As a marketer, you invest valuable time, money, and resources to generate leads for your company. The last thing you want is for those leads to go to waste. Yet it can happen, because there are many cracks that leads can fall through if you don’t manage them properly.

Some companies put technology to work on the lead management challenge, investing in sales force, marketing automation, or customer relationship management software. And they still might fumble leads. Other companies, usually smaller ones, might use something as simple as a spreadsheet to manage leads. And they might have high success rates in converting leads to customers.

So what’s the secret? It’s not technology—it’s your lead handling process. Success in lead management depends on defining and following a disciplined process. These nine tips will help you.

1. Create a cross-functional team
Whether your sales and marketing teams are integrated or independent, they must be on the same page for lead management. Leads are a shared responsibility between sales and marketing, and it takes executive sponsorship and team players to properly manage the flow of leads. Your team could be one person from sales and one from marketing, or it could be a roundtable of participants. The important thing to remember is that you all have the same goal: efficiently converting leads into profitable customers. Make team decisions about how leads are handled and assign responsibility: who gets what leads, who follows-up with leads, and who measures outcomes.

2. Define what a lead is—and isn’t
You probably need three definitions: a sales-ready lead, a marketing lead, and an unqualified lead. Get these definitions right so you know what type of leads are coming in the door and what to do with them. Each type of lead is pretty obvious. The sales-ready lead goes directly to sales; the marketing lead stays with the marketing team until it is sales ready. Unqualified leads are not really leads because they won’t become customers for a number of reasons and there is no value to pursuing the lead further. Perhaps the lead is seeking a different product or solution to the ones you offer or has no budget to allocate to your offering.

3. Funnel leads as they come in the door
You likely won’t have enough information to create a full profile of your prospect when the lead is first generated. For example, for a lead that downloads a white paper or connects with you at an online event, you may not know much more than their contact information and interest area. This is likely a marketing lead. But as you continue to interact with the lead, you will find out more information, which will help you make a better decision on what to do with them. Hopefully, your leads will meet more of the criteria for a sales-ready lead. If not, the lead may be classified as “unqualified” or remain a marketing lead for further development.

4. Set up processes to pass hot leads to sales
This situation may have happened to you at some point. A potential customer may not meet all the checkbox criteria of a sales-ready lead, yet expresses an urgent need and is ready to make a decision. However tempting it is to pass the lead to sales right away, this shouldn’t happen outside of your established processes for lead-handling. If set up correctly, your system should be able to address this situation and pass the lead to sales in an appropriate and timely manner.

5. Nurture leads with content
Any lead that isn’t ready for your sales team should stay with the marketing team. Lead nurturing is a popular term in B2B marketing. It refers to all the ways you keep leads interested and your company top-of-mind while prospects continue through their buying process.

The key to good lead nurturing is providing relevant content to your prospects, and then tracking what they pay attention to. E-mail is a great way to nurture leads. You can send articles, links to blog posts, invitations to Webinars or online events, application notes, and other content. The advantage of e-mail is that you can track what prospects click on and you can send them to landing pages where you capture more information about them. Also, you can nurture leads by making phone calls to ask if your prospects have any questions—a low pressure, non-selling tactic that can make prospects feel you are paying attention to them.

6. Personalize when possible
When sending content during lead nurturing campaigns, it’s best to personalize your communications. This is part of being relevant to your prospects. A generic e-newsletter that gets sent to everyone in your database isn’t very exciting to new leads. On the other hand, a personalized e-mail that specifically addresses their area of interest will help make a positive impression. Your leads are people, not just names and contact information. They want to feel wanted. They want to feel you understand their needs.

7. Re-check status of leads
As you interact with leads over time, you will gain more information about them. Their actions will demonstrate their specific interest area, and you may learn more about their needs and decision-making process. You’ll want to continually check whether a lead is sales ready, either by an automated or manual process. When you pass a lead to sales, make sure they have all the information available on a prospect so they are up-to-speed from the start.

