Two Keys to More Effective Marketing in 2014 - Part 1

Two years ago this month, I published a post here titled Five Ways to Improve Your Marketing in 2012. With the end of 2013 now only a month away, I thought it would be a good time to revisit this topic with 2014 in mind. How much of what I wrote in 2011 is still relevant, and what would I change about (or add to) my 2011 post.

In my earlier post, I made five recommendations:

• Develop a marketing strategy
• Shift primary responsibility for lead generation from sales to marketing
• Increase the number of leads you acquire via inbound marketing
• Develop and implement a sound lead management process
• Implement a content marketing strategy

These recommendations are as valid today as they were two years ago, although I believe that the number of B2B companies using some or all of these practices has increased substantially over the past two years.

So, what are the most critical actions that B2B marketers should take in 2014 to boost marketing performance? There are several plausible answers to this question, but I suggest that two actions stand out in importance. In this post, I'll discuss why technology has become all but essential for effective B2B marketing in 2014, and my next post will describe how marketing content must change in 2014.

Why Marketing Technology is Essential

I don't write frequently in this blog about marketing technology for a couple of reasons. First, there are many other good sources of information on that topic. In addition, the hype surrounding marketing technology can easily create the erroneous impression that technology is a "silver bullet" that will automatically improve marketing and sales performance.

It's clear, however, that marketing and technology are deeply entwined and that it's now practically impossible to build and execute effective marketing programs without the use of technology. For example, unless you're working with a very small number of prospects, it's extremely difficult and highly inefficient to run sophisticated lead nurturing programs without the right technology tools.

B2B marketing automation (aka lead management) software enables companies to execute personalized and behavior-driven lead nurturing programs. These technologies also typically enable extensive data collection regarding lead behavior and the use of automated lead scoring systems. B2B marketing automation solutions are typically integrated with CRM solutions, and this combination of technologies can significantly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of both marketing and sales efforts.

The good news is, both marketing automation solutions and CRM solutions are now widely available as hosted solutions, they are relatively easy to use, and they are affordable for most B2B companies. These factors, combined with the pressing need to improve marketing performance, have made B2B marketing automation software extremely popular. David Raab, a widely-respected marketing automation industry analyst, estimates that revenues from the sale of B2B marketing automation software will reach $750 million in 2013, and the market has been growing at about 50% per year for the past several years.

If you don't have the internal skills needed to successfully implement a marketing automation solution, you should consider working with a marketing services firm that can use these technologies to execute marketing programs on your behalf.

Marketing technology is not a panacea, but it will be essential for effective B2B marketing in 2014.

Read Part 2 of the series here.

Rethinking the Value of BANT (It's Not as Outdated as Some Suggest)

Last fall, I published a post here titled Why BANT No Longer Works for Qualifying Leads. In that post, I argued rather strongly that BANT (the acronym for Budget-Authority-Need-Timeframe) is no longer an effective way to qualify sales leads because of changes in how B2B buyers make purchase decisions.

My post was neither the first nor the last discussion of BANT to appear in the blogosphere. Here are a few of the blog articles that have been published this year.

• Why BANT is Bunk for Today's B2B Buyer by Ardath Albee
• Banning BANT:  Redefining Quality Lead Criteria and Handling Moot Objections by Allison Tetreault
• All Real Salespeople Love Sales Leads (but there is a tiny caveat) by James Obermayer
• BANT is Dead - Find the Authority by Mike Damphousse
• Lead Scoring:  Don't BANT On It by Sarah Hums
• BANT Isn't Enough Anymore:  A New Framework for Qualifying Prospects by Pete Caputa

As you can tell from these titles, the weight of opinion in the blogosphere is clearly anti-BANT.

While I stand by what I wrote last fall, I also now believe that my criticisms of BANT were probably too broad and that the BANT criteria are still relevant and useful for evaluating sales leads if they're used at the right times to answer the right questions. In the typical demand generation process, there are three major points at which you need to evaluate the quality of a sales lead.

