Having viewed the development of social networking in the past year from the sidelines I think it’s time I had my say.

The main question needing an answer is, does Social Networking as a lead generation medium, work? 

Networking has always been an obvious way to develop business and business opportunities.  What’s more it’s very effective. However, the fact is that this activity is rapidly moving from the club or the golf course, or the local business network to the WEB.  This provides you with the opportunity to expand your contacts substantially, unhampered by geography or company size.

Networking for lead generation reminds me of the insurance sales rep who’s just out of training.  He’s all gung ho and motivated to make it happen.  Yet where does he first turn? To no one’s surprise he turns to his natural environment - his personal network.  First to the family, then to friends and acquaintances. Then to the prospects they recommend.

However, there’s no doubt that as he ventures farther afield to include strangers, his network will yield fewer genuine opportunities. Though he swims manfully against the stream, absent good luck the new recruit may not survive. His only hope for the future is to engage in an effective lead generation effort before his money runs out. Or to hope the company he works for will slip him a few sales ready leads to help him stay afloat.

LinkedIn

I’ve subscribed to a number of groups on LinkedIn these past few years. Frankly it’s been a big disappointment.  There are large numbers of participants out there trying to sell whatever it is they sell. They contribute nothing or very little to the dialogue.  Others are there to recruit.  These groups do seem to constitute fertile ground to find staff - much as happens in regular social networks.�
From time to time I also notice people posting topics for discussion that are on point. But for the most part it’s fairly obvious that the questions posed are self serving - designed more than anything else to promote the reputation of the poster.

Twitter

Twitter is another phenomenon I have struggled with.  I suppose if you admire and respect someone and want to know what he/she is thinking or doing every day, then being a follower is useful.  On the other hand if you’re a thought leader on a particular subject – with many followers – it’s also likely that being a twitterer could be useful. 

I tend to think of myself as a thought leader.  I write, I hold a goodly variety of opinions and I’m capable of communicating thoughts to my clients and prospects via a variety of channels.  So I ask myself – do I want to sit and post tweets day in and day out for my followers?  Fact is I don’t and being a follower or being followed 24×7 is really not my thing.

There could however, be some potential in Twitter in terms of Lead Generation. But this depends how numerous your “follower” network is and how motivated they are to become buyers or recommenders.

How is eti embracing the new networks to improve lead generation results for its clients?

eti’s primary business is focused on B2B (complex) lead generation.  Our ultimate goal is to to maximize client’s sales force productivity. Here then are some of the things we’re doing to exploit the new resources.

Firstly it needs to be appreciated that these networks are often fantastic information resources. That, technically, is the business we’re in.  Because we engage with prospects in consultative dialogues for the purpose of identifying information and characteristics which indicates the prospect’s ability and need to purchase our clients’ solutions.  To achieve that purpose our Business Developers actively participate in the networks to better understand the market places our clients do business in. 

Secondly, we link directly to these resources from i*collaborator - eti’s CRM/PRM framework. This enables us to search dynamically within LinkedIn, Plaxo and Facebook, to extract third party information that could be leveraged to reveal big fish prospects. Nor are we shy to hook smaller fish which have good growth potential.

Thirdly, we make these facilities directly available to our clients via their Opportunity Dashboards so that their sales persons are motivated to leverage the new opportunities without their having to do the research themselves. 

What else might we do?  Well we’re always open to new ideas and would welcome and appreciate your thoughts.

Conclusion

As a lead generation tool for the most part the networks mentioned remain on the periphery.  In their current incarnations they will probably not become mainstream lead generation tools.

However they do have enormous potential as tools to build influence and credibility. And that’s the best use of a network.  Because with that credibility will come the desired recommendations and referrals that will help you maximize your lead generation efforts.

Recently Shelly Sachs (eti’s VP Business Development) and I hosted a workshop at a recent MIT Sloan School of Business Sales conference. Our contribution was titled “Tough Times Demand Smarter Sales Strategies”. 

Bill McDermott, President, Global Field Operations of SAP gave the keynote address. It was outstanding. His presentation focused on the complex problems and challenges facing a large global company in today’s difficult business climate.

McDermott did not mince his words. He had in fact come face to face with the serious need to maintain and grow sales during these difficult times.  His solution was as simple as it was dramatic:

“Double the number of new sales opportunities  being driven to the field sales force!”

He made it clear of course that he was talking about qualified and sales-ready opportunities. Not simply doubling the number of raw inquiries because that’s just the starting point of the qualifying process. Such inquiries still require to be carefully qualified.

Clearly one can’t double the number of sales-ready opportunities by cutting sales and marketing budgets.  The only way to increase the number of qualified leads is to increase your lead generation investments. Nor can one handle an increased flow of raw leads by cutting the sales force - in fact you may be compelled to hire additional resources.

