Using Sales Development to Turn Marketing Leads into Qualified Sales Leads

I've long argued that the effective use of a Sales Development team is an essential component to a truly high-performance revenue engine. This team is also sometimes called Lead Qualification or even Business Development, but regardless of what you call it, this team has one exclusive focus: to review, contact and qualify marketing-generated leads and deliver them to Sales Account Execs.

In March, 2011 I authored a Marketo ebook called The Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development.  (It has since been updated, download the latest copy here.)

Here are a few highlights from the guide, starting with Seven Ways that Sales Development Reps Drive Revenue:

1. More consistent and better quality follow-up on leads = better conversion of leads into opportunities. When you have a qualified lead, it's too valuable to call once and leave a voicemail.  You want someone whose sole job is to contact your leads, answer questions, make sure they are a fit, and get them connected to sales teams.
2. Faster lead response times = better conversion rates. When a lead submits an inquiry on your website, the faster the response the better.  According to a Lead Response Management study, a five-minute lead response is 21X more likely to convert than after 30-minute wait.  SDRs can focus on this fast response time.
3. Better economics. Salespeople are expensive and you want them focused on closing business, not qualifying raw leads, talking to people who don’t want to talk to them, or worse, wasting time with unqualified prospects. It makes sense to have lower-cost SDRs talking to leads and passing just the right ones onto sales. 
4. The human touch enhances lead nurturing. Whether or not leads are sales-ready, SDRs can nurture relationships with each interaction. By talking with more leads, you can offer personalized thought leadership and value around a lead’s individual pain points, and cultivate future demand. 
5. Superior data. It's easier to require SDRs to enter proper information about lead qualification and disposition, so marketing gets better data accuracy and information they can use to optimize future efforts.
6. Improved revenue cycle analytics. By adding a stage between marketing and sales, you’ll be able to track conversion rates for each step. This means you can isolate problems and resolve them faster than if you lump together the responsibilities of qualifying and closing leads.
7. Talent development for sales. Your Sales Development reps can play an important role in your sales talent pipeline, effectively serving as your “farm team” for future quota carrying reps. 

The guide goes on to cover these common questions about the sales development process:

1. When Should Marketing Pass a Lead to the SDRs?
2. When Should SDRs Pass a Sales Lead to an Account Executive?
3. How Do You Determine Which Leads are Accepted by Sales?
4. How Should I Allocate Leads to SDRs?
5. What Kind Of Conversion Rates Can I Expect?
6. Should Sales Development Report to Marketing or Sales?
7. How Many SDRs Do I Need / How Big Should The Lead Qualification Team Be?
8. How Can I Hire the Best SDRs?
9. How Much Should I Pay My SDRs?
10. How Should I Best Train my Lead Qualification Team?
11. Can I Outsource My Lead Qualification Or Do SDRs Need To Be In-House?

Check out my Definitive Guide to to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development for my detailed answers to all these questions.

The Expanding Role of Video in Online Marketing

We have only just begun to realize the impact that video will have on online marketing. Remember how much of a game-changer television ads were to print and radio? Just imagine what happens when online video does the same thing to internet advertising.

From Lean Forward to Lean Back

Millennials today watch less live "traditional" TV than other groups (41% to 59%), and nearly 3X as much online video than non-Millennials (34% to 12%) (source).  They are watching on mobile devices and connected TVs, which allows for individually addressable advertisements. This is driving yet another revolution in online video: in recent history, watching online video meant sitting at our desks in a “lean forward” mode. Now, online video is now available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Now, we can watch video in line at Starbucks, or surf through videos while leaning back on our couches at home.

Soon, it will be possible to watch a custom-curated channel of online videos tailored just for you.  Sometimes, you'll want to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones; other times, your custom channel. Such personalization and accessibility are especially important to marketers who know that buyers are extremely adept at filtering out unwanted marketing messages.  A marketer may not be able to reach a prospect through e-mail or phone, but once a video gets into a customized feed that reflects the prospect’s exact personal interests, the video will stimulate action.

How to Optimize Your Marketing with Online Video

In February, 2011 I explored this topic in my blog post, How to Optimize Your B2B Marketing and Sales with Online Video. In it, I shared my top 10 recommendations to promote your online videos (which do you think are still true?):

1. Search optimize your video with text summary.
2. Replace static ads with viral pay-per-click (PPC) displays.
3. Capture sales leads with longer form video.
4. Bolster conversion with YouTube promotion and Call-To-Action overlays.
5. Integrate video into your email marketing.
6. Increase downloads of marketing collateral with a video-enabled landing page.
7. Leverage social media.
8. Feature videos on your website.
9. It’s all about control… and a consistent brand.
10. Create sales videos to engage and qualify buyers.

Marketing Forecasting: Why Marketing Should Forecast Revenue

At executive staff and board meetings, the number one topic of discussion is never the upcoming marketing program or the new brand strategy – it’s almost always the revenue forecast. Everyone wants to know if the company will make the target for this quarter and what next quarter is going to look like.

Invariably, this discussion is led by the sales executives, with little or no input from marketing. This ability to make revenue forecasts – and to be held accountable for delivering against them – is the single biggest factor that gives sales more credibility (and power) than marketing at most companies.

But in a world where buyers are doing their own research and delaying engagement with sales, the sales team has less and less visibility into future revenue; a traditional forecast completely misses the opportunities that are being cultivated by marketing but have not yet entered the sales pipeline.

This is why marketing forecasting is so important. I am not talking about “traditional” marketing forecasts, which take the form of a top-down market size analysis. I am talking about bottoms-up predictions of future revenue and pipeline based on a quantitative understanding of how potential customers move through the revenue cycle. Done right, the marketing forecast gives the CMO the confidence to stake a portion of his or her compensation on meeting the goal, and the CSO relies on marketing’s input to make a valid forecast for the period.