Qualification of New Leads

The first is when you initially acquire a lead, and the issue is whether the lead should be added to your nurturing program. BANT criteria have little role to play in this decision. At this stage, the only information about the lead that you're likely to have is a name, a company affiliation, and a job title. Company affiliation and job title may allow you to infer something about potential need, financial ability to purchase, and buying authority, but that's it. For this decision, the primary criteria should be that the lead is affiliated with an organization that fits your company's target market and has a job title that indicates a reasonable connection with the products or services you sell.

Identification of Sales-Ready Leads

The next point at which you need to evaluate lead quality is when you are deciding whether a lead is ready to engage with a sales rep. A modified version of BANT should be part of the criteria you use to make this decision. For example:

• Need - A sales-ready lead will have acknowledged the existence of a need that your product or service can address.
• Authority - A sales-ready lead will be a member of the buying group that will make the purchase decision. The lead doesn't need to be the classic "economic buyer" or have sole buying authority, but he or she should be a member of the decision-making group.
• Timeframe - A sales-ready lead will be actively evaluating possible solutions for the recognized need. Your lead may not have a firm schedule for making a purchase decision, but he or she should have acknowledged that addressing the need has become a priority for his or her organization.
• Budget - A lead doesn't need to have an established budget to be considered sales ready. As I wrote in my earlier post, research by DemandGen Report has shown that between 70% and 80% of business buyers evaluate potential solutions, build a business case for immediate adoption, and then obtain spending approval. However, you should be fairly confident that the prospect organization has the financial wherewithal to purchase your product or service.

Identification of Sales Opportunities

The third point at which you need to evaluate lead quality is when you are determining whether you have a legitimate sales opportunity. By sales opportunity, I mean a potential deal that has progressed far enough to be included in your revenue forecast. For this decision, the focus of lead qualification is on the prospect organization rather than on an individual "lead" within the organization, and the BANT criteria are particularly relevant. For example:

• Need - To qualify as a sales opportunity, your sales rep should have confirmed that the prospect has a need that your product or service can address and that all members of the buying group have acknowledged the need.
• Authority - Your sales rep should have identified and established relationships will all members of the buying group. In addition, you sales rep must understand what process will be used to make the buying decision and what role each "buyer" plays in that process.
• Timeframe - To qualify as a sales opportunity, the buying process must have progressed to the point that the prospect is committed to making a purchase decision within a defined period of time.
• Budget - While it is not essential to have a specific budget line item for the proposed purchase, your sales rep should have confirmed that the prospect's buying group has access to sufficient funds to make the purchase and the ability to commit those funds when the purchase decision is made.

BANT should never be the only criteria used to qualify sales leads. As noted earlier, BANT is not appropriate for qualifying early-stage leads, and it provides only some of the criteria for identifying when a lead is sales ready. However, BANT is not nearly as useless or outdated as some of us may have thought.

How Lead Development Reps Take Demand Generation to the Next Level

Effective lead management is now an essential component of a high-performing B2B demand generation system. Broadly speaking, lead management refers to demand generation activities that begin when a potential buyer identifies himself or herself to your company and expresses some interest in what you offer.

The two most important components of lead management are lead nurturing and lead qualification. Lead nurturing is designed to build relationships with prospects who are in your target market, but who aren't ready to have a productive sales conversation. Lead qualification refers to the activities and criteria you use to determine where a prospect is in his or her buying process.

Lead management is the weak link in the demand generation chain for many companies. One reason is that it hasn't typically been viewed as a top priority by either sales or marketing. In the conventional view, marketing's primary role is to acquire new leads, and the top priority of sales is to close short-term sales opportunities.

B2B marketing software provides powerful capabilities for automating content-based lead nurturing and some aspects of lead qualification. However, it is also becoming apparent that automated lead nurturing and lead scoring will not, in themselves, enable a company to optimize demand generation. A growing number of companies have recognized that person-to-person communication and human judgment are needed to produce maximum demand generation results.

This recognition is causing a growing number of companies to establish a lead management function that is responsible for coordinating lead management activities. The people who perform this function can have a variety of job titles. Some companies call them telemarketers or inside sales representatives, and others call them business development representatives.