Well then, here’s a merit worthy offer from eti. Give Shelly Sachs our VP Business Development a call to discuss how your company could double the number of sales-ready leads in your sales opportunity pipelines.

Shelley’s extensive experience in this highly specialized field makes him an ideal sounding board for developing your lead generation strategies moving forward.  He can be reached at at 914.747.3030 Ext.3450.

No doubt as the recession takes hold companies are at risk to lose more customers than new ones coming in. 

The problem:  If you don’t invest in keeping and developing your existing clients – especially in tough times – then it’s more than likely that your business will decline.

You’re no doubt familiar with the mantra that states that it costs about 5 times more to bring in a new customer than to sell to existing customers. 

So the question is what are you doing to communicate with your customers?  Do you have a structured customer development program to up-sell, cross-sell and above all manage your relationships in such a way to make sure these customers – whom you’ve already spent a lot of money acquiring – from walking?

Here are some ideas you may want to focus on:

• Establish a systematic, formal process to cultivate and grow high potential accounts
• Create a schedule to “touch” key accounts regularly
  • Build variable schedule based upon account potential (not current value of the relationship)
• Develop a strategy to manage marginal accounts ( those that cannot be effectively managed by the sales force)
  • Outsource is one way to go
• Raise awareness of new products and services
• Under promise – over deliver

We’re pleased to announce that I will be hosting a workshop entitled Tough Times Demand Smarter Sales Strategies at this year’s MIT Sloan Sales Conference which is to be held on April 17th, 2009 in Cambridge, MA.

Workshop Description:

Keeping your business afloat in tough times requires disciplined sales strategies to prevent being overwhelmed.

Most companies have areas of weakness in their sales and marketing processes.  When times are good, no one wants to upset the applecart so there’s less incentive to be introspective.

Tough times present a good opportunity to examine areas within your company most likely to benefit from introspective examination.   In the current environment, where fewer dollars are chasing fewer prospects in smaller and shrinking marketplaces, some questions virtually ask themselves.

In this session we’ll explore:

• Whether the sales organization is coping with the downturn.

•  Whether the sales opportunity pipeline is filled with genuine sales ready opportunities.

• Whether there is a solution to decreasing New Customer Acquisition (NCA) closing rates.

• Whether the marketing teams are fully aligned to sales’ needs.  

• Whether marketing and sales are ROI accountable.

• Whether there are leaks in the sales opportunity pipelines and, if so, how you can minimize their impact.

We’ll also take a hard look at marketing activity, lead generation, lead qualification and lead nurturing and how they can have a marked impact on maximizing sales productivity. 

To register click here.

You may wonder what the process of acquiring new customers has to do with upholding a client’s brand image.

We first learned to understand the importance of BRAND in the early 90’s when working on assignment for a Fortune listed 500 company.

Their executives made a serious point of informing us their company was much concerned that we should not do anything which might hurt their company’s carefully cultivated image.

On the contrary they went on to explain . . .

• that in speaking with their prospective clients we should speak with esteem for the way their company does business
• that we should convey their company is one which appreciates the customer as king
• that they value the opportunity to pay attention to the needs and values of their customers
• that they can be relied on to carry out their promises and offers
• that they should be admired for their products and respected for their services. 

We immediately realized the essential truth of this client’s definition of their brand, their company image, and the real value of their advice. Before long we decided to make changes in our business that would result in setting us apart from the average telemarketing service vendor of the time.

This decision required us to internalize that client’s priceless advice and to review eti’s company persona. It also affected our hiring objectives. The education and business experience of our phone agents would become one of the most important factors in our hiring decisions.

We would need to look for persons with an executive manner who easily and naturally spoke the language of their prospects. We would need people capable of understanding the need to uphold the client’s brand image whenever they spoke in their name. And scripts were thrown out in favor of Call Guides enabling us to engage in consultative and meaningful conversations with client prospects.

In due course our staff would be defined as Business Developers (no longer telemarketers or phone agents) in keeping with our clients’ objectives. These were, by and large, to acquire new customers via sales lead generation and lead qualification efforts. 

When we work for you, you’ll know that we are conscious of the fact that you too want respect for your company image and admiration for your products or services. You’ll get both.

Here is what clients have said about our approach:

• “You don’t describe yourselves as being in the business of generating leads. You defined your mission as New Customer Acquisition and Retention and maximizing sales/force productivity.”
• “You sold us on the lifetime significance of new customers rather than the value of their first orders.”
• “You have a basic brand image mindset which is very important to us.”
• “Your Business Developers are graduates and have business experience. They adapt and converse freely because they are not bound by scripts.”
• “You’re not the most competitive price wise. But if we wanted low costs we could have gone to any of the commodity type agencies that abound.”
• “What we can’t get from your competitors are people who will be concerned to uphold our brand image.”
• “You appreciated the concern we have for our brand image. You spoke our language.”

eti is concerned to convey the respect we have for our client’s brand image. This concept does not lend itself to a set of rules which can be prioritized and numbered. Brand image is not upheld or maintained or enhanced in this way.