8. Have a shared view of leads with the sales team
Both marketing and sales should have access to the same information about leads, and both teams should be able to update the records. Information should be transparent and shared. Each team knows what the other team is doing and can check the status of a lead at any time. Again, this is the case whether you are using sophisticated software or e-mailing a spreadsheet back and forth among team members.

9. Measure results
What percentage of marketing leads became sales-ready leads? How many sales-ready leads became customers? What lead sources performed the best? Did any leads fall through the cracks, and if so, why? What lead-nurturing content was most popular? Measure the performance of your lead management process and you will know where to make changes to improve the process. You may find that your lead definitions need tweaking, or the criteria needs to change, or you need more or more specific content. Continually refining and improving the way you handle leads will result in more of those leads converting into customers—that was your original, shared goal.

What have you found to be successful in managing your leads? What is your biggest challenge in lead management? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
 

You know that every e-mail you send to customers and prospects is important for them to read, but how does your audience know that? The answer lies in your subject line. Write a compelling and relevant subject line, and recipients will open your e-mail. Write a weak one, and your open rates will be disappointing. Sometimes it really is as simple as that.

The fact is business users are swamped with e-mail. Most people scan their inboxes to quickly sort important e-mails that must be read now from those that can wait for later—or never. Here’s how to make sure your subject lines stand out in a crowded e-mail inbox, get the attention of your audience, and instill that “must-read now” feeling about your e-mail.

Promise valuable information
The first and most basic rule: use the subject line to let recipients know why your e-mail is important. Whether you’re making a special offer, sharing company updates through your newsletter, or inviting them to an event, treat the subject line as a promise of valuable information. For example:

• New RF tool accurately predicts signal loss
• White paper: top ten reasons why hydraulic pumps fail
• Webinar to demonstrate new applications for diode lasers
• Solar cell expert will speak at energy conference

The above subject lines have common components:
• They work like headlines to stories, telling you what’s inside: information on a new product, white paper offer, upcoming Webinar, event speaker
• Each is between 7-9 words and around 50 characters long; this is about the right length for a subject line because anything longer might get cut off by some e-mail programs

While 50 characters is a standard length for subject lines, the first 15 characters are the most critical. Many business users read e-mail on their mobile devices, which often have room to display only the first 15 characters.

If you can’t come up with a compelling subject line that motivates readers to open your e-mail, this may be an indication that the content of your e-mail is not interesting or relevant to recipients. If that’s the case, go back and work on your purpose and content, making sure you have something relevant to say to your audience.

Create a sense of urgency
Look again at the subject lines above. While they all serve as potential headlines to a good story and may entice a recipient to open the e-mail, all but one lack a critical factor that can mean the difference between having your e-mail read or not: a sense of timeliness or urgency.

There’s nothing like fresh news or the feeling that time is running out to get your reader to take action. The first subject line ‘New RF tool accurately predicts signal loss’ has the newness aspect to it. The others lack urgency or newness. Can they be improved by re-writing?

• Just published: Top ten reasons why hydraulic pumps fail. The words ‘white paper’ are replaced with ‘just published,’ providing a sense of something brand new that’s worth paying attention to; the other powerful component of this subject line is the ever popular ‘top ten’ list.
• Registration closes Friday for Webinar on lasers. This one takes advantage of the element of time to give it a sense of urgency. Maybe it’s the second or third invitation you’ve sent and now the concept of time running out takes precedence over the content of the Webinar. You could also use words and phrases like “Last chance” or “Final reminder” to instill the sense of urgency.
• September 12, Orlando: Solar cell expert to speak. Again, adding a time element increases the sense of urgency. What’s sacrificed is information about an energy conference. The closer you get to the event, the more weight you should give to the urgency, especially if your e-mail is one of a series.

Have your subject line and from line work together
Just as important as the subject line is the from line, which tells recipients who the e-mail is from. E-mails with recognized senders in the from line get opened first.