For details on why marketing forecasts are so important in the age of information scarcity, and detailed step-by-step instructions on how to implement them at your company, check out my ebook: Marketing Forecasting: The Hidden Secret of Today’s Most Accountable CMOs.

Full-Funnel Marketing - Nurturing Relationships Without Contact Information

I introduced the term "seed nurturing" in early 2010 to describe the practice of building relationships with qualified prospects before you have their contact information (e.g. personally identifiable information).

This concept has become known as "full-funnel" marketing, and it is increasingly important since prospects are educating themselves long before you actually identify them. They are on your site as anonymous visitors, and researching your products with third-party resources, word-of-mouth, and social media. Just because you can't identify these individuals doesn't mean they aren't qualified prospects — and because of this, you must nurture them just as you would the known contacts in your database.

In my blog post, Introducing Seed Nurturing, I introduced the following requirements for successful full-funnel marketing:

• Personalize interactions with anonymous visitors
• Make valuable content freely available on your site and over social media
• Use social media to build a rock-solid reputation that builds credibility and trust with prospects

UPDATE: Since 2010, there are additional options for marketing to "anonymous" visitors and nurturing relationships outside of the inbox, including ad retargeting, sophisticated display targeting, and rich audiences on social media.

I'm excited to see how these concepts play out.  LinkedIn's July 2014 purchase of Bizo is a key validation of these concepts... stay tuned.

Marketing during a Recession

An economic downturn creates additional challenges for marketers across industries. Fewer consumers means less demand; less demand means that efforts to stimulate demand (i.e. marketing) are less effective overall. 

However, in a recession, direct and online marketing spending tends to rise even as broad brand advertising slows down.  The implication is that there are marketing strategies that work particularly well in a downturn.  These include:

1. Use lead management to maximize the value of each lead. Each lead is more valuable than ever, so be sure to follow-up with each one most effectively.
2. Focus on your house list. Spend less on acquiring new leads, and more marketing to (and building relationships with) the people you already know.
3. Build and optimize landing pages. Maximize conversion on the valuable traffic you do get.
4. Create content for later in the buying cycle. Make sure the prospects who are ready to buy can find you.
5. Appeal to the nervous buyer. A recession can mean more risk-adverse buyers, so do more than ever to reassure and build trust.
6. Align sales and marketing. A tougher selling environment means marketing and sales need to work seamlessly more than ever.
7. Don’t be a cost center. In a recession, marketing needs more than ever to change the perception that marketing is a cost center, focusing on accountability, metrics, and ROI.

Read the entire original post, 7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession: The Definitive Guide.

The Ultimate Guide To Online Testing Statistics

I'm a bit of a math geek, and love a good analysis.  So one of my favorite posts was the mega-article I published on the Marketo blog: Landing Page Testing – The Ultimate Guide To Test Statistics.

In this article, I explain all the math behind statistical confidence for online tests, including standard deviation, binomial distributions, hypothesis testing, Z-values, Chi-Square distributions, two-sided tests, and more.

And for those who are "allergic" to math, I also share some simple "rules of thumb":

• Between 25 to 50 conversions are required to be somewhat confident in a given landing page’s reported conversion rate.

• Typically, you need 25 to 50 conversions per test version to be somewhat confident in your test results.

• To get the number of versions you can confidently test, take the number of conversions you get per day and divide it by 20. Then take your testing period in weeks. Multiply the two results together, and you’ll estimate the number of versions you can confidently test.

For the mathematically inclined, it's a "fun" post to read.  Check it out: Landing Page Testing – The Ultimate Guide To Test Statistics.

The Five Stages of Marketing Accountability

The five stages of Marketing Accountability are:

1. Denial: “Marketing is an art, not a science. It can’t be measured. The results will come, trust me!”
2. Fear: “What if my marketing activities don’t impact the bottom line? Will I lose my job?”
3. Confusion: “I know I should measure marketing results, but I just don’t know how.”
4. Self-Promotion: “Hey, come look at all these charts and graphs!”
5. True Accountability: “Revenue starts in marketing.”

Read more in the original post on the Marketo blog: The Five Stages of Marketing Accountability.

80% of Your New Customers Think They Found You

80% of decision makers who made a technology purchase believe that they found the vendor — as opposed to the vendor targeting them. (Source: MarketingSherpa’s Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-08.)

I wouldn’t think of buying an airplane ticket or car without researching online, and these behaviors are true for purchases across all industries.

As a result, interruption-based techniques where the marketer searches for customers no longer work. What DOES work are inbound marketing strategies that smooth the process of customers finding you. Since the buyer controls their buying process, the marketer’s job is to synchronize the company’s marketing (and to some extent sales) activities to the buyer’s process.

This includes:

• Search marketing so prospects find you when they search
• Content marketing and PR – so your brand appears wherever prospects are reading
• Brand awareness efforts so buyers are aware of you when they make their short lists
• Client satisfaction to encourage referrals and word of mouth

Read my original post on this topic, 80% of Your New Customers Think They Found You.

The Social Media Trap: Popularity not Quality

Social media rewards popularity, not quality or accuracy, so there is an inherent push to write about trendy topics that will get links over rich, important topics that may not be as trendy. There’s no topic that social networkers like to write about and share more than social networking itself. And this creates the perverse incentive to write about social media more than other marketing topics.

What do you think? How do you balance writing about the important stuff versus content that you just know will "get links"?

For more, see my article What’s Wrong With Social Media For B2B Marketing.