I prefer to call these individuals lead development representatives because this title more accurately describes their actual function. The primary responsibilities of lead development representatives, or LDRs, are to orchestrate lead nurturing communications with specified leads and simultaneously qualify those prospects.

More specifically, LDRs will perform the following major activities:

• Make contact with leads who have indicated a defined level of interest. This would include both inbound leads and leads acquired via outbound lead generation programs.
• Ask the lead appropriate questions to determine his or her level of interest and place in the buying cycle.
• Place each lead in the appropriate lead nurturing track so that nurturing communications will be most effective.
• Document interactions with the lead in the company's CRM system.
• Identify leads who are ready to have a productive conversation with a salesperson and arrange an appointment.

The capabilities offered by B2B marketing software play a critical role in today's demand generation, but those capabilities need to be supplemented with person-to-person communications to achieve optimum results. Lead development representatives can take your demand generation to the next level.

How to Avoid Marketing Automation Failure

I don't write frequently here about B2B marketing automation, primarily because there's a wealth of information already available on the subject. The marketing automation vendors (Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, and several others) do a great job of providing resources that discuss the capabilities, use, and benefits of B2B marketing automation technologies. Understandably, these firms don't put quite the same emphasis on describing the challenges that B2B marketers must address to maximize the benefits of these powerful technologies.

Learning how other companies have leveraged marketing automation technology to improve business performance is useful, but it can be equally valuable to learn why some companies were not successful with marketing automation. Thanks to Joby Blume with BrightCarbon, we have some valuable insights regarding what can go wrong.

Last year, Mr. Blume published a remarkable blog post that described why a previous employer failed with marketing automation. This post triggered a huge number of comments, and the "discussion" continued for about six months. If you're considering an investment in marketing automation technology, this material should be required reading.

Mr. Blume described a dozen reasons for the marketing automation failure. His former employer was a small company - 40 employees/less than $5 million in annual revenues - so some of these reasons are particularly applicable to small firms. However, companies of all sizes can learn important lessons from Mr. Blume's experience.

Here are some of the major reasons cited by Mr. Blume, along with a few comments by me.

Lack of clear objectives - Blume's company wanted to track and identify website visitors and know where inbound leads had come from. Beyond this, however, the company didn't have clear goals for marketing automation.

Lack of marketing processes - Mr. Blume said that his company lacked a clearly defined set of marketing processes. My take:  Marketing automation will make well-designed processes more efficient and enable processes that would be impossible to perform manually. However, even the most powerful marketing automation technologies cannot overcome poorly-designed or non-existent processes. In fact, marketing automation will probably make any flaws in your marketing system more glaring and more painful. Therefore, before you invest in a marketing automation solution, you need to make sure that your underlying marketing and lead management processes are sound.

Lack of leads - Mr. Blume indicated that his company's biggest demand generation problem was not having enough leads and that marketing automation didn't solve that problem. My take:  The real strength of most B2B marketing automation solutions is lead management (nurturing, scoring, etc.). If your company needs to generate a higher volume of leads, your first priority should be to boost your lead acquisition marketing efforts, and most B2B marketing automation solutions play a very limited role in lead acquisition.

Lack of content - Mr. Blume acknowledged that his company did not have (and was not able to create) enough of the kind of marketing content that is required to generate leads effectively. My take:  Content is the fuel for the marketing automation engine, and marketing automation "burns" a lot of content. If you don't keep the fuel topped off, your marketing automation system will stop functioning effectively. Therefore, I usually recommend that companies plan and create all of the content resources they will need for about three months before launching the marketing automation system.

B2B marketing automation is powerful technology, and it's becoming more and more essential for marketing success. As with many other technologies, however, the hard part is not learning how to use marketing automation software. The more difficult challenge is doing the other work that's required to enable marketing automation to perform up to its potential.