The from line should clearly identify the sender as you, your company, a specific brand or some combination of those three items. If you have a personal relationship with the recipient, definitely use your name in the from line. Combine a person’s name with a company name for more impact. From: AudreyJones@CompanyName.

The from line should be consistent. The subject line should not. Even if you are sending a regular newsletter to your audience, try to avoid a generic subject line such as ‘January newsletter.’ Instead, you could put the name of the newsletter in the from line, and save the subject line for something specific, beneficial, and compelling that appears in that issue of the newsletter.

What have you found to be successful subject lines and “from names” that generate opens? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
 

It’s December, and that means it’s time for the Marketing Maven to re-publish the most popular articles of the past year. Looking at the list, we can see 2011 was a year of marketing pragmatism, with marketers seeking practical advice, how-to articles, and insider tips. Companies were particularly interested in increasing their online presence, creating more effective landing pages, and developing content to match their customers’ needs. Here are the three most popular articles from 2011.

Eight Ways to Increase Your Online Presence
Manufacturers and suppliers understand the mandate now: you need a broad online presence — more than just a company Web site— to connect with customers. No wonder this article was the most popular in 2011. From exhibiting at online events, to using more effective calls-to-action on your Web site, to the benefits of e-newsletter advertising — you’ll find all the tips you need to build a strong, sustainable, and effective online presence.

Landing Pages: 10 Tips to Improve
What’s so important about landing pages? Landing page design and content are probably the most crucial factors in determining whether your Web site visitors disappear or convert into leads you can follow up with. As one reader commented, “Ads, press releases, direct marketing, or any other promotions that do not work in tandem with an online “doorway” to further enlightenment or direct deals risk loss of sales momentum.”

How-To: Developing a Content Strategy
Your customers and prospects are hungry for content that will educate them and provide guidance to help them make the right buying decision. They need white papers, data sheets, videos, Webinars/Webcasts, case studies, ROI calculators, and more. Thismeans you need a strategy to develop, publish, and manage this content. This article tells you how to get started.

The Marketing Maven will be back in January with fresh, new articles and marketing advice. Until then, all of us at GlobalSpec wish you a happy holiday season!
 

A recent Big Fat Marketing Blog post warned of the risks of sending to inactive, unengaged subscribers. The article noted a study showing that about 30% of the participants were sending e-mails to these contacts at the same rate that they were sending to contacts that had opened.

The main risk noted in the article is that major ISPs are increasingly factoring in a contact’s engagement level when filtering e-mail messages. ISPs look at a number of factors when determining a sender’s engagement level. Opens and clicks play a large role in engagement level, but having your e-mail deleted, or moved to a junk mail folder can also impact your engagement level.

The key to maintaining a high level of engagement is sending relevant messages. Having relevant content and segmenting your list remain important to keeping your messages relevant. In the case of engagement it’s especially important to track responses and segment out contacts that are not engaged. If there’s a percentage of your list that is consistently not opening your messages, you’ll want to try and get them re-engaged by separating them out of your main mailing list and testing different subject lines, formatting, and messaging. If testing doesn’t yield increased engagement, it may be necessary to stop emailing these contacts and test reaching them via other channels.

You probably get more than a few of these delivered to your inbox daily and chances are you may contribute in one way or another to your own company’s. E-newsletters are a tried and true way of reaching your audience. Now that they may be an automatic part of your marketing plan, it becomes increasingly necessary to step back and review your newsletter as a whole. As we get ready to move into the new year, here are ways your newsletter can remain successful in 2012.

1. Mobile - It’s not going anywhere – more and more people are reading work email on their mobile device. If your audience is moving in this direction or already has, you’ll want to make sure your newsletter templates can accommodate a mobile-friendly design.  

2. Include the right images – Seems like a no brainer, yet there are still many images in newsletters that aren’t effective. You’ve probably already branded your newsletter, so try not to use logos in the body. The most clicked images support the article content, are large enough to see clearly and generate curiosity. If you want to generate more traffic from your newsletter, make sure your images are both hyperlinked and interesting to the reader.

