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.

Marketers spend a lot of time on content creation, really thinking through what they want to offer the audience to educate them on products or services. More time goes into a catchy or succinct title and promotional copy that will act as the hook to reel the leads in. Everything in place, great content, strong title, informative copy and then…there is the “Registration” page. It can be a marketer’s best friend or worst enemy.

Demographic questions are typical and most respondents are used to providing answers to them in return for content. In addition, many sites have pre-populated registration pages for return users. But what is your strategy with additional qualification questions? On the one hand, qualification questions can give marketers a large amount of information about their prospects. It can help them bucket the leads for their sales teams - offering the hottest ones first and highlighting leads that need more nurturing. However, it’s important that you have a sound strategy behind each question asked.

In our experience, people collect qualification data in several ways. Some options include:

• • Make questions mandatory
• • Make questions voluntary
• • Ask questions in steps, as prospects download more information, ask more questions
• • Don’t ask any questions until your sales team or telesales contacts them

If making questions mandatory, make sure that the question asked is deemed important for qualifying leads for sales. Having mandatory questions increases the rate of abandonment, so the quantity of leads will decrease, but valid responses can lead to a quicker sales cycle. Keep in mind that our recent Google/TechTarget study revealed that only 30 - 40% of respondents provide valid information. They are more likely to share valid qualification data the further along they are in the buying process. Bottom line, be sure you are asking the questions for the right reasons and have a sales strategy in place that will make the most use out of this information. Do not use registration questions as a survey or if the lead is going to be called on regardless of the answers.

Making qualification questions voluntary is an effective way of collecting reliable information with decent conversion rates. In this Pardot blog there is a case study of a company who tested this option and had some surprising results.

Asking questions in steps, as Adam Blitzer of Pardot outlines in his blog, can help build a greater trust between the marketer and the prospect. Also called “progressive profiling” this strategy allows an interaction or relationship to build between the vendor and the lead. Prospects feel they are offering their information, but also getting something in return be it a white paper, webcast, case study, etc.

Another option is to not ask any qualification questions. This option would increase conversion rates and would use a lead nurturing strategy to truly qualify the leads further.

Therein lies the question - Do you put a strategy in place in which marketing and sales work together to define what is a “HOT” lead or if a lead is a lead is a lead, do you collect as many leads as you can and call them all?

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.

I am hearing from many technology marketers that — in a time in which marketing activities need to deliver tangible results within a tighter timeframe — it is imperative that marketers allocate a portion of their budget dollars toward campaigns which capture more late-stage, actionable leads.

To accomplish this, marketers often use pay-per-click programs that point towards product trials and online product demonstrations.  While these types of programs result in marketers competing for a relatively small pool of leads, they do generate significant results because they reach potential buyers in the late stages of the research and purchase process - the “ready-to-buy” prospect.  

Recent TechTarget market research indicates that “try-before-you-buy” programs are particularly effective in the Application Development software space, because the developer community is immersed in the types of tools and products that they are encountering or implementing on a daily basis.  In the developer community, we see that implementers have a high degree of influence on the IT purchase decision.  The “try-before-you-buy” method is very important in building their loyalty and trust, and provides the IT marketer with an opportunity to demonstrate both the quality of the product, and, in many cases, showcase the quality of the customer service supporting the product.

Also, because the developer community places a high value on peer feedback and product recommendations, marketers can leverage social media to reach this group by providing a platform for experts within their organization to engage prospects in discussions about market trends, not just to gain exposure for their product, but build a rapport with — and establish a degree of trust within — the community.

Finally, although there is a significant benefit to offering downloads and trial versions of software to generate leads from prospects in the final stages of the research and purchase process, it is important that this not be the sole focus of your marketing efforts to the detriment of campaign elements supporting your branding efforts or reaching potential clients at the early and mid-stages of the research and purchase process.  You still need to maintain program elements to generate leads that will generate sales over an extended period of time.

While there is no “silver bullet” formula for what percentage of your marketing budget should focus on long-term or short-term leads, it is important that your plans include a mix of elements - like topical whitepapers to reach IT professionals at the very start of the research process, Webcasts and Webinars to reach mid-stage prospects, and virtual tradeshows to facilitate direct contact with prospective buyers.

Let’s face it; the current state of the economy has everyone, including IT marketers, concerned about their short- and long-term goals and the budget expenditures required to reach those goals.  A recent trend we’ve seen is IT marketers saying they only want to do highly filtered marketing campaigns to deliver only leads from a very limited demographic group that will deliver immediate sales.  And, if they have any funds earmarked for branding campaigns, many marketers think they should reallocate these branding dollars for use on lead generation programs.  While every online marketing campaign should deliver a percentage of immediately actionable leads, in many cases these short-term campaigns are being done to the exclusion of activities that will help generate sales over the long haul.

The danger of this approach is obvious — when the economy improves, marketers focusing exclusively on generating leads for immediate sales will have no supply of leads in their pipeline, and will have to start from scratch to rebuild one.  The situation gets worse if their competitors have been nurturing leads to generate sales over an extended period and now have a large pool of prospects at various stages of the research and purchase process.  If you find yourself on the wrong side of this situation - without leads in the pipeline — you can be certain of one thing: your competitors will be taking sales away from you for a very long time until you catch up, if you catch up.  The key lesson here: Even if your budget allocations are being scrutinized in the short-term, IT marketers need to think long term about future sales and be prepared to defend allocations of budget dollars to maintain a sales pipeline. 

