How to Improve the Quality and Cost of B2B Leads

How To Improve the Quality and Cost of B2B Leads
by JeffKostermans

Part 1

“I don’t care how stretched the marketing budget is or how tough the market is…we need more and better quality leads ASAP!”

Ask any marketer responsible for lead generation whether she or he has heard this from someone in senior management or sales lately and you’ll most likely hear an exasperated “Yes, of course.”

What’s a marketer to do when budgets and staff are stretched extremely thin, qualified prospects have become even more elusive, and resource-constrained sales teams simply need a better mousetrap to accelerate the sales cycle?

Progressive B2B marketers are adopting a new, more cost-effective approach to lead generation. An approach that:

• Focuses on targeted, multi-channel and carefully sequenced touches
• Boosts direct marketing campaign ROI,
• Leverages and optimizes sales team productivity.

Managing an ongoing direct marketing lead generation program that constantly improves lead quality and the cost per customer conversion requires as much preparation as follow-through.

That’s why the first portion of this two-part tutorial focuses on five key steps that should be taken long before your first responders fill out a profile capture form. Follow these guidelines and you will lay the foundation for a sustained and constantly-improving lead generation program.

1. Constantly focus on lead quality and the cost per conversion

This starts with targeting--and never ends. When targeting continuously improves, so should your campaign ROI. Whether you work with an agency or manage point-solution vendors in-house, have a solution in place that measures the effectiveness of campaign elements like your lists, creative, offer, and timing of multiple marketing vehicles.

Your lead generation solution should take the guesswork out of testing and targeting, and should also help accelerate the conversion-to-customer process. Ultimately, a campaign’s success must be measured by the cost per conversion and ROI, not just the cost per response. When the focus is on cost per conversion-to-customer, the quality of leads gets more emphasis that just the quantity. Why cast out a wider net to reach more prospects or spend any money at all on leads that miss the mark?

Creative and printing costs and purchase minimums for rented lists all factor into the cost per lead. Rented email blasts are also impacted by minimums and these email lists often have a limited amount of profile data. Some marketers may be tempted to inflate campaign quantities in order to keep the cost per piece and cost per response down. Unfortunately, this also decreases targeting.

There are only a limited number of people that will buy your product or service. Refined targeting, with concentrated, multi-touch marketing efforts is the best way to get a response from a limited pool of decision makers.

2. Get executive level support and work very closely with sales

Without executive level support, getting superior results from a comprehensive lead generation program becomes very difficult. Once the CEO understands the highlights and importance of your program, you’ll have much more success collaborating with Sales, Customer Service and other groups that help with customer conversion.

Working closely with the sales department is critical. Sales should have input into all stages of the campaign. As contributors, sales team members will assume ownership and ensure that cultivation of the leads is a priority.

Nothing will kill lead cultivation efforts faster than a sales force that feels a campaign has been thrust upon them. When the CMO and head of sales jointly agree on and present the objectives of a campaign, accountability is shared and campaign ROI stand a good chance of being optimized.

3. Control lead-flow and optimize your budget with more targeted efforts

Imagine the prospect experience of responding to a campaign only to be ignored because the inside sales force is too busy handling other responders or a sales rep assumes the prospect is less qualified because the company name is not recognized.

Unfortunately the allure of a low cost per response all too often results in a large influx of leads that miss the mark only to frustrate the sales force--and interested prospects. When over half of marketing-driven leads get labeled as a “poor fit,” it doesn’t take long for Sales to assume all the leads associated with that campaign are not worth following up on.

A better approach is to control the flow of leads with multiple, highly targeted efforts. This has several advantages. Keeping direct mail and email drops small, with focused phone follow-ups enables you to test and refine many campaign elements over successive campaign waves.

With a steady lead-flow rather than a mass influx, leads that on the surface may not look as appealing as others stand a better chance of being cultivated.

4. Reach elusive prospects through an integrated approach

Integrated, multi-touch marketing helps boost response rates in a number of ways. It significantly increases the odds that your message will reach your prospect, overcomes the timing issue, and after multiple impressions, dramatically increases recall rates to also serve as a means of highly targeted branding.

