Managing across the Marketing-Sales divide: new Sherpa data

July 23, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

Another in MarketingSherpa’s Chart of the Week series – perhaps familiar if you happen to have sprung for Sherpa’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey 2009 – this one focused on the often yawning Marketing-Sales chasm.  Although in this case there is good news, such as:

  • 51% using a CRM to manage lead process (13% say no, but a high priority)
  • 45% collaborating with Sales to define sales-ready leads (20% say high priority)
  • 44% have system for rating qualified v. warm leads (18% say high priority)

(View large chart…)
Those are some fairly tall numbers, significantly better than we expected to see.
But then there’s the bad news, including:

  • Only 30% presently doing closed-loop tracking from lead source to disposition …which begs the question, just what are that other 21% using their CRM for??
  • Only 28% have a “re-engage” process for handing cool leads back to Marketing

That latter point is a bit of a surprise, since a two-way process feels so symmetric and logical.  As Sherpa says:  “A pipeline flowing in both directions [enables] Sales to hand leads back to Marketing for re-engagement and continued nurturing, creating opportunities for the sales force to pursue again in the future when timing is optimal.”

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy ·

Best practices for starting and running a business blog

July 22, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

We get the questions a lot from our B2B clients… “Should we start a blog?” and “What do we need to know to do it ‘right’?”  We answer “yes” to the first one in most cases, because if nothing else, a reasonably well-done blog will improve their website’s search-engine ranking and their market’s perception of their thought leadership.  And it’s likely to be a first step down the path of leveraging social media, which we know will help them build their brand(s) and tighten their relationship with their market as individuals.

Answering that second question usually takes a PowerPoint and a couple of follow-up concalls.  But now we can also refer them to Jeff Cohen’s excellent post over on Social Media B2B, “10 Business Blogging Best Practices”.

As usual, we won’t go through all 10 here …for that, you’ll want to click on over to Jeff’s post.  But we’ve picked out a few takeaways to whet your appetite: [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Blogs, Blogging ·

7 ways your landing page(s) can go wrong

July 22, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

Hopefully, we’re all well aware by now of the critical importance of landing pages, due to their tremendous leverage;  50-80% swings in conversion rate from seemingly minor changes to headlines, copy or design elements are commonplace.  And there’s certainly a lot of info “out there” on how to do landing pages right.

Well folks, Google wants to help, too.  In fact, they recently released a webinar treating the 7 most common mistakes marketers make with landing pages.  What? …you don’t have the hour+ you’ll need to view it?  Then you may want to click on over to Karim Gargum’s blog for his nifty bullet-point summary.  We’ll just list them here;  for a bit more explanation, see Karim’s post …or better yet, the full webinar.

  • Unclear – or missing – call to action
  • Too many choices (including navigation to other parts of your site, a big no-no)
  • No clear connection with the upstream ad
  • Too much text
  • Requesting too much information
  • Insufficient credibility/trust
  • Visual distractions

Avoid these 7 deadly sins, and your B2B will reap the rewards of higher conversion rates and hence improved return on its PPC investment.

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Conversion Metrics, PPC ·

Social media: it’s working for B2B lead generation, too

July 21, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

For those who thought that social media were mostly good for brand- and relationship-building, and maybe SEO… along comes a study from DemandGen Report showing that – at least for the 218 B2B sales and marketing professionals sampled – lead generation is becoming the main goal of social media use.  In fact, some early adopters are already generating between 10% and 15% of their leads through social media connections; and 35% of the respondents expect the number of leads generated via social media to increase by 1%-5% over the next 12 months.

Some of this could well be due to broadened participation within B2B organizations:  while marketing (cited by 86% of respondents) & PR (54%) departments account for most activity in driving demand via social networks, the survey showed that other disciplines – including sales (41%), product management (21%), and engineering – (13%) are finding that prospecting gold can be a byproduct of their customary social networking.  In terms of vehicles, LinkedIn was deemed nearly twice as useful for lead generation as Twitter, which was nearly twice as useful as Facebook.

