As an example, technology is outlined in the book as a barrier to entry. After receiving an e-mail your potential prospect has several options:

1. Read it and reply (highly unlikely)
2. Read it and discard it
3. Dismiss it as spam
4. Dismiss it as spam and block future e-mails from your address

More often than not the prospect will dismiss your e-mail as spam or simply ignore it The “Circle of Leverage“ is designed to help you to surpass this and other barriers, allowing you to get in the door.

So what is the Circle of Leverage? The circle of leverage system is a top down sales lead strategy that gives detailed steps on how to cause your potential customer to ‘want’ to let you in the door. According to the author this can be accomplished by activating one of your targets four ‘Key Engagers.’ The four key engagers are; your prospects fears, insecurities, competitiveness, or desires what Mercury Leads refers to as the “pain or gain” factor. For example, if your target fears what might happen if you aren’t let in the door, (missed opportunity) what will motivate them to give you the chance to present your ideas? Acting upon one or more of these key engagers will enable you to get your foot in the door with a highly qualified sales lead.

In total, the system includes 15 steps. There are ten preparation steps designed to expand your knowledge base of your potential client and five execution steps. After reading through all the steps of the Circle of Leverage system it is easy to envision a cohesive business development process. While this lead generation system is not guaranteed it does seem to be a sound concept. The real question is does it work. For Mercury Leads, it is a sales lead system that definitely seems to present good ideas on how to get in. At the same time, many of the ideas presented in the book seem redundant. Preparing and executing follow up steps have been a part of the sales lead process forever. The tactics that sets this book apart is what happens behind the scenes. Using several ‘leverage points’ the lead generation system is designed to cause your targets to be talking about you or your product before you even talk to them in person. This is where the aforementioned key engagers become essential in your pursuit of a sale. One example Boylan gives in the book outlines letters that he sends out to several targets in a business that trigger the competitiveness engager. In these letters he describes how he is already talking to several of their competitors about his product. Boylan believes the targets are much more likely to let you in the door because their competitive instincts compel them to learn what their competitors already know about you and your product.

This book describes a system that, on the surface, seems to be a bulletproof idea. However, this system seems a bit coercive at some points and, if placed the wrong hands, I could see how people could make some wrong turns. Nonetheless there are several good ideas presented in the book and was definitely a good read.  We give the book a thumbs up.

The Fifteen Steps:

Preparation:

1. Define what you need vs. what you want
2. Do your homework
3. Develop a prospect profile
4. Understand your prospect’s nature; key drivers such as competitiveness or opportunity for gain.
5. Crystallize the net benefits of your offer
6. Know your competitors net benefits and your key points of difference
7. Reality Check: Why do you deserve to get in?
8. Crystallize the net benefits of granting you access
9. Take stock of your firepower
10. Check your attitude

Execution

1. Prepare your initial communication and put it in play
2. Flush out your prospect
3. Dance, Sponge, and Reiterate
4. Align and champion your offer
5. Open their door

Book Review – The Power To Get In, by Michael Boylan is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!

• 23 percent had bought the product or service advertised from the advertiser or a competitor.
• 67 percent said they were still in the market planning to buy.

And, looking back at older inquiries, they found that of those who bought:

• 11 percent purchased within 3 months of inquiring.
• 17 percent purchased within 4-6 months.
• 25 percent purchased within 7-12 months.
• 47 percent took more than a year to buy.

What are the best practices for lead nurturing?  To us it’s a combination of touch points that involves a multi-channel ongoing effort (not a campaign) to place your company “top of mind” with your prospects. 

A process which we’ve found to resonate with prospects particular if you’re doing lead generation of the complex sale involves some or all of the following:

• Targeted Profiling – The 40/40/20 rule in Direct Marketing of the importance of list/offer/package needs to be updated, particularly when you use your website and internet marketing as the lever. The list or prospect profile is vitally important. Mercury Lead’s experience has shown that up to 60% of your sales success can come from some simple tricks of the trade and a razor sharp profile.
• Intelligent Engagement – Requires highly trained teleprospecting talent who are expert in nurturing (there’s that word again) gatekeepers, and motivating the prospect to consent to the personal meeting, virtual event, or minimally future communications so you can win mindshare over time.
• Creating Interest – You can’t hook the big fish if you’re using the wrong bait!  All aspects of your lead nurturing effort need to be considered.  Today’s Chief Executives are increasingly being held accountable for performance and you will too.  Your brand or solution better come equipped with a quick path to ROI.  This requires that you articulate the WIFM (What’s In It For Me?) equation, through a multi channel lead generation process including targeted website and landing page content, killer value propositions,  all centered around your prospects problem or missed opportunity. 
• Call-To-Action – Remember in today’s impatient world you have 8 seconds or 2.3 clicks to make this happen or you lose the fish.  Every time you communicate with your prospect whether through a personal call, email, user group, or social mechanisms you need to provide a reason for your prospect to take action.  Some channels require direct and motivating CTA’s like pay-per-click advertising or vertical specific landing page deployment while other tactics are more of a soft sell.  SEO Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing are examples, but in all cases a Call-To-Action is needed.
• Creating Thought Leadership – Let’s face it, the best lead generation strategies will yield a small percentage of immediate opportunities (or A leads) for your company.  What then happens with B& C opportunities?  This is where most companies fail to have a long term vision.  Mercury Leads has customers where up to 20 touches are planned over a period of 2 or more years.  This is particularly important when selling a high ticket item with a long sales cycle.  Creating thought leadership is done through creating value in your prospects eyes over time.  Tactically this can incorporate many of the channels discussed above, and you need to strategize what works best with your prospect.  There is a fine line between being informative, staying in touch with useful information and being obnoxious. 