Why BANT No Longer Works for Qualifying Leads

One of the most widely-used methods for qualifying B2B sales leads is known by the acronym BANT, which stands for Budget - Authority - Need - Timeline. The basic idea is that you will  have a strong sales opportunity if you identify a lead who:

• Has a recognized need that your company can address
• Has the authority to make the buying decision
• Has the budget to purchase the kind of product or service you provide
• Has an identified timeline for purchasing the kind of product or service you provide

At first glance, BANT appears to offer an entirely reasonable way to qualify sales leads. It's hard to argue that a lead who meets these four requirements would not be highly qualified.

In reality, however, BANT is no longer an effective way to qualify sales leads for two reasons.

• Some of the criteria are all but impossible for an individual "lead" to meet. So, a strict use of the BANT criteria will cause you to ignore many valuable leads.
• By the time a lead is fully "BANT-qualified," it's probably too late. Your odds of concluding a sale on your terms are greatly diminished because a competitor has probably established a favored position.

To understand why BANT no longer works well, let's look at each of the criteria.

Budget
B2B companies no longer budget for many purchases in advance. Surveys by DemandGen Report indicate that only 20% - 30% of purchases are budgeted at the beginning of the year. Between 70% and 80% of survey respondents say they evaluate potential solutions, build a business case for immediate adoption, and then obtain spending approval. Therefore, if you require qualified leads to have established budgets, you will obviously miss out on many sales opportunities. Instead of requiring a specific budget, what you have to do is make a judgment call about whether a prospect has the financial ability to purchase your product or service.

Authority
In the 2012 Sales Performance Optimization survey by CSO Insights, 76% of respondents indicated that 3 or more individuals are involved in making the final buying decision. Purchasing by committee is now the norm. In this environment, most of the leads you encounter won't have full purchasing authority, but many of these leads will play a major role in the final buying decision. The right criteria for lead qualification is influence or involvement, not authority.

Need
Of the four BANT criteria, need is still obviously essential. In most cases, if there's no need, there won't be a sale. Even here, however, the idea of "need" is changing. In the past, the goal was to find a lead who recognized the need and understood it. Now we know that a seller can often have greater influence with a lead who does not fully understand the scope or implications of the need, at least at the beginning of the engagement. This can enable the seller to use marketing content and sales messaging to shape and influence how the lead thinks about the need and possible solutions.

Timeline
The primary problem with using timeline for lead qualification is that by the time a prospect has set a timeline for a significant purchase, the prospect has probably completed most of the buying process. In this sense, timelines have become like budgets. Potential buyers identify needs, evaluate potential solutions, and then get spending approval and set a purchase timeline. In fact, a purchase timeline may not be set until after the supplier has been selected.

For many years, BANT provided a useful framework for qualifying sales leads. Given the new realities of B2B buying, however, BANT no longer works for lead qualification. Today, the BANT criteria develop and evolve as the buying process moves forward. But, you can't expect them to exist at the beginning of a prospect relationship.

Three Things To Do Before Hiring More Sales Reps

When B2B companies need to increase sales, managers will usually consider hiring more sales reps. This thinking is understandable because many B2B companies have long relied almost exclusively on their salespeople to find and win new business. Today, however, simply putting "more feet on the street" isn't likely to produce the volume of new sales that managers are looking for, and even if it does, the cost of those new sales is likely to be unacceptably high.

I've written before about why B2B companies should no longer rely exclusively on salespeople to generate new sales leads. Business buyers have fundamentally changed how they make buying decisions, and these changes require a new approach to B2B demand generation.

So, before you invest in more sales reps, there are three other steps you should take.

Step 1:  Improve Lead Acquisition Marketing

If your marketing programs aren't producing at least 40% - 50% of your qualified sales leads, it's likely that you aren't investing enough in lead acquisition marketing or your marketing programs aren't as effective as they need to be. Marketing must play a larger role in generating new sales leads because in the current environment, business buyers are less receptive to traditional sales prospecting techniques, making such  techniques far less effective and efficient.

For most B2B companies, effective lead acquisition marketing should include a mix of inbound and outbound marketing programs. In both cases, persistence is an important key to success. In today's environment, marketers must assume that multiple contacts will be required to entice a potential buyer to respond.