When your list is tightly targeted, it’s safe to assume many non-responders may actually be your best prospects. The timing of your message may have simply been off or the marketing piece just didn’t reach the prospect. High-level decision makers each have their own preference on what they respond to, which is why it takes an integrated multi-touch effort to get their response.

When your multi-channel approach aims to drive prospects to a profile capture page on your website, the campaign should identify and re-target responders that for any reason did not submit their profile. These responders have expressed interest, so they are far more likely to respond again and submit a profile in subsequent contacts.

Your integrated solution should also be able to keep track of complete contact history so you’ll know when to suspend efforts on prospects that have had over X number of contacts without a response. Contact history trend analysis will also help reveal the optimal contact strategy and which channels are most effective.

5. Boost response rates with enhanced personalization and relevancy

To more than double typical direct mail response rates, personalize each mail piece as much as possible. New printing technology enables you to print small lots of direct mail tailored to each recipient. With variable images and content, you can dramatically enhance the personalization and relevancy of each individual mail piece--to drive much higher response rates.

Display a personalized URL on each mail piece when the objective of your mail piece is to capture a profile on your website. Personalized landing pages with pre-filled forms make it much easier for the responder to submit a profile resulting in significantly higher profile capture rates. Although personalization of direct mail does increase the cost per piece, the increased response rates almost always justifies the added expense.

The same level of personalization should be applied to email. Because email is electronic, it’s much easier and cost effective to dynamically assemble relevant content.

Getting a prospect’s opt-in (or permission to communicate via email) on the website landing page enables you to cultivate the prospect much more cost effectively. But be careful to always send timely, personalized and relevant information...not doing this will most certainly result in opt-outs that shut down this very effective marketing avenue.

Summary:

Now you’re ready to launch your B2B campaign. With the support of the sales team, you’ve refined targeting and lead-flow, adopted a carefully sequenced approach with multiple marketing channels, and personalized each version of your relevant messages.

But before that campaign goes out the door...Make sure you are prepared to effectively capture and process the leads to accelerate the sales cycle.

Part Two of this tutorial covers key topics like:

• How to optimize profile capture landing pages and score leads
• What campaign elements you should track
• The benefits of sharing real-time data between marketing and sales teams
• How to optimize the lead follow-up strategy
• How to leverage the sales team to boost op-in of quality leads

Part 2

If you’ve read Part One of this tutorial or already have the foundation in place for a carefully sequenced, multi-touch campaign, you’re ready to start capturing leads.

But before those elusive prospects come running to beat down your door, be sure you have a plan in place to accelerate the sales cycle. Here are five ways to optimize the capture, management and conversion of those new leads.

1. Optimize Profile Capture Landing Pages and Score Leads

Imagine driving high numbers of interested prospects to your landing page only to see the majority of them drop off once they see a long form. Careful attention to the design of your landing pages and profile capture forms helps mitigate the drop off of responders that for any number of reasons may choose not to fill out your form. Consider testing a few different forms and offering an extra bonus for filling out the form like additional, relevant information.

There are many design details that will increase your profile capture rate, so work with a vendor that has extensive experience in this area. Just a few best practices in the design of landing pages include:

• Keep introductory copy as short as possible
• When appropriate, add the form onto the same page as the landing page.
• Pre-fill form fields with prospect data that the prospect can update
• Limit the qualifying attribute fields on initial prospecting forms to encourage form completion—you can always get more information later.
• Identify mandatory fields and point them out when not filled in by the prospect
• Score the profile capture attributes that are important to you.

Scoring captured profiles has a number of advantages that enable you to:

• Prioritize cultivation efforts
• Measure the effectiveness of marketing campaign components
• Gain early insight to make quicker adjustments to future marketing campaigns
• See the quality of leads by sales region

2. Track and Measure Everything

The bottom line is if you’re not tracking, you’re not learning how to increase the ROI of your next campaign. Unless your direct marketing vendor provides it, setting up tracking and conducting the response analysis for an integrated campaign can take some effort.

You could invest in expensive software or marketing automation solutions to help you with this, but all the license and related maintenance costs factor into a much higher cost per lead.

Tracking should be real-time so you can instantly see response results and make any needed campaign adjustments on the fly. To keep costs down, look for an integrated tracking solution that is either inherent to the supporting services or relatively easy to set up. Reporting should be inexpensive and enable you to focus your energy on program refinement—not on gathering and analyzing data from disparate sources.

