Best practices in lead generation are evolving rapidly and leading marketers to a growing appreciation of a prospect's online behaviors in determining their level of interest. At the same time, marketers are incorporating lead-gen best practices into a number of their communication channels—including online, on the phone, with sales reps, in stores or via wholesalers and distributors.
“Companies must conduct a single dialogue that cuts across all these channels,” said Alan Bunce, product marketing director-enterprise marketing management group at IBM Corp.
“The days of batch-and-blast b2b marketing are gone,” said Bunce, whose group offers solutions developed by Unica, a company IBM acquired last summer.
“In this sense, there is some interesting convergence [between] b2b and b-to-c marketing practices and technologies, and the opportunity for marketers in each domain to learn from each other,” he said.
Social media is also emerging as a tool for lead-gen as part of this multichannel approach.
“But that doesn't mean it's easy, said Bryan Brown, director of product strategy at online marketing company Silverpop, of the difficulty in integrating the disparate tools. “The challenge is not just developing and implementing social, mobile and even location-based demand-generation techniques but also ensuring that they are strategically integrated with more mature email programs and are measurable.”
Whatever methods they use to accomplish such integration, marketers recognize that managing leads is mission-critical. Sales expects it, and the revenue-performance metrics demand it.
“Revenue-generation and new buying behaviors are under even greater scrutiny given the explosion of digital communications, including social networks,” said Lisa Arthur, CMO of marketing software and services company Aprimo Inc.
Arthur agreed that integrating social channels into marketing campaigns is one of the most significant trends she sees among businesses today, but added that accomplishing it is often quite intricate. Organizations that embrace social as part of the lead-gen process are usually faced with struggles as well as successes.
“The struggles primarily stem from the need to adjust processes and priorities to support socially fueled marketing,” Arthur said. “How, for example, does one score and nurture a lead generated by Foursquare, Twitter or Facebook? Put the complexity of mobile on top of this, and it's clear that marketers have a big challenge in front of them.”
In addition to integrating social media with existing communication channels, marketers also know that strong content drives prospect engagement, which is moving them to become publishers as well.
“The tipping point between executing timely, smart, targeted campaigns and what could be considered spam is influenced in large part by one thing: content,” said Kristin Hambelton, VP-marketing at marketing automation company Neolane Inc. “Creating good content is dependent upon collaborative processes and best practices across departments for incorporating targeted messaging, information and offers that resonate with key audiences.”
Hambelton said it's important to establish clear guidelines for reusing content across channels to promote consistency.
Integration, social media, content—each of these is impacting the marketing landscape. A new term that ties all this together is that marketers must be involved in “revenue generation.”
That concept really isn't new, Hambelton said.
“We suspect that several vendors may be inclined to position "revenue generation' as a trend,” she said. “We'd argue that it's always been about revenue generation; this is nothing new. Perhaps the strategies for going after that revenue are more sophisticated and targeted, but we'd be hard-pressed to call it a trend.”
What definitely is a trend, however, is an ever-tighter integration of the sales and marketing functions.
“Better measurement and more automation can improve the marketing-sales relationship,” IBM's Bunch said.” Marketing and sales incentives are generally pretty well-aligned—generate a pipeline that turns into revenue. But it can be hard to track and assess what part of the pipeline actually converts, and therein begins the "he said/she said' process about whether leads are junk or not.”
Marketing software is automating more elements of the process, which prevents leads from falling through the cracks, Bunch said.
“ "No lead left behind' has long been a goal at IBM,” he said. IBM is using its Unica products to manage its own lead-generation and pipeline processes, he added.
For the future, marketers must become their own IT experts. According to SiriusDecisions, 71% of marketers are responsible for selecting marketing automation products and vendors. Also, 66% are responsible for implementation, 72% for ongoing management and 76% for roadmap development. Those findings were part of a study on marketing technology budgeting and purchasing trends, conducted via an online poll of 200 b2b companies in March and April.
“Marketers are going to quickly become experts at automating their existing processes,” Brown said, “and will then start to explore more sophisticated tools, such as Web tracking capabilities, multiple lead-scoring models and social sharing options.”
“As maturity of an organization's usage of lead generation processes develops, [marketers] will see greater predictability, accuracy and repeatability driving a better balance to the art and science of marketing efforts,” he said.
Lead-gen processes are also becoming more dynamic and personalized as technology allows for the detection of buyer preferences and the subsequent customization of Web content and offers.
“This thrusts analytics even more into the spotlight, and this will drive new scoring models,” Aprimo's Arthur said. “In addition, analytics will help bring more accountability, revealing exactly how well—or how poorly—your current content and nurture campaigns are working.
“There will always be some degree of outbound cold-calling activity but moving forward, more focus will be on inbound channels, like Web forms and webinar registrations,” she said. “The long and multitouch nature of b2b sales cycles lends itself very well to analytics to determine which activities and what content deliver the best results.”
None of this comes without risk, according to experts. Without relevant messages based on a keen understanding of individual customer desires, engagement (and leads) will suffer.
Marketing is always at risk of reaching a saturation level with customers and prospects. Avoiding customer overload while increasing engagement and relevance is becoming the new normal in b2b marketing.
“Conversational marketing technology is an important component of this strategy,” Hambelton said, “because it was built to unify inbound and outbound communications strategies.”
Such an approach, she said, can provide a centralized system for tracking and managing marketing activity data. That in turn can generate targeted messaging and the best, most relevant offers based on customer behavior and established preferences.
As a result, the imperative for marketing and sales to work closely together has never been more pressing.
“Some of the best practices for helping the teams work better together include common definitions for a qualified lead; lead scoring to identify suspected quality leads; a strong lead-management process to manage the handoffs; and the use of marketing automation to power the whole thing,” said Maria Pergolino, director of marketing at Marketo Inc.
“The secret to a truly high-performance revenue engine is the effectiveness of a sales development team,” Pergolino added. “This role bridges the gap between sales and marketing, allowing for the sales development representatives to contact and qualify marketing-generated leads and deliver them to sales account executives.”