Step 2:  Implement a Sound Lead Management Process

Research continues to show that most new sales leads are not ready or willing to engage with a salesperson. We also know, however, that most "qualified but not ready to buy" prospects will eventually buy from someone. Once a new lead is acquired (meaning that the prospect has identified himself/herself and indicated some level of interest in your product or service), the big challenge for B2B companies is to build the relationship with the prospect until he or she is ready to make a buying decision.

A lead management process encompasses all of the marketing and sales activities that you use with prospects "from curiosity to close." The objective of a lead management process is to prevent valuable leads from "falling through the cracks" and out of the marketing/sales funnel. While a comprehensive lead management process includes many components, the three core elements are:

• A lead nurturing program that provides prospects relevant, primarily non-promotional information in multiple formats and through multiple channels. The primary objectives of a lead nurturing program are to support prospects throughout the buying process, establish and enhance your credibility, and maintain "mindshare" with prospects until they are ready to have a serious sales conversation.
• A lead qualification system that defines appropriate buying process stages and provides a mechanism for estimating where each prospect is in the buying process.
• A selling process that's designed to identify legitimate sales opportunities and convert those opportunities into closed deals.

Step 3:  Add a Lead Development Representative

Rather than adding more outside sales reps, hire one or more lead development representatives to support your demand generation efforts. Lead development representatives have two primary responsibilities:

• They provide the "human touch" components of your lead nurturing program. In this role, their objective is to use multiple conversations to build rapport with prospects in ways that automated, content-based lead nurturing cannot accomplish.
• They play a major role in the lead qualification process, and they can be primarily responsible for determining when a prospect meets the criteria to be considered a sales-ready lead. When that occurs, the LDR may also be responsible for arranging the first meeting between a prospect and your sales rep.

Lead development reps can perform these functions more efficiently that regular sales reps, and they enable your sales reps to devote more of their time to working with fully qualified prospects who are in the later stages of the buying process.

Hiring more sales reps may be necessary to achieve your growth objectives, but take these three steps first to ensure that you're getting the most out of your existing sales force.

Five Ways to Improve Your Marketing in 2012

Bloggers love lists, and we're told that blog posts with titles like, "Five Secrets to. . ." or "Four Sure-Fire Tactics for. . ." are appealing to readers. Bloggers who write about business also seem to share another characteristic. About now, many feel compelled to make predictions about the new year. When you combine these inclinations, the results are lots of blog posts with titles like, "Six Game-Changing Marketing Trends for 2012,"

I'll leave the prognostications to others, but I will offer a list. I have five recommendations for improving your marketing efforts in 2012.

Before you do anything else, develop a marketing strategy.
You've heard this one before, so I won't repeat all of the reasons that strategy is necessary for success. At its most basic level, marketing strategy is a simple thing for most B2B companies. First, you need to identify all of the significant ways that your product or service can create value for customers and identify the kinds of companies that can obtain the greatest value by purchasing and using your product or service. Second, you need to determine the best ways for communicating your value propositions to potential buyers. This step includes the selection of marketing tactics and channels and the creation of marketing messages. Companies tend to spend most of their time and attention on step two, but step one is even more important. I discussed the "value identification" aspect of marketing strategy in an earlier post titled How to Make Difficult Marketing Questions Easier to Answer.

Shift primary responsibility for lead generation from sales to marketing.
I've explained my rationale for this recommendation in two earlier posts - Stop Depending on Your Salespeople to Generate Leads and Why Marketing Should Take the Lead in Lead Generation. I don't contend that traditional sales prospecting doesn't work at all or that you should completely abandon it. I do contend that traditional sales prospecting is an inefficient use of resources and that you should strive to become less dependent on it.

Increase the number of leads acquired via inbound marketing.
There is little doubt that inbound marketing has become the tactic of choice for lead acquisition. Buyers now control the buying process, and they are performing research and gathering information about products and services on their own, usually via the Web. Therefore, traditional outbound lead acquisition techniques such as direct mail and e-mail don't work as well as they once did. It's just good sense to make yourself easy to find when a prospect begins looking for the kind of solution you provide. Research firm SiriusDecisions says that 80% of new sales leads will come from inbound marketing by 2015. Your objective for 2012 should be to substantially increase the number of leads and the percentage of total leads acquired via inbound marketing.

