Archive for September, 2008

Building a Marketing Funnel

Published September 28, 2008 lead generation , marketing funnel , sales funnel Leave a Comment

Building a Marketing Funnel and Other Lead Management Tips

Brian Carroll wants us to get passionate about one of marketing’s most important tasks: finding and nurturing leads—80% of which wind up being ignored or discarded. “To me it’s better to not be involved with a customer at all than to start a relationship and then drop the ball,” says Carroll. “What we are doing is just generating more leads. But it’s not about more, it’s about better.”

Here, Carroll, who is CEO of InTouch, a lead generation optimization services firm, gives us five ways to make B2B lead management more effective. For much more on lead management, you can read Carroll’s book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, and check out his popular blog, B2B Lead Generation.

1. Create a marketing funnel.

Most organizations don’t have a marketing funnel; they have a sales funnel that looks more like a bucket with lots of holes in it where leads leak out. Marketing needs to create its own funnel to understand whether leads are sales ready or not.

The purpose of the marketing funnel is to bring leads into one spot and qualify them. By qualifying them, I mean that the leads are ready to talk to someone from a sales perspective. Then there is the hand-off process between marketing and sales. I find that connecting the marketing and sales funnel together is really a big challenge. You have to understand your sales process to know at what point the sales team views a lead as an opportunity and begins actively pursuing it.

Lead generation really is about building relationships. It’s how can I help my sales team build relationships with the right people and the right companies. The marketing funnel creates sales-ready leads and nurtures the leads that aren’t sales ready.

The bigger and better you make your marketing pipeline, ultimately the bigger and better you make your sales pipeline. In the end, this isn’t about generating more leads; it’s about generating actionable leads.

2. Create a universal definition of a lead.

If you are trying to measure lead generation and you don’t have agreement within your organization on what the word means, you won’t be successful—especially if your organization is growing fast and the number of leads is growing all the time. In this situation, salespeople will have a tendency to focus on the relationships they already have and ignore the others. They need to keep their numbers up and don’t trust uncertain leads to move the needle.

To get past this, you have to sit down with the sales team and ask, What are the major things that you need to know in order for you to feel that a lead is viable? In my work with one organization, these were the key points of information that sales wanted about a lead:

Role in the organization
Authority in the buying process
Business need
Timeframe for buying
Defined internal initiative
Stage of investigation

We asked sales in this organization, At what point do you want to start receiving leads? For them, it was all about need. They said that the lead has to have an active initiative.

It’s important to remember that the lead definition process is iterative. It’s not a one-and-done thing. With my clients, we revisit the definition and make changes. And we’re always asking questions, such as, Are we asking the lead the right questions?

3. Use the phone.

The phone is the gold standard for qualifying most leads. We found that you can email, you can do Web profiling, you can measure all these touch points, but in the end if you want to know something, you need to talk to someone and engage them in conversation.

4. Ask about goals—don’t sell.

One of the mistakes we see in lead handoff is that sales sees that someone downloads a white paper, so they do a follow-up call and want to set up an appointment. That’s not going to get you anywhere. You want to be able to engage them in more of a discussion rather than trying to make an immediate qualification. To do that, you need to ask a question: What question were you hoping to answer by downloading our white paper? The next question is, Was that you asking the question, or was that someone else in your company asking the question? The goal is to be a trusted advisor or a relevant resource to your audience until they move to the point of being ready to talk about initiatives or a project.

5. Define lead nurturing—and the right people to nurture.

In our experience, lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialogue with viable potential customers, regardless of their timing to buy. The people to be nurtured are generally those with whom you’ve had a direct, meaningful interaction via phone or email and who are in companies that fit your preferred profile. The point is to build the relationship with them over time—without trying to qualify them during each interaction.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go. CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or mailto:jogden@findnewcustomers.net.

Demand Generation grows up — finally

Published September 28, 2008 lead generation Leave a Comment

Dear Reader.
The naive approaches of most B2B sellers of the past are falling by the wayside:

Here’s a phone, dial it — used by a VAR
Quickies — useless one sheet overview of a product (used by a VAR)
Measuring number of calls — used by a business intelligence software firm.

Those short sighted and, in my mind, lazy approaches to lead generation are finally being supplanted by much more strategic and well-thought out strategic plans.

I added two excellent webcasts recently about this very topic.

One was presented by Sirius Decisions and Bulldog Solutions entitled Strategic Marketing Blueprint: Four Steps for Better Lead Generation. The other was by Brian Carroll of Start with a Lead and Marketing Experiments entitled A Five Step Playbook to Optimize Lead Generation. While both were outstanding and I highly recommend them, I believe my readers should get a brief of the former.

Bulldog uses a very systematic approach for optimizing lead generation. Unlike the earlier naive approaches, their strategy helps companies avoid random act of marketing. The goal is to “Win the right battles all of the time.” In their experience, the difference between companies who are very successful in lead generation and those who are not successful is a matter of strategic thinking.