Lead nurturing is very much like fishing.  You need to plan to fish in the right spots, have the best gear, and irresistible bait, but most importantly patience and you will catch your limit.

Lead Nurturing Your Prospects for Higher Yield is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!

• 44% of all mobile users checked their mobile in the last 30 minutes.
• 86% are between 18-44 years old & 54% make over $50k a year.
• 68% own a smartphone.
• 45% say that when they wake up checking their smartphone is the first or second thing they do (smartphone was 2nd to going to the bathroom.

Even more compelling, average purchase intent of mobile marketing is 5x of online marketing.  Simply stated people use their mobile to “save time” or to “kill time”, and they can do this anywhere or anytime, giving the media instant dominance over online marketing.  So how can you use Mobile Marketing to enhance your B2B marketing?  The following are ideas for ways in which Mobile can be utilized as part of a B2B marketing/communication strategy:

1. Lead Generation – Offer something of value in exchange for signing up to your ‘opt-in’ list; provide potential customers a link to a white-paper, a special discount, a video, or other standard B2B strategic tools in exchange for adding themselves to your prospect list via Mobile opt-in.
2. News/Updates – Important and time-sensitive customer updates can be sent directly to your opted-in clients using SMS (text) messaging. Further, people like being ahead of the crowd and being among “the first” to know something; send your customers updates about product launches, product updates or upcoming events.
3. Emergency Notification – SMS (text) messaging is a great way to notify your employees or customers quickly. Send critical updates of last-minute event location changes or just before your company’s important meetings.
4. Special Promotions – Communicate with your customers, distributors or franchises via SMS with the details about special promotions they can offer to customers.
5. Employee Assignments – Improve your customer service and dispatch employees to their next customer location via text messaging.
6. Presentations – Communicate with your audience during in-person or webinar presentations, conduct polling.
7. Customer Service – Many companies offer customer support and problem resolution via text messaging. This can save you money and help you channel problem tickets more effectively.
8. Events – Implement a text messaging marketing strategy to promote weekly meetups or networking events for members, or remind employees about upcoming meetings. Send out key logistic information like changes of venue or detailed parking instructions. You can even take event registration information via text!
9. Customer Payments – Use mobile technology to allow your field-service reps to take customer payments via mobile; get immediate payment, encrypt customers credit card information, and manage payments risk-free!
10. Trade Shows – Use Mobile at trade shows to exchange information with prospects; allow them to enter contests, request and receive company information,  or see a video about your product or service.  Send text alerts to attendees about your next presentation so they’ll have time to get there before it starts!

As you can see there is a lot that you can do as B2B marketers to use mobile marketing in your communications mix.  As we know, B2B marketing involves multiple touch points with well though out lead cultivation process incorporated.  Mobile can be one of the tactics deployed to make you a thought leader in your industry and this leads to more business.  What are you waiting for?

Is B2B Ready for Mobile Marketing? is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!

b2b lead generation

1. Create a Game Plan:
The big reason why most lead generation marketing strategies fail is lack of planning. All too often ideas get implemented into action without the proper foresight to know if the idea is tangible or not. Carefully plan out a lead generation strategy from beginning to end and try to come up with possible problems that might arise. Before you start any of that, you need to clearly define your b2b lead generation goal. What do you want SEO to do for your company? Generate leads? Increase your online presence? Create sales?

2. Evaluate Your Resources Honestly:
Before you being your search engine optimization marketing quest, you need to honestly evaluate if your company has the capabilities to perform the task. Many times companies will sign up for the whole package only to find that SEO is an ongoing and arduous process. Ask yourself if you have the personnel to manage the job or if you will need to outsource the project. This involves content developers, programmers, competitive researchers and technical personnel to handle code and server issues. After your site is properly optimized it is going to take an ongoing team to promote the site, keep it current with fresh content and build a network through backlinking. Is your team knowledgeable with all aspects of SEO? Once you have determined that you have the necessary personnel and you have a good plan, you need to figure out if you have the budget to accomplish the task. Do you have the long-term budget to do search engine optimization marketing correctly?

