An old boss once told me that success happens when preparation and opportunity meet. This also holds true for targeting an audience with your marketing campaigns. I’ve been thinking about the evolution of targeting and how it has and, in some cases, has not progressed. As marketers, we often default to the basics of a targeted audience’s make up: title, industry, role, technical characteristics and so on. Why not first think of project, responsibility on the buying team, interest level, purchasing stage…  Because targeting is not just about capturing the right audience at the right time, it is also about the investment you make and passing on the most likely opportunities for sales to engage and close. Helping sales save time, effort and hard costs and focusing efforts on the opportunities that really matter could move those opportunities along faster as well as save budget and resources.

So, how do we do this? Employ a targeting strategy that takes into account activity, content and context at least as much as demographics. Finding an active, interested, engaged audience can help your marketing campaign by providing a better starting point for your qualification and selling efforts. How you use the intelligence from the activity, content and context can also better shape the follow-up approach to lead qualification. Think in context of the enterprise technology buying team. All the leads that you capture may not have ultimate authority or the need may be latent, but knowing their role can help with qualification by determining the type of questioning and relationship that sales would want to build. This type of strategy can help you identify the urgent, actionable leads that inside sales and field sales can jump on quickly and can put the proper emphasis on the leads that matter.

Looking at how the recession has impacted businesses, specifically how businesses are making decisions, I’ve decided to look at common mistakes IT marketers need to avoid during a recession.

A misaligned ROI program can aim you in the wrong direction causing bad decisions. Placing too much emphasis on the end game or revenue of an ROI measurement program can cause you to miss revenue opportunities and shorten sales cycles that would have ultimately improved ROI. Online marketing enables you to define and track conversion rates to improve ROI for faster payback. Knowing which target segments are most responsive, which offers generate the greatest interest, and, most importantly, which conversion rates are exceeding benchmarks help you make better decisions, faster and improve program performance. Conversion rates can include: clicks to leads, leads to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), MQLs to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), SQLs to meetings, meetings to pipeline… through to sales and revenue. Employ a re-messaging and nurturing program to prospects and early stage leads so you can identify the most interested prospects faster, while moving prospects to SQLs sooner.

Prioritizing program efforts on existing prospect lists can cause you to miss the active projects being researched right now. IT buyers are searching online for your solutions right now. 97% of all IT pros start with search to identify the solutions for their short lists. Online marketing offers scalability to reach the buying team when “they” are ready. The most significant trend in IT professional online usage patterns shows search engines and publisher websites are consistently the starting point for any research. IT buyers use search to locate the information they need, but rely on IT publishers to have the resources on specific topics, including editorial content, analyst research, whitepapers, webcasts, videos, blogs and trial downloads. This helps you attract net new buyers, including existing customers, to maintain and grow pipelines, giving you a better opportunity to penetrate and capture multiple members of the enterprise buying team. Use your content to extend your message to where the IT buyers are searching online.

Budgets are tight, the need for measuring ROI of your marketing investment has never been greater, and as a technology marketer, we can use all the help we can get. With the mantra of “Doing more with less,” we need to have an approach that can not only get us through these tough times but can put us in a better position than our competition when we get to the other side. Here are a series of tips for IT marketers to help market successfully in this tough economy:

10. Monitor the competition and the market. If your competition is cutting back, consider adjusting your marketing budget and attacking the market with your message. This will provide a great opportunity to capture - and retain - market share. A recent post on the MarketingProfs blog refers to a study of 600 b-to-b companies by McGraw-Hill Research.

In this study, they found that businesses that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-1982 recession, averaged higher sales growth during the recession and in the three years following. By 1985, sales of aggressive recession advertisers (those that either maintained or increased spending) had risen 256% over those that cut-back on advertising. In 2001, another study found that aggressive recession advertisers increased market share 2 ½ times the average for all businesses in the post-recession economy.

Thinking post-recession maybe hard to imagine now but companies that do will reap the benefits. I found some good information from StrategicOxygen’s blog on this topic that you might find useful.

9. Focus on lead generation efforts with direct-response techniques. In email and online campaigns, use hard-hitting copy with simple benefit-oriented, convincing language, an informational offer relevant to the prospect’s topic interest, and a strong call to action. Focus on the problems that you solve for your customers and how you uniquely address them.

Lead generation is where the rubber meets the road and with this economic situation, you need to focus on the basics of the audience, your message, offer and the call to action. Getting focused so you have the right audience responding in the right way to the right offer taking the right steps will help your efficiency as well as effectiveness of your program and get you the results you want.

Providing leads to the right person at the right time is what opportunity management is all about. You can categorize leads according to territory, product, lead source, level of urgency, or new vs. existing customers. Leads can also be escalated if, for example, they have a short timeframe in which to make a decision, or a ready-approved budget, or if they have a particular urgency or a high value associated with them. With the right technology infrastructure, companies can automate the distribution of leads according to predetermined criteria. This removes the burden from the support staff, and ensures that leads really do reach the right person at the right time.

Best Practices for Opportunity Management include:

•  Marketing should continue to engage with Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) - The marketing process does not end with the hand off to sales.
•  Define the level of ownership, responsibility and accountability when Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) transition to SQLs.
•  Connect the marketing system used for tracking and reporting in Inquiry Management and Prospect Management with the sales forecast system to establish seamless closed loop tracking and reporting for deals closed and revenue realized.
•  Document the process from marketing to sales and sales activities post transition.
•  Consistent follow-up by marketing with sales on leads passed and status within the process.
•  Must resolve the timeframe issue of the handoff of MQLs to sales acceptance of SQLs; one solution could be to automatically populate the MQL to the sales forecast system after a defined period of time, for example 3-7 days.
•  MQLs rejected by sales go back into the nurturing process until they are identified as MQLs.