Develop and implement a sound lead management process.
Consider these facts:  (1) Acquiring new leads is becoming increasingly difficult. (2) 50%-75% of new leads are qualified but not ready to buy. (3) Up to 70% of these lukewarm leads will eventually buy from someone. Put these facts together and one thing is clear - leads are valuable and must be managed with care. An effective lead management process will address several key issues, including lead nurturing, lead scoring, and marketing and sales alignment. A well-designed lead management process will enable you to maximize the sales you obtain from your pool of leads.

Implement a content marketing program.
Having and using the right kind of content is now essential for B2B marketing success. By "the right kind of content," I mean marketing content that is:

• Primarily educational and non-promotional
• Customized for the types of buyers you sell to
• Customized for where the potential buyer is in his or her buying process

I've discussed these requirements in a white paper titled, Two Powerful Ways to Make Your Marketing More Relevant. If you haven't already seen this paper and would like to get a copy, just send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

That's my list. Do you have other plans to improve your marketing in 2012?

Automating B2B Marketing

Three forces are shaping today's B2B marketing landscape - the growing power of B2B buyers, the need to make marketing messages and materials relevant to potential buyers, and the recent emergence of technology tools that automate many marketing tasks. I've covered buyer empowerment and the importance of relevant marketing communications in previous posts. This post will focus on marketing automation technologies.

By the way, if you want to dig deeply into the topic of B2B marketing automation, I highly recommend that you read David Raab's Customer Experience Matrix blog. This post will briefly cover the major points.

B2B marketing automation systems - also called demand generation systems - are software tools that are designed to help marketers acquire, nurture, qualify, and distribute leads to sales. Demand generation systems automate four types of B2B marketing tasks.

Lead Generation - All demand generation systems enable users to create and execute lead generation e-mail campaigns. Demand generation systems can also host landing pages and the forms that are used to capture campaign responses, and they can use cookies to track visits to Web pages at a company's main Website in addition to the campaign landing page(s). Support for channels other than e-mail and Web pages is inconsistent. For example, if a lead generation campaign involves direct mail, the direct mail component must usually be managed outside the demand generation system.

Lead Nurturing - Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects on a regular basis until they are ready to buy. For example, a lead nurturing program might involve sending a prospect a particular sequence of e-mails on a specified schedule. Demand generation systems automate the execution of lead nurturing programs. Automated lead nurturing is probably the most important feature of demand generation systems because nurturing programs are difficult to implement without automation.

Lead Scoring - Lead scoring is a method of qualifying prospects by assigning numerical "points" based on information provided by the prospect and on the prospect's behavior (e-mails opened, white papers downloaded, Webinars attended, etc.). All demand generation systems allow users to define scoring criteria and assign scoring values to those criteria.

Lead Distribution - When a prospect's lead score reaches a pre-determined value, the lead is deemed to be sales ready, and the demand generation system passes the lead to sales. Other events can also be used to trigger a hand-off to sales. Demand generation systems are usually configured to distribute leads to sales automatically when these triggering events occur. Most, if not all, demand generation systems offer integration with salesforce.com, and some vendors offer integration with other sales automation and CRM products. This integration makes distributing leads virtually seamless.

Forrester Research has estimated that only 2 to 5 percent of B2B companies have implemented demand generation systems. My take is that this market is on the cusp of a huge growth spurt. I believe this growth will occur for three reasons. First, demand generation systems exist for virtually all sizes of B2B companies. Monthly costs start as low as $200. Second, all of the major demand generation systems are sold as a hosted solution, which means that companies don't need extensive IT resources to implement and use them. And finally, there is a growing body of evidence from early adopters that demand generation systems can significantly improve marketing and sales performance.

If you are a corporate marketer and you haven't already invested in a demand generation system, you should start looking at these technologies now. If you are a marketing services firm, you need to be thinking about how you can help your clients leverage the capabilities of demand generation technologies.