One of the first steps is to understand your prospective customers. Develop personas based on their role in the purchase

Next identify how to deal with them:

What are their pain points? (What keeps them up at night?)
What are their motivators? (What are their personal and business goals?)
What are their validators? (What sources do they use to make a decision?)

In the next step, figure out the conversation formats with each persona.

What is the format? — print, phone, email
What is the time? — morning, afternoon, day of week, weekend
What is the access? — Outlook on desktop, gmail, Blackberry

Goal is to figure out how to cut through the clutter.

Next you get all the decision makers and salespeople in a room and begin brainstorming ideas and topics. When completed, the group votes to place them on a two by two grid which looks at the importance to the customer and the fit with our offerings. Once they are all on the white board, we group them by topic. For instance, hire sales, host webinars and create white papers might all be grouped under Lead Generation.

Once this exercise is complete we can match the items in the top right quadrant to the audience persona’s and begin building and reusing marketing content.

This is a massive topic, so I will hold future discussions for my next post. I hope you find this useful. Good luck and good selling.

How to Expand into the U.S. Market (or vice versa)

Published September 17, 2008 International expansion Moving to US Leave a Comment

Having been hired to head sales and marketing for a UK search marketing firm that wished to jump the Atlantic, I was disappointed to find repeated failures. This begged a question: If this UK firm lacked a a good process to expand across the Atlantic, what is the right way?

In my quest to find those who did this right, I was pleasantly surprised to find this superb article at SandHill.com.

The folks at the UK firm were terrific and they had strong services, but they use simplistic approach: Hire a sales guy and micro manage from London, while giving him little to no marketing or support. Case in point, they hired a Public Relations firm, without even consulting their head of Sales and Marketing.

It failed once again — with hundreds of thousands of British Pounds spent and not one dollar coming back.

If you are a CEO that wants to jump an ocean, take a look at this Israeli CEO who tells you how to do it right.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

How to Expand into the U.S. Market
The CEO of an Israeli software explains strategies and best-practice techniques for successfully establishing a foreign software company in the U.S.

By Avinoam Nowogrodski, Clarizen
Sep. 08, 2008

We launched Clarizen, now a global provider of on-demand project management software, in Israel in 2005. In December 2006, we secured $7 million in first-round funding from Benchmark Capital and Carmel Ventures. The two General Partners of both firms also joined Clarizen’s Board of Directors. From the beginning, the plan was to go global to expand our growth options. With Benchmark Capital, we determined we should establish a presence as soon as possible in North America — our largest target market.

Obviously, there are cultural and language differences, as well as other variations from country to country as to how business should be conducted. These differences are risks that can become hindrances to success in establishing a company in a foreign market within the necessary timeline and budget. So the decision to go international must be made carefully. Yet, it need not be intimidating.

Having set the strategic direction for our company, we forged ahead and successfully established our North American headquarters in Menlo Park, California, after having been in business in Israel for 1.5 years. The following points represent the best-practice techniques we employed to reduce the time and effort to bring a company into the U.S. market and mitigate the risks of navigating cultural business variations.

Create Market Presence Before Moving to the U.S.
A well-proven business mantra is that timing is everything, and that was true in Clarizen’s case. A key to success is to make preparations with respect to the market before setting up shop there. Don’t wait to come to the U.S. before getting acquainted with and developing relationships with customers, since this will impact your timeline and budget.

Understand where your market really is. I came to the U.S. several times before we opened our sales and marketing presence here. Every two months we held one-day meetings attended by our board and potential customers. An American executive connected with our company helped me in this effort. The meetings were invaluable, as it helped us understand where our market really was and how should we sell into the market.

Generate demand and identify customer issues.
Mitigating the risk of wasting money involves ensuring you don’t move until there is some demand for your product(s). During my trips to the U.S., one technique for establishing market presence was giving potential customers a better version of our product than the beta version. This strategy helped to generate demand for our product. But even more important, their evaluation helped us understand the level at which customers were making purchasing decisions and identified their concerns regarding our product and business model.