3. Use social media - Once you’ve finished your latest article, be sure you maximize its effectiveness by getting the word out beyond your newsletter. Tweet it, post it to Facebook and LinkedIn and get it on your site. Having members of your sales team promote it to their “friends” and “followers” can also get it in front of new readers.

4. Sell it – At the end of the day you are trying to sell something. While you don’t want your newsletter to look like a web page or print ad, you should always have a call to action. Ask your readers to click, sign up, download or keep reading.

5. Subject lines – As a general rule, try to keep it 50 characters or less. The more timely the information and useful to the reader, the better. Don’t get too hung up on personalizing it – research has shown that doesn’t increase open rates. And as always, stay out of the spam folder. Avoid using "help", "reminder", "percent off" and of course "free". 

6. Headlines - When you open a newsletter you skim headlines and only read what’s most relevant to you (or what’s just too interesting to pass up). Keep your headline copy short and full of benefits to the reader.

7. Solid content - Put yourself in their shoes. What do they care about? What issues do they face? Whether you’re sharing survey results or industry news, every issue should be full of valuable content.

8. Plan ahead – Make sure you’ve always got content at the ready by building an editorial calendar at the beginning of the year. You can follow it loosely as new content comes during the year, but this way you will always have something to fall back on.

What other newsletter best practices are out there? Which ones do you swear by?

White papers have long been a staple of lead generation, thought leadership and branding campaigns in the industrial sector. Effective white papers that provide relevant, educational content to help their target audience solve problems and make more informed business decisions tend to deliver strong results in terms of leads, impact on market, thought leadership, and overall brand recognition for your company.

Yet the market remains flooded with poorly conceived white papers. Some are little more than sales brochures passing themselves off as white papers. Others lack credible evidence or persuasive arguments — and persuasion is the key objective of a white paper.

To help you create effective white papers that achieve their objectives, we’ve compiled this list of tips.

• Identify your audience. Is your audience executive, analytical, or technical — or a combination of all three? The answer to this question will help determine topics and your approach. An executive audience is concerned with top line benefits and return on investment. The analytical audience is trying to solve a specific business or technical problem. A technical audience is concerned with the nuts and bolts details such as how a proposed problem-solving approach technically fits into the company’s environment.

• Choose topics that are important to your audience. One good way to find out what your customers are thinking is to ask them through surveys. A simple survey with questions such as: “What is one problem plaguing you in your industry [or job, or role]? Or: “What is one thing you’d like to see in new products [or technical standards or advancements] for our industry?” Your sales and support teams might also be a good source for ideas, since they are close to the customer.

• Use an accepted approach to white paper development. Here are some of the most common approaches:

o Executive briefing — a short, high-level summary of a specific market, problem or offering
o Business benefits — how a non-technical audience might benefit
o Technical overview — to explain an approach or offering to a technical audience
o Competitive review — discussion of strengths and weaknesses of competing offerings, with the intent to show one as the best choice (a good choice for a third-party written white paper)
o Evaluator’s guide — an explanation of important functionality and features to a buyer who is well along in the buying process
o Position paper — makes the case for a certain approach to solving an industry problem, based on opinion and facts
o Special report — generally tackles a hot or controversial topic for a specific audience

• Create a process and compile a review team. Start with an outline or one-page brief that defines the audience, objective, and content for the white paper. Also, assemble a team of reviewers and approvers who can add expertise and sign off on the final paper. Build a schedule for the writing, editing, and approval stages. Plan ahead. White papers typically take four-eight weeks from start to finish.

• Make it look like a white paper. White papers tend to be designed and formatted to land somewhere between a technical manual and a glossy brochure in the style department. Think serious but not dull. If you don’t already have one, create a white paper style sheet with consistent headlines, sub-headlines, callouts, sidebars, cover sheet, etc., so all of your company’s white papers share a consistent design. Use white space and separation between sections of information. Remember that readers tend to skim and scan white papers just as they do Web pages. Give them visual cues to gain their attention. Use an outside designer if you don’t have the graphic and layout skills internally.

