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?

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. 

Today Online Media Daily ran an interesting and “long-time coming”story on how eight major consumer companies are demanding that Internet publishers provide consistent audited ad impression reports for online ad campaigns.  

The article also cited that other companies including HP would soon place the same requirement on publishers. Marketers anticipate that reporting formats should be in line with guidelines clearly established by the Internet Advertising Bureau.

Of course, as a publisher, we’d be interested in hearing from our audience as to where you stand with this issue. Let us know.

Many companies look for ways to position themselves as a thought leader in their market.

There are many ways to build your reputation as a thought leader – press releases, public speeches, and differentiating yourself through content.  I had a client in the CRM space looking to position themselves as a thought leader that offers a service that no other company offers.

My answer was to run a banner roadblock to create initial buzz. To maintain consistent presence the campaign followed up with an integrated online campaign that included banners, e-newsletters and print.  They started with a white paper offer followed by a webcast offer in order to educate and raise awareness for their user experience monitoring solution.  Insightful content (webcast/white paper) is extremely important in how the company differentiates themselves in the market place.  This client used a 3rd party expert to write the white paper and to participate in the webcast.  They also included prominent, easily recognizable companies as case studies to lend credibility and strengthen their case.  The results of the campaign were very successful. This is one example, of positioning a company as a thought leader - Does anyone else have other suggestions?

Clients often come to us looking for comparisons of results of one media vs the other in terms of lead generation.

Recently a data backup/recovery company came to us with a unique challenge.  They were looking to target IT decision makers who are responsible for backup at small/medium-sized businesses.  In the past, this client had great success promoting white papers to the Storage audience. Now, they wanted to test the effectiveness of a webcast vs. the white paper.

To help them accomplish this, we customized a program promoting both media products, the white paper and webcast equally.  We used numerous push out emails and banners to the same Storage audience.  As we had expected,  there was a higher quantity of white paper leads than webcast leads.  However, the leads were then sent to a telemarketing team and the webcast leads proved to be more highly qualified in that they were further along the sales cycle.  The white paper leads still needed more nurturing.

We’ve always believed that IT pros who take an hour out of their day to attend a webcast are ready to short-list a final vendor recommendation. This exercise reinforced that.

You and I face marketing questions every minute of the day – from branding and positioning to lead generation issues. And, you may have noticed by now, that the perfect answer never becomes any clearer. Most often based on actual trial and error, we are just making educated guesses. The more experienced we become, hopefully, the more educated the guesses become as well.

Meeting other marketers, as I often do in my position, we tend to have long discussions and email strings about what works and what fails. I have often wished I could capture these conversations to remember and build on them when a new situation comes up. Now, I think I’ve found a way.

I created this blog with my client consulting team to share some of the decisions we, and our clients, have made in marketing to enterprise IT audiences.

My hope is that by sharing experiences and conversations with you - and reading your responses - we will both make more educated guesses and come up with the right answers.

Enjoy,
Marilou Barsam

You and I face marketing questions every minute of the day – from branding and positioning to lead generation issues. And, you may have noticed by now, that the perfect answer never becomes any clearer.  Most often based on actual trial and error, we are just making educated guesses. The more experienced we become, hopefully, the more educated the guesses become as well.

Meeting other marketers, as I often do in my position, we tend to have long discussions and email strings about what works and what fails.  I have often wished I could capture these conversations to remember and build on them when a new situation comes up. Now, I think I’ve found a way.

I created this blog with my client consulting team to share some of the decisions we, and our clients, have made in marketing to enterprise IT audiences.

My hope is that by sharing experiences and conversations with you - and reading your responses - we will both make more educated guesses and come up with the right answers.

Enjoy,
Marilou Barsam