In a recent article in B2Bonline entitled “Study: ‘Inbound’ marketing rates high in lead-gen results” one would be led to believe that this is the case. 

Cambridge, Mass.—Inbound marketing, including techniques such as blogging, social media, search engine optimization and pay-per-click, which pull relevant prospects toward a business and its products, realize lower costs-per lead than outbound marketing efforts, according to a new report by Internet marketing company HubSpot.

The company’s report, “State of Inbound Marketing,” is based on an online survey performed late last year among 167 executives and business owners, 71% of whom work for b-to-b companies.

The survey found that respondents who spent 50% or more of their lead-generation budget on inbound marketing averaged $84 per lead, while businesses spending half or more of their budgets on such outbound marketing techniques as direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows averaged $220 per lead.

Search leads the pack in lead-generation efficiency. Survey respondents said they devoted an average of 12% of their budgets to search but gained 16% of their leads from their search marketing efforts.

So let’s examine the facts. 

Unfortunately HubSpot appears to have made an unfair  comparison.  The Inbound Leads referred to here are not leads at all.  They are mostly “hand raisers”, that is to say they have merely  inquired and we have no way of knowing how genuine each inquiry is.

This is because the ‘so called’ leads have not been qualified to ascertain quality. Their potential is unknown.

No one has established the value of their potential; their decision making processes; their purchasing timeframe; their budgets.  Etc.

All these aspects and more can only be ascertained by someone who has the experience to engage with the prospect and peel away at the onion in order to establish if the lead is worth the investment of a sales person’s expensive selling time.

Leads without qualification have little value to salespersons whose standard of living depends on the volume of their sales. In many instances the most experienced salespersons will not follow through on unqualified leads because it doesn’t pay them. In that event the total cost of the cheap leads would be wasted.  And your actual cost per qualified lead and sale will skyrocket.

eti statistics show that only a very small percentage of these types of  “low cost” inquiries actually convert to highly qualified leads.  Based on thousands of inquiries of this type – over any number of industries -  we can say with certainly that the range of conversion is between 5% and 15%.  If you take the mean of 10% you can then ascertain that the true cost per lead (based on their $84 average) is $840  - or 10 times what they claim.

That’s substantially higher than the cost of qualified leads from the other media mentioned.�

Tough times require all expenditures to be examined for possible reduction or elimination. Marketing is not exempt from such investigation and will undoubtedly reveal areas where cuts can and will be made.

One example is Brand Advertising which for the most part is not an immediate result producing expenditure. On the other hand it would be unwise to cut advertising oriented to generate demand activity for your goods/services. Or to generate inquiries for goods/services since such sales leads can effectively be converted to new customers.

The following strategies should be implemented:

• Focus on generating quality inquiries as distinct from large numbers of inquiries.
• Analyze inquiry response by media to check on the effectiveness (front and back end) of both ad and media. Save money by canceling or revising ineffective ads and/or media.
• Cancel advertising that is not generating satisfactory revenue and invest the funds in strategies that are creating revenues.
• Analyze effectiveness of costly Trade Shows and Webinars and other Event driven activities. Not only by volume of actual inquiries but more importantly by actual conversion rates.   (Typically the return on investment from such activities is lower than other more organic marketing tactics.)
• Be cautious about offering free or premium offers. These often drive high volume of inquiries.  That’s natural - but they are seldom effective in helping the sales force to sell more.
• Large volumes of email can be sent at very low cost but actual readership is in doubt. Too much depends on factors over which senders have no control.
  • Use sparingly and wisely to maximize the impact.
  • Make sure your messaging is targeted to applicable prospect companies.
  • Personalize if possible with TEXT (not html) based content.
  • Where possible mail only to OPT IN contacts.
  • Track each and every email open and click through to ascertain readership and traffic driven to your website and or micro-site.
• The management of inquiries and follow through is complex and requires a strong database infrastructure for effective control. Outsourced CRM solutions may well be helpful. eti clients derive immense benefits using our thoroughly reliable in-house CRM solutions - provided at no extra cost. An advantage worth its weight in gold!

We’ve just posted a great new article (IOHO) on the eti site that offers up 4 Positive Sales Boosting Ideas. 

Do the bean counters have you running for the hills … cutting back on all your marketing expenditures?

Are results from your current marketing and promotional activities falling?

Do you have a tough times strategy in place?

Read more here.