Just in case the message isn’t clear:  Steve McAbee over at The Practitioner cites a survey issued by Forbes and Google about the habits of C-level execs, showing that over half of those under age 40 use social media several times a week.  It only makes sense for B2B businesses to go where their buyers are.

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Lead Generation, Social Media ·

Is your slow response alienating leads you spent good money to get?

July 20, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

So much ink is spilled over driving traffic, generating leads and conversion… one might conclude that that’s all that matters.  But equally important… what’s happening to all those leads?  More specifically, how long does it take you to respond to them?  For B2Bs, lead response is kind of like baggage claim for an airline:  it’s their last chance to disappoint a customer (or prospect).

Writing on his Sales Lead Insights blog, Mac McIntosh reviews some research showing:

  • for the majority of companies that respond by email, the average response time was 13 hours …which means at best the following business day
  • for the remainder who use phone, the average time was 44 hours (that’s a week, folks!)

According to InsideSales.com, Omniture has done survey work showing that – incredibly – 45% never responded at all …to any inquiry.  This begs the question:  what was the point of all that investment in SEO, PPC and other lead generation, if they’re just going to ignore the leads anyway?  Aside from the few prospects that are dead-set on buying from them regardless of how they’re treated, these vendors could forego all that lead-gen expense and achieve basically the same results.  As Mac put it:

“In the B2B world, how responsive your company is to its inquiries, or how it handles the follow up of sales leads, has a lot more impact on prospective customers’ perception of your brand than brand advertising ever will.”

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Lead Generation ·

Where is B2B social networking headed? …customer service, maybe?

July 17, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

We all know about the usefulness of social media in brand-building, customer relationship enhancement, and the like.  But according to John Gaffney in his recent piece for ClickZ, the real value of social networking will eventually lie in improved customer service.

John cites a number of examples, including the Mountain View police using Twitter to tell residents not to worry about the legitimacy of door-to-door census takers, and the Ford dealer in Chicago getting nearly instant notification of a customer griping about problems with his new Focus.  It may be tempting to conclude from these that this is a B2C kind of solution.  However, “Salesforce.com has introduced a tool that lets its users monitor, search and respond directly to comments on Twitter, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other social media, directly from the Salesforce.com system.” And Salesforce’s customers are not primarily B2C companies.

Other tools such as Factiva, Nielsen Buzz Metrics, BoardReader and dozens more help automate social media conversation tracking.  Says Laura Bassett, director of customer service solutions for Avaya: “The companies need to have a complete view of the customer, and now they can include social networks in that view.”

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Social Media ·

Ba-da-Bing! …does Microsoft’s new engine require different SEO?

July 16, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

It’s bedeviled webmasters and SEM practitioners since the dawn of the Bing age a month or so ago.  But in our analysis, and now with some good work by Julie Batten writing for ClickZ, it seems like “everything old is new again” (or maybe vice-versa).

Bing’s critical SERP-influencing elements appear to be…

Content – it’s king.  If you want to rank well on Bing, you must have great content;  in fact, rich content seems even more important on Bing.
Keyword placement.  Having keywords in all the right places (page titles, H1 tags and link text) is imperative with this engine.
Inbound links.  Bing appears to value inbound links, particularly those from “authoritative” sites that also have a high number of links.
Technically sound, well-built site.  Validating your code, checking for broken links, and employing appropriate redirects are explicitly recommended by MSN.

See anything dramatically new or different yet? …yeah, neither did we.  We’re not predicting that MS is done already, and this will never change;  but for now, it sure appears that today’s accepted SEO best practices will work just fine for Bing, too.
Do check out Julie’s piece, though;  it also includes a number of technical and content tips (and major no-no’s) gleaned from Bing’s Webmaster Center.

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Search Engine Marketing ·
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