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If you are still measuring your marketing value on a cost per lead or cost per meeting basis, you are not taking advantage of the services and technology available to make true business-relevant marketing decisions.

When you go into a marketing activity, in the least, start with a complete understanding of the following data points:

• Average Opportunity Value
• Average Closed Sales Rate
• Average Sale Value

Start there.

Then figure out how much you are willing to spend to drive one opportunity. Think 10X at least (this is a very rudimentary equation but for illustration purposes let’s go with it). So if your average opportunity is $100k, you should be willing to spend $10k. Then figure out what process will require, wait for it, the LEAST amount of meetings/leads to identify one opportunity. I know, I know. “But Tim,” you say, “that makes my cost per meeting and cost per lead go up!” Yes. Yes it does. Ask your sales team what they’d rather do, go on 10 meetings to get one opportunity or one meeting to get one opportunity. Chase 50 leads for one opportunity or 10 (this assumes you have sales that will even bother with leads). The answer to that is obvious. And,  if they can do their part and turn opportunity into sales, and do so at a decent conversion rate, well my friend, now you are cooking with gas.

When you stop to think about it, we’re conditioned to asses marketing a little bass-akwards and alf-hassed. Break the mold, take the time to approach marketing completely, spend against opportunity and sales measurements, and start seeing real, actual, business building results. Crazy talk I know….

(Note: look for a follow-up post on the obvious-but-ignored flaw in butts-in-seats approach to event marketing.)

As enter:marketing moves forward into 2011 and looks to expand how our clients connect with and sell to their customers – one thing is glaringly obvious: Social Media. In particular, Facebook is a frontier that is critical for our clients to conquer.

That said, we’re facing resistance in our discussions of the value of Facebook marketing. I’m not surprised though. The unknown makes people uncomfortable. The majority of marketing and sales professionals in IT are not familiar with strategies in this space – after all, it’s not an event at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse. Because of this unfamiliarity, most are not willing to make the leap. A couple primary objections pervade most of my conversations: 1) “I don’t think Facebook is for IT businesses; and 2) “Custom what?”

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First, lets define “success.” Actually, let’s define the antithesis of success. Success is NOT pretty pictures or cool designs. Yes, sometimes marketers can smoke and mirror their way through life, but tricks are for kids (someone wise once said that). Success in demand generation marketing is NOT the number of leads. The definition of good vs. bad leads is too subjective and wildly unpredictable. Success is NOT the number of meetings. Unless you are charging the prospect a fee to attend the meeting, a meeting in and of itself is nothing more than two people talking. So what is success in demand generation? It’s simple. Success is the amount of revenue you enable a sales executive to identify from the targets in your programs. I’ll say it again. Success is the amount of revenue you enable a sales executive to identify from the targets in your programs.

The reason I define success in such a manner is because it’s at this point at which the marketer begins to lose direct control of the actual sales process. The marketer still has influence and indirect control (helping provide reps with data sheets, case studies, and other sales tools to aid them in their journey with the prospect) but it’s still the point in that process where the 80/20 rule of control flips. As long as you have at least 80% control, you have the ball. Its where that responsibility ends, where you “make the hand off” that you need to hold yourself accountable, and where the metric for success should be defined. Read the rest of this entry »

Email marketing has been around for a while, and many marketers have clear thoughts on the value it provides. Respondents to a recent MarketingSherpa survey indicated a variety of perspectives on email marketing, ROI and investment, though almost all surveyed indicated seeing the value of this approach.

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In some industries, the corporate blogging and social media marketing opportunity is obvious. Especially in the consumer space, you use a corporate blog to attract, retain and engage your target market, ultimately with the goal of leading them into your sales funnel and converting on your website. For business-to-business companies, especially in the professional services sector, the case isn’t quite as clear.

Does a corporate blog become relegated to PR tool, or is it primarily a brand play?

With only soft metrics apparently available, it can be incredibly difficult to get even the slightest investment. Startup costs may be low, but content creation and traffic analysis tend to be time-consuming if done properly, making a soft-dollar employee commitment crucial … which is where the reluctance of senior management usually comes into play. To free up resources to tend to your corporate blog and manage your social media marketing environment, you need to deliver a compelling business case, showing explicitly the tangible benefits to your company.