Become part of the various circles of influence in the business community.
It’s also important to become part of the American business community by participating in events and forums. We found this was especially key in the Bay area. Becoming a part of the community not only helps to market your company but, more importantly, helps in understanding the American culture. We participated in events that were relevant to our business, such as SaaS and Office 2.0 events, Microsoft sponsored events, and Interop/Software 2008 where I gave a presentation. Such forums also helped us establish a presence in the second circle of influence — the analyst community.
Determine the Best Location for OperationsDetermining where to set up operations as a start-up in the U.S. is another decision that is key to success, as the location will impact several ongoing operational issues that need to be balanced. For instance, communication challenges could be reduced by locating in a city with minimum time zone differences from our team in our headquarters in Israel.Recruiting and retaining the right talent for your business is crucial to success, so it factors as an important criteria in deciding where to locate your company.Funding issues also come into play in considering the right location. In our case, we knew we would need to raise money from a second round of VC funding, and it would be helpful to be located near the right set of VC firms.Last, but not least, it’s important to consider where your spouse and family would enjoy living.After evaluating various locations against these criteria, we chose our Menlo Park location, despite it being many time zones apart from Israel.
Be Prepared to Quickly Build an American TeamSet up your company in the U.S. and market only when you’re ready to hire employees. Keep in mind the following principles:Start with a minimal amount of people in the U.S. location — but enough to ensure the capability of responding quickly to customersAll of your marketing and sales team should be Americans, as they will have the best understanding of the U.S. market.Bring as few people as possible from your foreign location—mainly the product marketing operation. On my trips to the U.S., I asked questions that helped me determine who would be the right people to bring from our operations in Israel.It’s critical to have a board member located where you’ll be trying to raise money. In Clarizen’s case, that meant we needed at least one board member in the Valley. As it turned out, that was not an issue for us.
After starting with a minimal number of U.S. employees, grow your team only according to the need. We started with one salesperson, eventually added a second person and now have five in the United States. A start-up needs to be flexible and have a strategy for scaling with the business growth; contracting or outsourcing administrative, legal, and other non-core processes to a third party in order to be agile.

It costs less to hire local talent. For instance, by using as many American employees as possible, we reduced the cost of having to fly Israeli employees back home to see their families.
Align the U.S. Team With the Original TeamCompanies starting operations in the U.S. must avoid the pitfall of not aligning the U.S. team with the one from your home country. Here are a few key factors to consider.Mindset. Critical to successfully establishing your foreign company’s business in the United States is the integration of the teams in both countries. The teams in each country have different cultures and approaches to life and business operations. It is important that both teams be open, flexible, and willing to adapt to change. It’s also important for management not to allow either team to focus on only one way of doing things; any employee exhibiting this type of behavior or mindset will not enable your company to be successful.Communications. At the outset, our American team had challenges in communicating with our Israeli team. While some Americans now know how to work with foreign companies, they may not know how to integrate with a specific country. For example, working with a company in Israel is not the same as working with a company in India.As the ability of our American team to communicate effectively with our team in Israel was key to our success, we established the following communication structure:
- Weekly meetings between our American sales and marketing team and our Israeli R&D team
- Weekly meetings of Israeli and U.S. management teams
- Meetings must use technology that enables visual communication to eliminate potential issues; one of the first investments we made was in a video conferencing technology
Such a structure admittedly requires a lot of energy and effort, as well as some additional operational investment. However, it was well worth it, as communication issues cannot be neglected. It’s also critical that management be sensitive to customer reactions to communication issues (if any).
Ensure Strong Customer Commitment and FeedbackKnowing your customers’ feelings about your products is critical in understanding how to improve your product to meet customer needs and expectations.For example, people generally don’t like to use project management software because it basically plans a project but doesn’t help in the execution of it. So we founded Clarizen with a clear vision of bringing the power of team collaboration to project management in order to enhance the plan execution. Having information about customer adoption is crucial to our success. So we put mechanisms in place to get detailed customer feedback about the following issues:
- Whether our customers are impressed with the product’s ability to align efforts across the entire value chain in their business
- If they think it’s fast enough or too slow
- Do they find it’s as simple to use as e-mail
- If they’re using the product to obtain up-to-the-minute knowledge that helps them align project data with their business objectives.
- If they have a strong commitment to our product
- Whether they’re too busy to use our product
- If they’re using the system as we’ve intended
Clarizen, like many companies these days, is an SaaS and an on-premise vendor. Some vendors believe they can manage their product adoption and improvement strategies by using business analytics to observing what their customers are doing with the product.

While the SaaS model provides a good possibility for obtaining that type of customer information, we believe it’s not enough to answer the issues I listed above.

We’ve found that being successful in the SaaS domain requires excited customers. You can’t get close to customers’ feelings by simply using business analytics to observe how they use the SaaS product. It requires being close to the customer, having face-to-face meetings, and maintaining a presence in the market (through a Webinar, for example). Here, again, our strategy is paying off.

The great thing about excited customers is that they become the best salespersons for a product. Clarizen has now been in the United States for one year, and we’re making great progress. Although we sell also in Europe and Asia, 80 percent of our market is with excited customers in the U.S.

Avinoam Nowogrodski is co-founder and CEO of Clarizen, a provider of on-demand, online project management software, allows businesses to easily manage all of their projects and resources in a single environment. Prior to establishing Clarizen, Avinoam co-founded SmarTeam Corp., a provider of collaborative product life cycle management solutions.