by: Jon Miller
I'm here at the MarketingSherpa B2B Demand Generation Summit in Boston. The opening session was by Sean Donahue, Senior Editor for B-to-B Marketing at MarketingSherpa. In it, he shared the top five challenges faced by B2B marketers. I was especially intrigued by challenges 3, 4, and 5.
1. The Growing Committee
Even at small companies (100-500 employees), the average number of people involved in a decision is 6.8. You need to answer all those people's questions, and each has different concerns. This means you need to tailor your marketing materials to each of them. In fact, 77% of respondents to Marketing Sherpa's survey say that targeting the content to their job role makes the content somewhat or significantly more valuable.
2. Use the Right Content at the Right Time
Not only do you need different content for each buyer role, you need to customize content for each stage in the buying cycle. This is also true since different buying roles tend to be more involved at different stages.
3. Getting Landing Pages Built & Tested
Marketers say the top reason why people don't create landing pages is that they don't have the time or resources. However, as Marketing Sherpa points out, using and optimizing your landing pages can improve conversion rates by 40% or more. Think about it: getting 40% more conversions for the same spending is a lot smarter than spending 40% more!
4. Being Everywhere
80% of decision makers say that they found the vendor. Does this mean you should give up or cut your marketing budget by 80%? Of course not. What matters today in marketing is to be findable when people are looking. This, of course, means being everywhere they might possibly be when they start searching.
There are two interesting implications to this. First, it implies lots of cross-media, low-volume campaign all year long rather than spending your budget on one or two big programs. This way you can spread your budget across time period and channels.
Second, you need to focus your efforts where people look – and by far, this means managing your search engine marketing campaigns, especially on Google.
5. Handing Off the Right Leads
Less than 25% of the leads on your website are ready to speak with a sales rep. That's why the best companies score their leads and then use lead nurturing to build relationships with qualified prospects who are not yet ready to speak with Sales. This means:
- The ability to dialog with qualified prospects through automated "drip marketing" campaigns
- Lead analytics to understand and score the prospect's interests and intent
- Tight integration with SFA to automate tasks and track sales follow-up
To demonstrate the ROI of lead nurturing, Marketing Sherpa compared the results of all companies versus "best practice" marketers. They found that best practice companies pass only 12% of leads to sales (vs. 17% on average). But, 40% of those leads convert to prospects (vs. 34% on average) and to sales at 20% (vs. 16% average). The result is 9.6 sales per 1,000 leads, vs. 9.2 sales per 1,000 leads – which means more revenue. Also, they save costs as well, since they don't waste as many high-cost resources like the direct sales channel.
Do you agree? Are these the top challenges on your mind?
Original Post: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2007/10/top-5-challenge.html
While I agree entirely with both the original ppost and the comment from Glenn Gow, I would add two further considerations: 1. It is CRITICAL to properly qualify the lead fairly early. In our work with B2B clietns we stress this unmercifully -- way way way too much effort (and money) is expended by B2B firms on leads that somehow look promising only to find out late in the game that the potential customer has $2500 to spend and our client charges $250,000! 2. It is similarly critical to have, believe in, and consistently communicate a compelling Custoemr Value Proposition. This may seem obvious, but it is surprising (disappointing?) how many B2B firms, in the rush to attempt to close a sale, forget to focus very early on on their unique, distinguishing, CVP. Conitnuous reinforcement and communication (targeted at viable suspects and prpospects, of course)of the CVP will go a long way toward addressing the issue raised in your original point #4: 80% of decision makers claim that they found the vendor. Or, as we phrase it in our consulting work, "Most B2B projects/products/services are BOUGHT not SOLD."
Jon,
Our clients are seeing many of the same things you and Sean are seeing.
The Growing Committee / Use the Right Content at the Right Time
Both of these points create a need to understand the buying cycle. Who are the people involved in the decision? What roles do they play, and at what time do they play those roles? I have a greatly simplified version of this called The Smile Curve.
This is an easy way to think about it, and it gets marketers moving in the right direction to begin mapping the buying cycle for their product or service.
Getting Landing Pages Built and Tested
I’m sorry, but this is not difficult to do. Companies that ignore this are simply wasting their money on their advertising, their SEO and their site.
Being Everywhere
I have written about this topic as well in Who found Whom? A key element of the mix we advise our clients on is a heavy emphasis on social media.
Handing Off the Right Leads
I completely agree with your point about handing off leads. One question our clients grapple with constantly is “When do you require a visitor to your site to register vs. letting visitors peruse your content as much as they’d like without registration”. The trade-off is better information about those who are willing to register vs. many more visitors who want to surf, but not register. In the end, the answer depends on the relationship you want to have with a site visitor. We want them to “want” to become a lead at the point they register.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.
Best regards,
Glenn Gow
Partner
Crimson Consulting
Read my blog on Achieve Market Leadership.com