• Consider hiring an outside writer. White papers can consume resources and time, particularly if you don’t have a professional writer on the project. You might want to consider hiring a professional to develop the entire white paper.

• Include your white papers in marketing efforts. Don’t just post your white papers on your Web site and hope that customers and prospects will find them. Instead, make them the centerpiece in marketing campaigns. Promote them through industry e-newsletter advertisements, online banner ads, at online and location-based events, in online supplier directories, and more.

• Extend the life of white papers. Consider re-purposing the content of white papers for Webinars, a series of blog posts, or technical or by-lined articles. If you chose a relevant and timely topic, your audience will always be hungry for the information.

With 2012 just around the corner, it’s time to finalize your marketing strategy for next year. Right now you may be facing important and challenging decisions about how to best allocate a finite budget to achieve the greatest return on your marketing programs. Take advantage of the following tips to ensure that your marketing plan for the year ahead delivers the results you want.

How to Analyze the Effectiveness of Marketing Programs
The key to making improvements in your marketing program is the ability to analyze your current and planned marketing choices, which will enable you to make informed decisions.

Important factors to consider when analyzing marketing programs include:

• Quality of lead information delivered — While most manufacturers are implementing online programs today, not all online marketing delivers the same quality of leads. For example, a click to your Web site from a general search engine is not a lead at all; the only information you get is an IP address of where the visitor came from. At the other end of the spectrum, there are online marketing programs that offer individual contact information on your prospect and other valuable data such as specific area of interest and time frame for purchase decision.

• Level of branding and visibility — If your brand is visible to and recognized by prospects, you can shorten the sales cycle because people prefer to buy from companies they know. You can increase brand visibility if you implement marketing programs that keep you in front of your target audience at all times. That way, you can be sure that you are reaching them when they are actively searching for products and services.

• Timeliness — In the digital age, leads grow old quickly. Some traditional marketing programs might not deliver leads to you until days or weeks have passed. By then, your prospects have likely moved on to other potential vendors. When working with your media partners, ask them how fresh are the sales and marketing opportunities you receive. Are they available to you as soon as they are generated, so you can follow-up in a timely fashion?

• Marketing Mix — Your customers and prospects use a variety of information sources: supplier Web sites, specialized search engines, online catalogs, industry e-newsletters, online events, Webinars, social media, and more. Do you include different channels in your marketing mix? Doing so will allow you to connect with more prospects in more markets.

• Measurement — Marketing is being held more accountable than ever for achieving a return on investment. Fortunately, two things work in your favor here: your prospects have migrated to the Internet to find suppliers, products, and services; and online marketing is built for measurement. Impressions, click-throughs, and conversions can all be counted and measured — something that can’t be done with traditional marketing channels such as print ads. The ability to measure results will help you allocate your budget better and continually achieve improvements in your marketing ROI.

Get Started
Even if your budgets aren’t settled for next year, don’t wait to create your marketing plan. To help you get started, GlobalSpec created the “2012 Industrial Marketing Planning Kit: How to Develop Marketing Strategies That Target Engineering, Technical, Industrial and Manufacturing Professionals.” Download your complimentary copy.

The Marketing Planning Kit offers you tools to:
• Evaluate how well your current marketing channels deliver leads and branding visibility
• Measure the quality of leads you currently generate, and may generate using other marketing channels
• Compare the effectiveness of your marketing expenditures across various media channels
• Re-allocate budget to more effectively reach your industrial target audience

The kit also contains a six-point checklist for success, a list of questions to ask media partners, and a top ten list of the most common marketing mistakes to avoid.