An empty lead pipeline and loss of long-term sales are not the only problems associated with highly filtered campaigns.  If all or most of your competitors are also implementing this kind of limited marketing program — focusing on the exact same demographic profile at the exact same stage of the purchase process (ready to buy) — you are all competing for a limited universe of leads.  As a result, the volume of leads generated by campaigns will be smaller, the cost per lead will be higher, and everyone will be competing head to head for the attention - and dollars - of this limited group.  Under these circumstances, IT marketers should considering relaxing their demographic criteria to reach a broader group of potential customers engaged in the earlier stages of the purchase research process.  It’s also a good time to expand the range of content (broad industry-oriented, topic/issue-specific, product focused, etc) and the content types (white papers, Webcasts, Podcasts, downloads, etc) you offer to meet to the information needs of all the different decision makers involved all stages of the research and purchase process.

The upside of a down economy?  Current market conditions also offer companies - particularly smaller, less well-known ones - an opportunity to take market share away from their larger competitors.  In tight economic times at major companies, very often, the first marketing budget item to be cut or reallocated is branding.  If your company has had problems competing against bigger names — now is the time to get out there and seize market share by increasing your branding efforts.  If your competitor’s campaigns are focused on generating short-term results, focus your efforts on creating campaigns that will deliver consistent results over the long term.

What impact has the down economy had on your marketing campaigns and programs?  Is upper management questioning your budgeting decisions?  What due diligence actions are you taking to make sure your lead pipeline stays filled and delivers short- and long-term sales?  Let us know what you’re experiencing and seeing out there. 

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?”

What is lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects. John Miller mentions different nurturing lead activities in his marketing blog. He speaks about the importance of marketing to set up programs and activities that provide information on topics of interest to your target and that focus on the value of your solution. At TechTarget we have seen that by re-messaging to your lead through email, you increase the value of the lead. It allows you to gain face time with the most interested prospects. What nurturing tactics have you found to be affective?

As the online marketing landscape expands, maximizing existing lead acquisition channels and trying to understand new channels is a challenge all its own.  But, the ultimate goal of building a valuable marketing database remains crucial to the success of today’s marketing programs.

In the beginning, our focus was on member quantity and establishing our brand to both vendors and the IT users. We relied on traditional web-based marketing channels such as list rentals and co-marketing partnerships. However, as online audiences, particularly IT pros, have gotten more sophisticated, so too have our audience development methods and marketing outreach. Today, we’re focused on building a quality member base with lots of defining criteria. The more we know about our members, the more we can target and customize our customer/ prospect marketing programs, which results in an increased client ROI as well as member satisfaction.

Two acquisition channels that currently enable us to capture qualifying member data, which we can later use when developing client programs, are search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO).

On the SEM side, we’re running ad word campaigns in Google, for example, to generate interest in specific products and IT topics. By running highly targeted campaigns that point to relevant landing pages with incentives, we generate members who indicate their IT topics of interest, as well as share their job or product needs. We also generate leads for products including events, print pubs and search-site specific programs.

In contrast to SEM, search engine optimization is first and foremost a company-wide effort aimed at increasing site traffic.  Acquisition or conversion success is a result of how well we align our marketing messages and registration incentives with the content on those trafficked pages.

There are consistent challenges with both the SEM and SEO channels, however, through both channels we have converted and captured valuable information that can later be used to create a pre-qualified list or audience for vendor campaigns.

Now we use all three of these channels to support our marketing strategy and meet goals. Our approach to building and mining our marketing database has proven its value many times over to clients as increased ROI as well as member satisfaction.

If you’d like to hear how we made this work, join me for a webcast and I’ll share all the details.  “Building a Targeted, Receptive and Valuable Audience”

Lead Management includes data collection, lead qualification, nurturing, distributing and analyzing leads.
The result? To increase the likelihood that a lead will convert to a qualified opportunity.
A recent study, “CMO Advisory Best Practices Series: Marketing Lead Management Process”, states only a few Tech Companies surveyed were able to demonstrate their impact on the sales pipeline. Failure points include: data collection, lead qualification, sales hand off, lead nurturing and performance measurement.
Here at TechTarget, we provide our customers with a unique lead management tool. The tools provides reporting metrics detailing each user’s interaction with the specific content – such are time spent with a document, pages views and pages printed. This data combined with customized questions helps better identify quality leads for sales. Do you currently utilize a lead management tool? If so, how advanced is the tool?

There has been a lot of discussion on lead follow-up.
Do you nurture your leads via phone, email or a combination of both?
What do you do if a lead does not supply full contact information such as address or phone number?

We have seen that it is important to start with good qualifying questions to help segment leads.  From there, prioritize leads based on the qualifing questions and the actions taken by the leads.  Regardless of where they are prioritized, all leads need to be followed up within 24 hours. However, this does not mean all leads should be treated the same.
How do you follow up with your leads?