The origin of telemarketing (TM) may be lost in the mists of time. Lots of folk credit Murray Roman for being the father of telemarketing but I don’t believe he ever confirmed parenthood. As an executive for the Ford company however, he was involved in the first mass telephone campaign in 1964.

Vance Packard in his “The Naked Society” wrote about the 20 million phone calls which Ford then made. Packard was not altogether complimentary even though the campaign produced a magnificent result for Ford. Ford’s success quite likely sparked the entry of business into this direct marketing medium. 

The basic concept of TM was much like that of direct mail … deliver a consistent message to a generally uniform audience and the response will be measurable.  If you sent out 10, 000 advertising packages and received 200 responses you could extrapolate that 2% by mailing a million to the same quality list and geography.

This applied equally to outbound telemarketing.  If one called 1000 similar prospects with a similarly consistent message (script) then this too became a measurable marketing medium.  And it worked, sometimes better, sometimes worse depending on the ability of your callers to conduct proficient conversations with decision makers.

The medium was embraced early on by consumer direct marketers who built large phone banks to organize their calls. And it did not take long for the medium to start irritating consumers. Calls were being made during the evenings and weekends.  They were rigorously scripted and for the most part high pressured. There were also many scams. Sure enough everyone who operated a TM service was soon tainted with the bad reputation of the medium. 

Newspapers whipped up a frenzy of fury – partly due to a loss of revenue no doubt. Ironically, many of them were later to become the biggest users in an attempt to build subscriptions, to regain lost subscribers, and even to solicit advertising. In 1996 my company, Effective Telemarketing Inc. changed its name to eti Sales Support simply because it just became pain-in-the-neck embarrassing to be tainted by the consumer side of the medium. Especially as we never operated in the consumer sphere.  Our focus was and has always been in the domain of B2B.

With the advent of the ‘Do Not Call’ lists initiated early on by the Direct Marketing Association and later endorsed by the Federal Government, this negativity has markedly decreased.

So is the phone a marketing medium?  Especially as it pertains in the B2B marketing space?

The answer is definitely a huge yes.  And an enormously successful one too.

When looking to generate B2B Sales Leads here are some pointers to bear in mind.

• Messaging: – Although in our world (B2B Lead Generation and Lead Qualification) the communication is consultative (i.e. not scripted) in nature it is still consistent from prospect to prospect and market to market.  This allows one to measure results and data accurately.  Furthermore, these results are fully projectable.
• Interactive medium:  No other form of direct communication allows for instantaneous two way communication with a prospect.  All other media facilitate an entirely one sided communication.  Take a moment to consider the power of such personal  interaction:
  • Best way to identify and talk to the decision making authority
    • Only dynamic medium that allows you to navigate within an organization to identify the true decision maker/s.
  • Best way to motivate purchasing interest of the decision maker
  •  Best way to respond to questions or objections
  • Immediate ability to probe for need and pain
  • Immediate ability to confirm
    • Real interest
    • Appointments
    • Orders
    • Webinar/Seminar registrations
    • Etc Etc.
• Brand: You never get a better chance to make a first impression.  (While many may think that brand might be compromised by a phone call, it’s my firm opinion that when handled correctly, brand image can be enhanced by such a communication.)
• Actionable Business Intelligence:  Because the telephone is interactive in gathering business intelligence and data in real time, one can measure the data quickly and effectively. This effectively allows clients to manage follow up processes (by sales or sales lead nurturing systems).
• Flexibility:  With a smart nimble business developement team one realign and modify call guides.  One can also customize the message as it pertains to different market segments and audience types.
• TM will produce about 4-10 times the result of direct mail alone. And as much as 1,000% more than permission based email blasts.
• Testing is possible and desirable.
  • Test various messaging approaches.
  • Testing different market segments can be quick and effective.
    • By vertical (SIC classifications)
    • Company size (employee and or revenue)
    • By product usage.
    • By geography
    • Etc.

So yes … B2B Telemarketing is a marketing highly effective medium and one that should be preferred when the objective is New Customer Acquisition.

In a post to from the Sales Lead management Association John Obermayer makes an interesting and timely point:

While most C-level managers realize that build-and-ship schedules are tied to sales performance, few understand that sales performance ultimately is tied to sales lead performance and the marketing budget.

Reduce your lead generating marketing funds and within 30 days inquiries will slow down in proportion to how much you have cut the budget.   The frightening subsequent sales failure happens within 60-90 days when sales plummet because the pipeline of prospects has slowed to a trickle.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a prime example of cause and effect.

In difficult times many companies make cuts without thinking through the consequences of their actions.  I have seen this time and time again … sometimes with disastrous results.  In difficult times it’s precisely the investments you make in lead generation, lead nurturing and lead qualification efforts that will keep you in the game.