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When it comes to building a successful lead nurturing program, you must inspire trust. Along with most aspects of life, consistency is key here. But above all, it is the relevance of your message that will ultimately engage prospects in the way that is needed to cultivate an interest to sales.

Successful lead nurturing is a process. Establishing a meaningful dialog by providing valuable education and information to prospects up front is important. It’s not a sales person calling routinely to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet.” Rather, it is about delivering insight and solutions in a non-invasive way so that the prospect perceives your company to have a superior level of expertise in the industry.

Is your process showing prospects that you have an understanding of their specific issues? And that your company has the knowledge and expertise to solve them? When your nurture program has a single point of focus on developing trust, you will plant the seeds that will produce more honest conversations with prospects.

I am sure that most people can relate to an interrupting phone or a persistent daily email solicitation. I actually received a telemarketing call during the Super Bowl for a newspaper subscription. That’s got to be a tough job. Speaking of the Super Bowl, was that a Chatter.com social networking TV add?

Being a director of business development for a leading B2B IT marketing agency, I work with leading manufacturers, distributors, and resellers in the IT space driving demand and sales opportunities. Many of these companies have limited marketing resources, technology infrastructure, and variance in their marketing approach and effectiveness. Our charter is to serve as a virtual marketing department and our focus is the scarcest resource in business today, net new customers. It’s a fast paced environment where the race to find sales leads and engagements never ends, budgets and funds are elusive, and success is measured in the short term.

In a presentation last week, I was asked by a regional reseller what I thought were the most important keys to successful demand generation marketing. It’s a great question and one that will yield a variety of answers. There is certainly a lot to consider given the volume of marketing messages prospects receive, the growing number of marketing channels available, and all the interactive media buzz. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing is more exciting than getting a hot lead – a prospect who wants to make a fast decision. Your sales costs stay low, and you turn an opportunity into revenue as quickly as possible with little effort. If only they were all that easy, right?

Of course, it rarely works that way. Most sales opportunities take some time and planning on your part in order to become revenue. For larger sales, the cycle can take quite a while to come to a conclusion, and you may have to wait a few months before you can even get started in earnest. Since some of the best opportunities you have may not be ready right away, you need to develop a lead cultivation strategy in order to keep the opportunity warm until you can engage the decision-maker in the sales process.

It’s what you do before you get started that can turn a long-term lead into your next big opportunity. Invest your time in cultivating a lead, and you’ll be the first call when it’s time to start discussing a purchase. Also, you’ll make it harder for your competitors to swoop in and steal the opportunity from you.

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I’ve had clients and internal stakeholders ask me some pretty detailed about their corporate blog performance. They’ve wanted to know why their bounce rates are so high, why they aren’t getting more traffic from search engines and why the pageviews-to-visit ratio is so low. In some cases, these are valid questions to ask about a corporate blog, but generally, they are pretty close to irrelevant. When you launch a corporate blog – either to market your company or provide information or support to existing customers – you need to focus on the right metrics.

Especially for corporate bloggers who either consume mass media blog content regularly (or who got their starts writing for independent mass market blogs), it’s natural to use the metrics that have become accepted in those venues. Unique visitors, pageviews and stickiness measures directly indicate the performance of blogs like Technorati and Gadling because of the underlying business model. However, they don’t speak directly to the success of your corporate blog. The reason for this is pretty simple: traffic does not directly drive revenue for your organization. It may contribute to sales possibilities down the road, but it doesn’t offer a straight connection, particularly in the B2B space.

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Organic growth translates to missed opportunities. When you launch your corporate blog, don’t sit back and wait for readers to come to you … and then wait some more for them to step into your sales cycle. Instead, seek them out, and use your blog as a first step in lead qualification.

Combine direct and social media marketing, and you’ll gain a powerful demand generation tool.

Blogs do have a tendency to be discovered (i.e., to gain readers). Whether it’s through searches, a link on your website, a PR effort or tweets and status updates, traffic happens … it just happens slowly. And since high-value readers are likely to be only a small portion of your organic traffic, you could be waiting quite a bit before your social media marketing effort generates any leads. Take a proactive approach, and this changes drastically and quickly.

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Marketing campaigns don’t add up to a strategy. Sometimes it may look that way, but that’s just a bit of luck at work. It’s far more effective to go the other way — start with a strategy and use that to drive your campaigns.

IT solution provider marketers tend to focus on the campaign, a perspective resulting largely from demand generation considerations. The best way to bring in leads, however, is to use a coordinated approach that maximizes the value and potency of your marketing efforts. One-off campaigns just don’t have the same effect.

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Sometimes it seems like IT sales professionals treat a full lead pipeline as a security blanket. They like to know it’s there … but they don’t do anything with it. The sense is that just having lead available means the future is secure. After all, they can pursue them anytime they want, right? Unfortunately, leads don’t get better with age – especially the hot ones. Eventually, someone will meet a prospect’s needs, taking away the near-term opportunity and giving another company the chance to turn it into a long-lasting relationship. In the end, a full pipeline actually provides little security, if it isn’t approached with swift action.

Of course, there are other reasons why leads are left dormant. Some sales professionals prefer to chase leads that have big tickets, not recognizing that a small client now can become a big one later. And, every rep has his or her favorite accounts, which provide a consistent flow of revenue with little opportunity for growth. In some cases, fear is involved: nobody wants to chase an opportunity and lose.

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Most IT sales professionals know what it takes to close a deal. Put one in front of a well-qualified prospect, and the rest takes care of itself. The problem, of course, is getting those meetings. Without effective marketing support, sales teams are stuck cold-calling, hovering at networking events filled mostly with job-hunters instead of decision-makers and otherwise trying to find very small needles in incredibly large haystacks. The odds against success are high.

The situation is made worse by a tendency – in both sales and marketing departments – to focus only on the present. Even if you can rack up enough appointments for this month, what happens next month? Next quarter? Next year?

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Most companies could be much more aggressive with their e-mail marketing initiatives. A new report from MarketingSherpa shows that customer retention is by far the top priority, with objectives around new opportunities not gaining nearly as much attention. Listen to this message from the market, and you’ll hear the whisper: “It’s time to make your move.”

When I saw the latest chart published by MarketingSherpa, I was shocked. Eighty-eight percent of respondents called “retain[ing] existing customers” a very important objective for e-mail marketing. Only 78 percent ascribed this level of importance to “generat[ing] new sales leads,” and “increase web traffic,” “build brand and educate market” and “drive offline sales” each was considered “very important” by only 56 percent of respondents.

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