Pro Tip in Lead Scoring: Stop Doing it Wrong

Any marketing campaign is effective as long as it generates the right kind of B2B sales leads. Quality is the underlying principle in a lead generation program. And better revenue generation is impossible if your sales pipeline is filled with disinterested leads, entailing a waste of time and money.

Hence, an improved lead scoring system should always be considered. With one in place and implemented with marketing automation software, a business is able to pursue only high-value sales opportunities. However, some marketers are not getting it right with their lead scoring. Mistakes are often made, but they should always be analyzed and rectified to maintain business efficiency.

Howard Sewell, president of the Spear Marketing Group, has listed the common mistakes that hamper lead scoring effectiveness. If you want a more efficient marketing and sales structure, then it is high time to identify these mistakes and get your improve your lead generation program.

No separate scores for behavioral and demographic values.

Demographic scores are best thought of as how interested you are in a prospect. Behavioral scores are how interested that prospect is in you. If you only use one lead score value, there will be no easy way to distinguish between, for example, the CEO with little to no interest in your solution vs. the low-level end user with a high interest. Scoring on both demographic and behavioral attributes allows you to provide more meaningful and relevant data to sales.

Score Inflation

When you award points to a prospect for some specific behavior (e.g. visiting a Web page, attending a Webinar), that score shouldn’t last forever. The value of someone attending a Webinar last week, for example, will be much less significant say, a year from now. However, many lead scoring schemas don’t reflect that degradation of score value over time, and the result is “score inflation,” where individual prospects may ring up lead scores of one thousand points or more, by which time the score has become meaningless.

Scoring email opens

Email opens are a grossly unreliable measure of email effectiveness. An email “open” can mean many things, but more than likely does NOT mean that the individual recipient consciously opened and read your message. As such, scoring email opens not only runs the risk of assigning lead value for no valid reason, but can also contribute to score inflation (see #3, above.) Better options are to score on email click-throughs and form submissions.

Read the full article here.  

Want to know where to find B2B Leads? Learn how.

What Influences the B2B Buyer?

B2B buyers are a tough nut to crack, mainly because they need a huge amount of information before purchasing a product or service. They want only the best solutions for their businesses, which is why they adhere to a strict process of searching for and choosing relevant information.

On the sellers’ part, their struggle involves reaching out to their target market. An effective lead generation and appointment setting program is always an important consideration here. Solutions providers can utilize a vast array of multichannel B2B marketing strategies to get their message across. Then again, email blasting and content marketing are practically insufficient in culling buyer interests. No matter how frequent you deliver your messages or how widespread your reach is, to win an engagement with a prospective client always demands the use of influencers.

Influencers are an indispensable component of any lead generation and appointment setting campaign. Their main aim is to fashion your messages with a touch of authority. Most people, even in the B2C world, would rather listen to someone who has a reputation for wielding important industry wisdom than to skim through a tedious ad copy that mentions the word “effective” a couple hundred times. Aside from that, influencers also provide objective facts about a given company, product or service, thereby easing the decision-making process for buyers.

Taking various forms, influencers are known to be effective tools for driving traffic of B2B sales leads. The Buyersphere Report 2015 proves that point with its study detailing the top influencers to which B2B buyers mostly listen to. It says that:

• Nineteen percent of B2B buyers rated external analyst information 10 out of 10 for influence during the buying process;
• the types of content most frequently used in the buying process, interviews with company (i.e. supplier) experts were used in 32% of purchases;
• although traditionally seen as powerful, customer testimonials were in fact seen to be less popular and less influential than content direct from the supplier; and
• the published opinions of peers were seldom sought and had little influence on the buying process.

Other factors such as “How To” guides, technical specs, pricing info and industry comparison are also mentioned. But according to the study, external analysts are the most influential in terms of providing useful information. Especially when the analysts themselves are reputable, they can serve as important additions to your lead generation and appointment setting campaign. Hiring them, however, is strictly your call.

Want to know where to find B2B Leads? Learn how.

Unpredictable Prospects are not an Excuse for Failing Sales. Here’s Why.

Marketers are in a constant struggle to maximize their lead generation and appointment setting activities. There is always a desire to expand profits and improve the public perception of one’s brand by capturing customer loyalty.

But it’s an unstable world the B2B market, where everything that shouldn’t happen can happen. For instance, there is always a possibility that a high quality lead would turn you down at a moment of critical importance. It’s not because the lead is half-baked, but because it’s just that unpredictable.

Some marketers link lead unpredictability to failed sales opportunities. Because they cannot foresee future actions within the buying cycle, they find themselves unable to prepare for when a buyer starts to wander off the path towards a purchase.

One way of course to confront this issue is to keep your buyers motivated, but is this really the case? Can we really blame the prerogative of a prospect to buy or turn down your products?