3. Establishing Metrics:
After your goals have been set you need to see if your lead generation strategies are working. Different companies will have different goals for their search engine optimization marketing campaigns. Before you start your campaign you should implement analytics software into your websites code to track your progress. A lot of companies view an SEO campaign as a success by the amount of #1 rankings they achieve. This way of looking at things is irrelevant to the success of a lead generation campaign. Search results can be radically different depending on what computer you’re logged on to, if you’re currently in your Google Account or by the location of the searcher (Geotracking). You should be looking for keyword rankings over a period of time, the number of people coming to your site based upon keywords and most importantly conversions. It doesn’t matter if you bring 2,000,000 people to your site. If they don’t pick up the phone or fill out that form you are ultimately wasting your b2b lead generation efforts.

4. Ongoing Promotion:
Search engine optimization marketing is not a “One and Done” strategy. Search engines view websites almost like living creatures in the sense if they don’t grow and evolve they will not be ranked as important as other sites. Once you have chosen the right keywords, that fit your business, are ranked highly and have low competition, then you must implement those keywords into your content. Content is King! It is not enough anymore to simply stuff your website with keywords. Your lead generation team needs to produce regular content, promote the site through social networks using micro sites and landing pages as well as building an extensive backlinking network.

5. Establishing a Long-Lasting Image
Search engine optimization marketing is just one tool your company can use in this new age of digital media. SEO should be integrated with social media, video, podcasts, webinars, lead nurturing, email marketing, directory listings, affiliate marketing, mobile and sms marketing, pay per click and teleprospecting. All of these b2b lead generation tools put together, along with traditional marketing efforts, should create a long-lasting brand for your company that creates excitement for your customers. Coordination between public relations, brand managers, the creative team, sales and the website team takes a lot of effort but only through teamwork will your marketing campaigns pay off.

To Your Success,

John Clifford

Five Tips To Establish Successful Search Engine Optimization Marketing Campaigns For Your Business In 2010 is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!

There are two main components to any undertaking, marketing related or not, that determine if the endeavor will be successful: Research and Testing.  All too often we see b2b lead generation campaigns falter because someone jumped the gun or failed to refine their processes until they were running at optimal efficiency. Today, I’m going to talk about the importance of marketing testing and how you can immediately improve your marketing campaigns through simple tests.

Sales lead generation is one of the more interesting sub-industries simply because things are constantly changing. New ideas, processes and technology make b2b lead generation an evolving science. It is because things are changing that, we as sales lead generation professionals, must constantly test our work to make sure we are getting the best possible gains from our efforts. Marketing testing is a great concept but is wasted if you don’t have tangible methods of testing.

Marketing testing protocol contains 6 major parts: the question, testing variables, metrics, validation, results and interpretation. You should establish a plan for these six components before any actual marketing test takes place. The question, pertains to what you hope to answer i.e. what conversion beckon will produce a better click through rate? Ask yourself what you are hoping to achieve to come up with a primary or secondary market research question.

In the testing variables phase you want to clearly describe what you are specifically going to test. Make sure to include what will become your variables as well as establish a control sample. For example if you are testing a new landing page to see which design works better, you need to establish various options to test. Option one could be a large table with details on the offer. Option 2 could be a small table with less detail. Option 3 could contain no table and only an offer and a form to fill out. The key is to test each one against one another and establish a clear winner.

The third marketing testing protocol is metrics. Metrics are considered the, “what” phase in a marketing test. You need to determine specifically what you are going to measure in your sales lead generation tests. This could be a number of different things from click through rate, conversion rate, number of times a whitepaper has been downloaded or the number of clicks on a flash piece to an a special offer. It really is up to you what you are going to test and what type of b2b lead generation strategy you are using.

The fourth testing phase is called validation. In the validation phase you are going to determine various factors regarding the actual marketing test itself. Such factors include the sample size needed to perform an accurate test, the time frame required to gather a sizeable test sample, the length of the test itself and any outside influences that might be a factor during a sales lead generation test. Some outside factors to take note of are selection effect (a biased sample), using skewed analytics software (using analytics software which interferes with the code of a website thus making the webpage display incorrectly) and the timing effect (running a b2b lead generation test during peak months or slow months or running a test on a weekend vs. a weekday.)

The fifth phase in marketing testing is the results phase. The results phase is fairly straightforward, it is important to keep accurate data throughout the duration of the test. The last phase of testing is interpretation. It is during the interpretation phase of a test where the most insight can be gained; not only for the specific marketing test but also for future tests. Notes and comments should be filed away so that you can learn from your experiment and build upon it at a later time.

One of the important aspects to keep in mind regarding testing in sales lead generation is to never stop testing. A common mistake b2b lead generation professionals make is to test once and then run with the results. Once you run a marketing test and achieve optimal results you should take your best results and see if you can top them. Many times if you run a marketing test three or four different times you will see better results than you previously thought you would. With some practice in testing you will start to see better results with your marketing campaigns.

To Your Success,

Michael Cordova

The Importance of Testing is a post from: Lead Generation Strategies: No Longer A One-Hit Wonder!