When it comes to direct marketing campaign reporting, make sure you can track:

• The quality of each captured lead
• The breakdown of leads attributable to each component of the campaign
• Effectiveness of the list, offer, creative and other test cell elements within each campaign component
• The breakdown of lead quality by sale region and individual sales rep.
• Total contact history
• The productivity of sales reps cultivating the leads When all the components of your multi-touch, integrated campaign are tracked and instantly available, you can focus more on the strategy of follow-up campaigns and on the inter-department collaboration that is so vital to success.

3. Share Marketing and Sales Data—Real Time

Collaborating with the sales department and getting their support is definitely important. But actually sharing real-time data is often easier said than done. Revenue is at stake and finger pointing is a common side-affect of a disjointed campaign that fails to meet its objectives. But when both sales and marketing have jointly assumed responsibility for a campaign’s success, it’s easier to share data during rather than upon completion of a campaign.

When a reporting solution reports on both the quality of marketing-driven leads and the effectiveness of cultivation efforts everybody wins. Sales management can better manage cultivation efforts, and can more accurately project sales forecasts based on early insight on campaigns. Marketing management can tweak campaigns and lead flow earlier and also see the effectiveness of cultivation efforts.

Peer pressure is amazingly powerful. Making the cultivation efforts of individual reps viewable has strong effects on productivity and overall campaign results. Your reporting solution should enable you to see campaign and cultivation effectiveness whether the lead cultivation is outsourced or kept in house.

4. Convert More Leads with a Carefully Sequenced Follow-Up Plan

Prior to executing your integrated campaign, have a cultivation plan in place that leads prospects down the path to customer conversion. Reciprocal information sharing helps to quickly qualify prospects and foster more intuitive dialogue.

Track all cultivation efforts, like the sending of information via email and direct mail and the corresponding responses. When your sales team uses an email-based prospecting tool that tracks which content is most effective, you can continuously improve your follow-up process.

Review the contact history of each new customer to discover contact trends that may reveal how close other prospects are to becoming new customers. When this data is instantly shared with marketing and sales departments, the cultivation cycle accelerates and produces better results.

5. Leverage the Sales Team to Build Your Opt-in Base

Lead cultivation via email is definitely more cost effective compared to off-line methods. It’s important to diligently collect opt-ins with every point of contact possible. Unfortunately, many inside sales reps don’t have an incentive to do this or the contact management systems they use don’t adequately support the capture of opt-ins. Whether calls are handled in-house or by an outsourced telemarketing solution, make sure that capturing opt-in is a priority action item.

All too often, sales departments complain that opt-in lists are filled with the wrong types of prospects. Then why not offer the sales team an email-based follow-up and prospecting tool that enables them to quickly send out marketing messages that drive prospects back to landing pages that capture and score opt-ins?

This collaborative approach fills the opt-in database with better quality prospects, saves valuable prospecting time and enables the marketing department to share the responsibility of building the opt-in base with the sales team.

Captured opt-ins with high scores can be automatically followed up on by the sales team and those with lower scores can be cost-effectively cultivated by the marketing department’s mass email campaigns.

Consider appending email addresses to your off line customer list.

Once you have opt-in permission, you can announce new product offerings, promotions, and send surveys to discover new needs that your products or services can solve. There are many ways to effectively cultivate leads via email.

There are even more ways to make mistakes resulting in increased opt-out rates. Make sure you consistently follow best practices or work with an experienced vendor that can help you prospect via email and mitigate opt-outs.

Summary:

Continuously improving the quality and cost of leads can be a full-time job, especially when you coordinate the efforts in-house—and outsourcing to agencies can be very expensive. However you decide to orchestrate your lead generation program, evaluate your supporting vendors with a sharp focus on ROI and their ability to lower you cost per lead with each successive campaign.

To keep costs down and optimize an integrated lead generation campaign, work with a specialized partner that can:

• Customize a solution that meets your specific objectives
• Dramatically increase response rates though personalization technology
• Manage and report real-time on all aspects of your integrated campaigns, and most importantly…
• Deploy proven tactics based on best practices.

JeffKostermans is CEO of LeadGenesys a B2B direct marketing and lead generation firm. He is author of the Email Marketing Imperatives and can be reached at