Though B2B professional services companies are extremely likely to generate direct sales online, there is a salient ROI opportunity from this form of marketing, and it stretches well past branding and publicity. Let’s take a look at five ways you can use your B2B corporate blog to gain a competitive advantage:

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The truth of what your clients need lies somewhere between “trends are trends for a reason” and “every company is unique.” New technology and its ability to address business needs, the effects of economic conditions on financial performance and emerging industry issues usually do have consistent effects on related companies. Yet, differences in operations and products, varying business objectives and employee personalities lead to the specific circumstances that can’t be addressed with cookie-cutter solutions.

So, what’s my point? You need to balance these two competing forces in order to serve your clients effectively. This may sound obvious, but it’s usually relegated to sentiment when you’re knee-deep in working with a prospect or existing client to address pain points and preparing to implement a solution.

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Tradeshow and conference leads are expensive – there’s no way around it. Compared to direct response, social media your own events and even PR, you’re going to drop a hefty portion of your budget for what amounts to a small number of business opportunities. For some IT solution providers, the notion of skipping these conferences entirely is not an option, so if you’re going to attend, you should at least tip the odds in your favor as much as possible. The biggest – and costliest – mistake you can make is completely preventable, and it happens on the convention floor.

Here are five ways you can reduce your tradeshow cost per lead, drive higher quality and increase your marketing ROI:

1. Choose your tradeshows carefully: do you really need to invest in every tradeshow on your list? Take a hard look at the results you gained from each, and think about how you could use your marketing budget more effectively. Be prepared to make some tough choices.

2. Have a game plan: market to key people you want to see in advance of the tradeshow. Make sure you can get them to your booth for a meaningful conversation. This increases the odds of a deeper, more productive appointment later.

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As you’re planning your marketing budget for next year, stop to think about what worked in 2010 – and what really didn’t. This can be a tough process, since you need to take critical look at the decisions you made and how they performed. Needless to say, it took me a couple of years to get used to this, but the end result has been far better for enter:marketing’s clients. You’ll probably find the same to be true for yours.

When you step through your list of marketing initiatives and decide what to keep for 2011, make sure you spend some extra time exploring your tradeshow investment. This is often your most expensive source of leads, and it can result in lots of time spent chasing dead ends. Instead of assuming that you’ll have the same tradeshow obligations in 2011 that you did in 2010, consider your ROI on each, and how you could redeploy your marketing dollars for greater returns.

To maintain the face-to-face interaction of tradeshows but avoid the substantial hard-dollar costs, consider hosting your own marketing events. With this approach, you’ll:

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Increasing your company’s revenue isn’t enough. Strong growth on the top line sometimes comes with heavy sales expenses, which erodes your profits, ultimately delivering little value for your efforts. Profitable growth on the other hand, is crucial to your ongoing success, and it can be quite difficult to attain. You can protect your margins (and even widen them) by streamlining your approach to marketing and generating revenue at a lower cost. By turning marketing into an ongoing activity, you can generate higher revenue and profits simultaneously.

Think about your last big client pursuit. Your sales team invested heavily in it. In addition to hard costs around travel, entertainment and demonstrations, the team spent a considerable amount of time on appointments, understanding pain points and developing a proposal. Your technology professionals, no doubt, contributed heavily to the effort, increasing your sales costs further. And, you had all those marketing costs up front just to get the lead. If you started from scratch, you probably invested a substantial amount in bringing that lead in the door.

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Small and mid-sized IT solution providers understand the value of leads. Without a full and steady pipeline, it’s easy to get nervous about the future. And with relatively tight marketing budgets, tough decisions are often necessary, and the focus naturally turns to demand generation over other important marketing initiatives, such as solidifying your brand.

What you may not realize, however, is that an investment in your brand is also an investment in shorter sales cycles, deeper client relationships and repeat business that comes at a lower cost than new client acquisition. Frankly, it pays to invest some of your marketing budget in branding, even if it comes at the expense of some lead generation.

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