specific solution before they choose to buy it or even why one solution might be better than another.

The amount of information being shared is extensive—some factual, but much that's based on opinion more than fact. Nevertheless, what's being said about your solutions on social networks needs to be listened to and, sometimes, responded to.

What marketers may struggle with is even admitting there are concerns about buying a type of product. They seem to have trouble talking about anything that's not evangelizing their products. Even though we all know that complex purchases are evaluated based on risk assessment as well as benefits. That's a part of the process. So, meet it head-on and be authentic while you're doing it.

I'm not talking about writing a piece about why buyers have chosen not to buy your solution. I'm talking about addressing concerns directly. For example; if your sales reps are reporting that you're losing deals because a certain type of influencer isn't buying in, find out why and develop content to address that concern to help eliminate that obstacle.

One of the best ways to identify Step Backs is with marketing automation. Here's one scenario made possible by the technology:

A prospect has been engaged by all your nurturing touches for the past five months and suddenly ceases to click through. Take a look at the prospect's individual profile and see if they've returned to some previously viewed content. If so, perhaps something in that content hasn't fully answered their needs and they've gone back to look for reassurance that their assumptions are correct. This is the perfect time to reach out to them personally and ask if they're looking for specific information you can provide. 

Most marketing automation solutions have a rules or work flow process that allows you to automatically send a message if your prospects do or don't do something. If you uncover certain patterns of behavior, you can develop content and distribution processes to address Step Backs as they occur, keeping prospects moving forward.

Or it could be that their priorities changed. You won't know until you ask. There's never a cut-and-dried rule for prospect behavior, but there are ways to try to address it helpfully.

Addressing Step Backs with content is a proactive way to show the depth of your understanding about your buyers' needs. By engaging with them about concerns that cause hesitation, you gain the ability to get them moving forward again, rather than losing them to a competitor or even to a decision to do nothing.

Marketing Content for Next Steps

In response to the blog post I wrote about the Return on YES, I was asked on Twitter to give some examples of what I mean by "show your prospects the next steps."

Think for a moment about the user experience at your website. You plan for how you'll get your website visitors to click on something to learn more after they arrive - to dive deeper into your content.

You construct navigational paths designed to lead them to the information they need (at least I hope you do). This means that once they click on something and move to that web page, you provide what you promised and then offer other related choices. And on, and on.

If all you ever wanted was for them to visit your homepage, none of this would be necessary. All of us would have single-page websites that read like executive summaries. Boring, right? Helpful, not so much.

Think about your content from this perspective.

Do you only want your prospects to read that one piece of marketing content?

Of course not. In a complex sale, that won't get you very far.

Each content resource is designed to do one thing. Some examples may include:

• Educate prospects about an issue that could be an obstacle to achieving an objective.
• Offer evidence that solving the problem delivers tangible outcomes.
• Provide thought leadership about an industry trend.

The examples can go on for miles, but you get the idea. So let's take the first one and dive in.

Once your prospect has read an educational piece to learn about why they might not be achieving an objective they want, is that the end?

Nope. You've left them hanging.

If you were them, what would you want to know next?

• What are others doing about this?
• If I solve it, what will happen?
• How hard is it going to be to solve?
• What if I do nothing?
• Prove that you can fix it.
• What will I have to risk to do so?

There are a multitude of thoughts and questions that occur to people after they've learned something relevant to them. To show your prospects the next step means to answer the questions that the content they've just read may have provoked.

This is why I continuously talk about content strategy, editorial calendars, storylines, buyer personas and problem-to-solution scenarios.

Showing your prospects the next steps doesn't just happen by accident. It takes planning.

It was pointed out to me the other day that no matter how I think a prospect will work through answering all their questions, they'll do it however it works for them. This is a valid point - the way people think is not as predictable as we'd like.

The crux is that if you don't plan for and develop content to show next steps, you won't have it available for whenever the time comes to provide an answer they're seeking.

The other factor is that if you develop your content to continuously evolve the concepts and ideas you're sharing in a progressive manner, you have a better shot at keeping your prospects engaged with your story. And that level of engagement is what will eventually cause them to raise their hands and reach out to get more answers - the ones they need right now that they expect you to have.

And that's exactly what you want them to do.

The Return on YES in Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing has been proven to be instrumental in producing qualified sales opportunities for B2B organizations—when done well. The goal, of course, is for your content strategy to produce momentum during the buying process that consistently produces that outcome.

But I'd like to challenge you to go farther.

You've got to harness the returns on YES to help your prospects take each and every consecutive step with your company.

Every time a prospect responds to you is not a YES.

Here's what I mean. If YES is defined as not only getting your prospect to open the email, click through to the content and then click to read the next related piece of content in your storyline, they have to do all three to give you a YES.

If they only make it as far as open, that's a "maybe."

If they make it past open and follow the link to your content, that's an "okay."

But, until they click on that next link, you don't have YES.

You see, the email send is only an initial invitation. In a considered sale, your prospect has so much to learn that if he's only reading that one piece of content you send out attached to your nurturing email each month—well, it will take forever to get to YES.

Eventually, as you help your buyer traverse the steps of learning all they need to know to be willing to engage in a sales conversation, the definition of YES will become that sales conversation.

YES is progressive. YES is based on credibility and value perception by your prospects.

YES takes patience, consistency and relevance.

YES requires that you show your prospects the next steps.

YES means you're continually assessing your prospects' online behavior and increasing your personalized responsiveness. (think tighter segmentation based on behavior)

Without a continuous string of YES in response to your nurturing programs, how far do you think you'll get?

That's why you need a content strategy. It's not just about "what do we send next?" Nurturing is about knowing and planning for how we respond when we get a YES. Interactive marketing means your nurturing program is a two-way street.

If your response doesn't acknowledge their YES, you're not likely to keep getting that level of engagement.

How are you incorporating YES into your nurturing programs? Better yet, how are you leveraging the return when you get YES? Something to think about.

AllBusiness.com Podcast on Handicapping Target Markets

I was recently interviewed by AllBusiness.com about the idea of Handicapping Target Markets. Handicapping in this sense is about how to use personas to increase the relevance of your nurturing campaigns to cull more ideal customers from your pipeline—as well as shorten sales cycles.

In the podcast I talk about:

• How a handicapping approach works -
• • Circumstances - the trigger events that create need for what you sell
  • Characteristics - the traits like roles, responsibilities and influencers that dictate your buyers' behavior and what they need to build a business case to buy.
• Handicapping as a group process involving salespeople and customers.
• Defining personas
• What kinds of questions you need to answer from the buyers' perspective to create content with higher relevance.
• Examples of persona-driven outcomes
• And more...

I also delve into this subject extensively in my new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. I present the idea of extending the persona into the creation of buyer synopses, which is essentially the combination of personas with a targeted problem-to-solution scenario. The outcome of this work is producing the insights that help marketers develop highly relevant content for progressive nurturing programs.

You can also download two chapters of the book here.