It’s not really a case of knowing what the prospects want. Rather, it’s about what you implement and how you handle your marketing that influences sales results. Unpredictability is an intrinsic condition of the B2B market. It’s not a problem in need of resolving, but it’s something that should be dealt with properly through:

1. A well-defined Sales Process

“Without a documented sales process that reflects current reality and is well understood by all customer-facing teams, a lot of problems quickly appear,” says Revenue Ramp Up founder Mike Andrews in this post. Working hard to analyze buyer behaviors and interactions in this case is important in that it leads to a better understanding of what buyers value the most, enabling you to develop more customer-centric sales strategies.

2. Efficient Lead Scoring

B2B suppliers cannot do without an efficient lead scoring mechanism since it is impossible to gauge audience interests. For this reason, accurate lead scoring is needed in order to locate high-quality leads. Through this system, you are allowed to focus only on high-quality leads. Some of these leads might want to back down from an appointment, but at least there are batches of likely buyers waiting for a sales engagement.

3. Increased Productivity and Monitoring

To enhance your sales productivity, you will need to improve the performance of your staff. Aside from that, you will need to provide your lead management database a needed boost via marketing automation. This will provide the ease needed to efficiently locate, identify and qualify B2B leads that profess a high likelihood to purchase your offers.

Want to know where to find B2B Leads? Learn how.

How to Revive a Flatlined Lead

More than conversations, telemarketing is about nurturing leads, placing value on one’s products and driving home with a smile and a sales appointment scheduled for next week.

But most of the time, things may not turn out well for your lead generation and appointment setting activities. You often encounter unforeseen circumstances along the way that may send you reeling.

There is always a possibility that a lead flatlines or suddenly withdraws just when you are at the nearest point to a purchase.  

Since telemarketing particularly in the B2B world is a delicate operation, we cannot entirely write off the likelihood that a lead whatever level of interest it is in suddenly expresses disinterest.

Hence, it is important to keep your connections instead of simply eliminating a disinterested lead from your list and keep your lead generation and appointment setting efficient.

Do you constantly experience flatlined leads? Take these steps to put them back on the road towards a sale.

Keep on nurturing

Easy as that. If a lead indicates an unwarranted decision to back down, don’t yield just yet. Keep it in your database, especially when it satisfies the specifications of your ideal client type.

Never make assumptions

When you get rejected, you open up a whole world of assumptions, negative ones to be exact. “What if my products aren’t good enough? What if my approaches were off?” There are numerous reasons why they turned you down. But does it help if you stay in bouts of self-criticism? Sometimes it does, but you should be able to spend more time satisfying such questions, which leads us to our next point.

Identify what doesn’t work

Maybe it’s your approach that needs improvement or perhaps you didn’t score the prospect well enough to discover its true value. Whatever it is that’s wrong in your lead generation and telemarketing campaign, you should seek and attempt to reevaluate it. Undertake another round of A/B testing for your telemarketing or try to add more categories in your lead scoring.

Provide better content

Content can serve as your hero the moment a lead flatlines. Continue sending scheduled emails to the prospect, but this time, up your game. Place your best offers front and center. Offer downloadable content and send invites to special events such as upcoming webinars and tradeshows. Make your prospects realize what they will be missing out without you as their solutions provider.

Want to know where to find B2B Leads? Learn how.

Telemarketing for Financial Services: A B2B Lead Generation Guide for Managers

Financial institutions that offer lending and banking services need tools and equipment to facilitate their operations. Luckily for them, there are B2B companies that provide such materials. They however confront their own set of dilemmas, one of which is marketing their offers.

Marketing financial services via B2B lead generation channels is essential to companies that offer a wide array of financial solutions to their respective audiences. One of many channels is telemarketing. Financial services are complex products to sell and it would require direct and real-time engagements in order to cultivate a purchase. In recent years however, B2B financial services companies are shifting a great bulk of their resources towards social media. The reason? Profitability.

In terms of cost-efficiency, social platforms like LinkedIn and WordPress require minimal capital inputs and provide ample space for content experimentation. The great downside is that direct engagement is limited, leading to poor qualification of B2B leads and lastly, poor ROI.

B2B telemarketing on the other hand offers advantages absent in social media. And given positive statistics about its value for financial service actors, it remains a good idea to invest in effective telemarketing.

As a start consider these important tips:

Qualify prospect data. For better sales results, it is important to know whether individual prospects are the right people to buy your services. Lead quality is crucial because without they ensure that only eager buyers are willing to progress through the sales funnel and make a purchase.

Add value to your conversations. One common mistake in B2B telemarketing is that selling points are presented during the first contact. What most telemarketers overlook is the fact that prospect engagement takes a long time until the prospect is “mature” enough to consider a purchase. Take time to nurture your prospect by centering your conversations on present issues.

Improve yourself through surveys. Telemarketing surveys are a good way of knowing what to improve in the organization as well as your present strategies. Using results from these surveys, managers can gain a clear understanding of what the majority of the market wants, allowing for effective adjustments in lead generation and appointment setting strategies.

Follow-up on existing leads. A rejection does not necessarily mean a prospect is disinterested in your product. Sometimes, telemarketers engage them at a time when there is no current demand for certain solutions. Regardless, decision-makers should always remain in your lead management database, because there is no telling when they will consider employing your financial service solutions.

Want to know where to find B2B Leads? Learn how.