B2B Demand Generation Services

What it takes for successful B2B lead generation programs

A well-defined target audience yields the greatest return

Key to effective lead generation is identifying your target audience as precisely as possible. Too often marketers want to select communications channels before fully defining the audience. It’s through the definition exercise we determine not only where to find your prospects, but what specifically to say to them.

Defining the profiles of purchasers and influencers starts with looking at your current customers and marketing database contacts.

An analysis of both databases helps create a profile of likely prospects for your solution. For example, looking at contact titles can shine light on who the decision-makers actually are. And examining purchasing periods can shape the timing of the program.

Gathering insights directly from your customers and sales teams further informs the program approach. We like to examine:

• Why a customer selected your solution
• How customers feel about the solution’s performance
• What are known barriers to buying
• Successful sales approaches used in the field

Conversations with your internal and channel sales teams are incredibly valuable. They can help simplify the marketing message to focus on the opportunities and address the most common obstacles they face in selling. This helps define how to execute engagement activities through all phases of the buying process.

Save money by identifying non-targets

It’s also important to develop profiles of non-targets to reduce downstream marketing effort and prevent spending budget on parties who will never purchase or influence the purchase of your solution. Using these profiles, you’ll want to build suppress lists so you can automate scrubbing batches of leads as they come in.

Dig into your prospects’ world with industry and competitive research

You’ll want to understand how prospects currently address the problems your offering can solve, including the prevalence and perception of competitive solutions.

We conduct several activities at this stage:

• Gain an understanding of customer challenges, and map your solution’s features to those challenges so we can show how you can solve them.
• Use research to find insights on competitors’ offerings and how they’re positioned.
• Review online communities where end users discuss, debate, review, and offer opinions about solutions.
• Study industry analysis and market research to understand the ecosystem your solution is part of and the current mainstream perceptions. We’re careful to scrutinize the accuracy and relevance of these sources as they apply to your solution. For example, a CEO research report may have little practical value if the actual decision-makers and influencers are several layers below the C-suite.

These explorations help uncover the prevailing opinions, biases, and critiques—and they reveal opportunities for how to successfully go to market.

Understand market size to shape plans

After defining prospect profiles, use SIC codes and other sources to determine industry segment, company size, and other firmographics. These steps lead up to market sizing: understanding how many companies exist that match the target profile. From here, you can prioritize targeting and start searching for media/publishers/list resources that have reach into your audience.

Prioritize targets to maximize marketing spend

It’s essential to define high-value prospects based on potential ROI and potential lifetime value. Be sure to include desired accounts to target and other requests from the sales team. These discussions help decide how best to market to prospects, such as:

• Who should be placed into a long-term nurturing cycle?
• Should they get more personalized, costly touchpoints?
• What prospects should simply go into the marketing automation system for drip campaigns?
• What triggers a personal follow-up call? (For example, a target showing increased activity on your web site.)

Some solutions, however, are horizontal in nature, geared toward a particular profession or line of business. This generally requires a reverse-engineering approach around who to eliminate rather than who to target. For example, if your solution is a high-cost human resources solution, you may want to eliminate industries with low turnover and low budget, such as the public sector and non-profits.

Create a perfect union between your program strategy stages and content

Top-of-the-funnel demand generation requires educational and thought leadership content to help capture attention and create awareness. That content gets more specific to solving the prospects’ challenges as they move through the funnel or buying process.

We create program strategies that determine the type of activities and offers that lead to action in each phase of the buying process.

Align the commitment level to the value of the content and the phase of buying process

Offers and calls to action (CTAs) are essential to qualifying a prospect and moving them through the buying process. As the prospect moves through the process, you can increase the amount of information you request from them in exchange for content—but only as long as the value of the content matches the level of information they are willing to provide for it.

First, you must define the desired prospect actions, align the value of the content with how much information you are requesting from prospects, and choose the mediums appropriate for various commitment levels.

Top-of-the-funnel (discovery phase of buying process) offers should require little to no commitment from prospects. While people are researching solutions, they are generally hesitant to give up personal or business information. Make it easy for them to review and gather your information. Research on the web is an essential part of the purchasing decision. Don’t make it easy for them to go to your competitors for information because you have unnecessary barriers to yours.

As the level of your prospect’s engagement and the value of the content you’re offering increases, people are more willing to fill out forms and self-identify their interest in return for higher-value information.

This continues as the ask for personal time or commitment increases. Activities such as web seminars and physical events are next-level engagement activities and are more effective in the middle of the buying process or later. Never underestimate the value of a prospect’s time. Add in the fact that prospects know they will be face to face with the sales team for physical events, and it’s easy to see why gaining their attendance is a big commitment.

Finally, hard CTAs such as free trials generally require not only commitment by the prospect, but from their entire organization. A large percentage of free trials aren’t really free as they require buy-in from the prospect organization to implement, learn, and manage the solution being trialed.

Optimize results to extend the duration of the effort: monitor, measure, refine

Once your campaign has been launched, it’s important to keep a close an eye on its performance. You’ll want to monitor results, such as which sources are producing the most actions and what offers are generating the most responses.

Using this data, you can adjust different variables and make course-corrections in your plans. However, be sure to look beyond the high-level metrics and dig into the form fills, downloads, on-page actions, and sources of origin. That’s where you’ll find the most useful insight. Be careful not to overcorrect based on the raw results though. Dig into them to make sure you understand what’s happening. For example, low response rates that produce higher quality leads are better than high response rates that produce few actionable opportunities.

Internal acceptance of your demand generation program is critical

An often-overlooked element that will impact your program’s success is the buy-in from your sales team and other internal stakeholders. This needs to happen at the beginning of program development and be maintained throughout.

For large organizations, integrated, aligned, and consistent demand generation can be “too big to succeed.” That’s because finding alignment and commitment from the numerous teams and stakeholders can be an arduous task.

However, without the support of the sales team, your well-conceived program can look like a bust if leads never evolve into real opportunities.

Here’s how we can help engage, prepare, and educate your inside sales, field sales, and channel partners:

• Buy-in: Involve sales in the program strategy phase; make them owners.
• Program brief development: Share useful information such as campaign touch points and messaging platform, customer pain points, competitive environment, and conversation guides.
• Training: Deliver solution information.
• Content library for conversation follow up: Centralize relevant information and offers for easy access.
• Sales team launch call: Explain your program to field sales.