Track, Measure and Improve - Key to Long Term

Disciplined, constant analysis and reporting while a program is live is the key to demonstrating success, or perhaps identifying what needs to be improved while a program is live. With Sales and Marketing going through a planning process at the beginning of a program, everyone should understand what is being measured, the milestones, and the key success metrics. This information should be tracked, measured and benchmarked against other campaigns. When the ROI at each stage from each campaign is accurately reported, trends and patterns start to emerge to help develop future programs and improve the overall lead management process.

Prospect Management is the process of qualifying and nurturing leads that have been generated through Inquiry Management.  These are the leads that are not yet ready to be passed to your sales organization but have potential for future business. They have demonstrated interest in your company or product.  These are the majority of leads that are typically generated by your marketing program efforts.

Consider this: Not every lead generated online deserves a phone call as the first step in the follow-up process! Remember, people research online for a reason.  Just because they downloaded a white paper or attended a Webcast does not necessarily mean they are ready for a phone call from you.  There needs to be a transition from online research activities to offline interaction.  One approach could be to use video, chat, or blogs to assist in that transition. This “virtual” interaction is a way to keep the buyer in control but start the process of that one-to- one interaction.

In the prospect management stage, leads are qualified, scored and processed according to pre-determined criteria that examines budget, authority, need and timeframe. When this information is known, the lead can be passed to sales as a priority lead requiring rapid follow-up, or a lead that needs further nurturing and communication.

Prospect Management best practices include:

1. A system to capture and consolidate prospect data — and qualification  criteria — in searchable fields for reporting and future targeting
2. A systematic approach to “active” prospects that are being qualified and the “passive” inquiries that are being nurtured.  Defining content for each  type is critical to success
3. Communicate with prospects to qualify and quantify the opportunity
4. Create a systematic nurturing system, and make it as targeted and  personalized as possible, but with the ability to scale as needed
5. Nurturing can be done through multiple touch points; i.e. online, events,  phone, etc.
6. Nurturing system can be structured by contact, company, interest, title, behavior, etc.
7. Measure time to MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), to appointment scheduled for every lead

Lead nurturing allows you to maintain contact with longer term leads until the  lead is ready to be advanced into the sales cycle. When the lead is closer to  making a purchase, it can then be passed on to sales.

What are you doing to manage and nurture leads that works particularly well?  What have you tried that didn’t deliver the desired results?

People often ask me to summarize the many questions a client asks at the outset of a working relationship with TechTarget.  Because the questions often come in a rapid-fire — and sometimes disjointed — manner at the initial stages of the new-client conversation, I really had to take some time and think this through to isolate and summarize important areas of client concern or interest.  The answer is: “What are the key components and stages that make up a successful closed-loop lead management system?”Rather than attempt to answer this question in a single blog entry, today’s posting will be the first in a series of three entries I’ll make - Inquiry/Lead Management, Prospect Management and Opportunity Management — to answer this question as thoroughly as I can.

So, what’s the goal of Lead Management? In one sentence: To increase the likelihood that a lead will convert to a qualified opportunity and then a new, satisfied customer. Having an approach that can rapidly and effectively create, nurture, distribute and analyzing leads in the stages of Inquiry Management, Prospect Management and Opportunity Management is critical. ROI measures or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) need to be associated at key points throughout the process. But before any programs are launched, leads are captured, systems are purchased or ROI is calculated, there needs to be communication, teamwork and consensus between sales and marketing to get the results you need. It all starts up front.  Here are some best practices to consider before launching a campaign.

1. Clearly define your target audience. The process always begins and ends with the audience.
2. Content is critical to obtaining the desired results. Understand what action you want your audience to take and define what content will get them to take that action.
3. Give the audience the choice of how they can access your information –Podcast/Webcast, white paper can all be used with the same content.
4. Define the characteristics of a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) (key attributes and profile) and a sales-qualified lead (SQL) (key attributes and profile).  Get input from sales when defining these!!
5. Determine how inquiries transition from MQLs then to SQLs.
6. Qualification questions and processes - again, get input and agreement from sales!
7. Lead distribution rules - Did you get agreement with sales?
8. Lead scoring: specific definitions of A, B and C-level leads to prioritize follow-up - How’d that discussion go with sales?
9. Define the milestone points in the process and the questions you want answered at each milestone. Example: Number of inquiries to MQLs to SQLs to Meetings to Opportunities to Forecasted deals to closed sales; Velocity metric - the time it takes it takes to reach each milestone. Over time you will develop your own benchmarks.
10. Define key benchmarks
11. How to manage atypical or out-of-profile leads
12. Ownership of each stage of the process - get agreement with all the owners as to what is expected entering and exiting each stage!  And, in all seriousness, work closely with your sales team throughout this process so the leads you generate are what your sales team needs.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to defining an ROI based Lead Management approach. But most of all, early on, work with and get agreement from sales. At the end of the day remember: sales is marketing’s customer!

Coming up next: “Prospect Management: MQLs, SQLs, Scoring… What?”