Use the tools available in the Marketing Planning Kit to proactively plan your marketing efforts and justify your expected marketing expenditures. This way, you’ll be ready to go as soon as possible and may have an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
 

In any industry today, you want a robust, full-featured Web site complete with intuitive navigation, detailed product information, up-to-date content, and offers that help you capture qualified leads. It’s a basic requirement in this digital age. Yet having a great Web site isn’t enough. By itself, your Web site will not lift you above competitors and connect you with potential customers. Why not?

Because in the industrial sector, your target audience and customers use a variety of online sources to seek out suppliers, products, and information. Yes, your company Web site is one of those sources — and an important source — but it’s not the only one, and usually not the first one potential customers find.

The Buy Cycle Determines Information Sources
According to the GlobalSpec Industrial Buy Cycle Survey, supplier Web sites are the least used information source during the early stages of the industrial buy cycle, when buyers are defining their requirements, conducting research, and identifying vendors who might be able to meet their needs.

During these early stages buyers use a wide range of information sources including general search engines, online catalogs, GlobalSpec.com, e-newsletters, social media, and others. It’s only in the later stages of the buy cycle, when buyers are comparing vendors and making their final purchase decision, that supplier Web sites become animportant information source.

Build Your Online Presence
The conclusion to draw is that you need a broad, yet focused online presence to be found in the early stages of the buy cycle; otherwise, your company will not make a buyer’s short list in the later stages of the cycle and you could miss an opportunity to win new business. A broad presence means you can be found in a variety of information sources. A focused presence means these information sources are used by the target audience you are trying to connect with.

Consider, for example, these marketing ideas:
• Placing advertisements in targeted industrial e-newsletters that with a single click send customers to your Web site to take advantage of an offer for a white paper or Webinar.
• Building a presence on specialized search engines and directories such as GlobalSpec where, during the early stages of their buy cycle, engineers and technical buyers seek out suppliers, products, and services that meet their needs.
• Promoting your brand and products using online banner ads on a network of industrial-related Web sites, again sending interested prospects back to your Web site with a single click.
• Participating through sponsorship in online events such as virtual conferences where you can establish your company’s reputation as a leader and showcase your entire portfolio of products and services.
• Teaming up with a leading online media company that is focused on the industrial sector to produce and promote an educational Webinar directed at the audience you want to attract.
• Increasing social media initiatives such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogs to help your company become a trusted and valuable resource for buyers.
• Producing short video segments such as executive interviews, technical advice/how-to’s, or customer case studies and posting them on YouTube where you can take advantage of features such as adding keywords that are relevant to the content and your offerings.

Each of these tactics can help expand your online presence, which will increase your opportunities to be in front of buyers during the early stages of the buy cycle. Then, once you are found, you can drive qualified traffic to your Web site and wow prospects with the breadth and depth of the information and offers you make available to them. But remember, they won’t come to your Web site unless you help get them there.
 

A recent MarketingSherpa article noted ways to utilize social reinforcement in e-mails. What caught my interest was that each of the examples of social reinforcement added an aspect of interactivity to the e-mail. Examples in the article include integrating Facebook contacts into the e-mail, incorporating a live feed into the e-mail, and having dynamic content that updates based on recipient responses. Each of these methods represents a step up from the common tactics of including links to your company’s social media platform pages, or links for sharing the article. We’d like to hear back from you if you’ve seen an e-mail utilizing some of these social reinforcement techniques or if you currently use them in your e-mails.

A great how-to article I recently read on the MarketingSherpa outlines 9 tactics to help you get the most out of your B2B social media presence. The article references three experts in this field and their recommendations for a social media campaign from goal-setting and testing to lead generation.

One tactic I found to be most helpful is to combine your social media advertising with your other marketing initiatives (in this case they mentioned email marketing). As you know, social media is a fantastic way to brand your company and build relationships with your audience, but it’s most powerful when paired with the other elements in your full marketing plan. And keeping your message consistent across all of your communications is always most effective. 

We’ve also discussed use of social media, along with 6 other digital trends, here.