Lead Gen: Don’t Go for the Quick Sale

Here’s an interesting post by Mike Damphousse of Green Leads that I found through Funnelholic (thanks Craig) on how lead nurturing impacts the effectiveness of calling campaigns designed to secure qualified sales appointments. The conclusion, not surprisingly: that prospects who have been nurtured over time are much more likely (by a factor of 15 percent, according to this case study) to be both a) qualified, and b) receptive to a sales meeting.

More broadly, these results underline a lead generation philosophy that we have preached for the better part of a decade: that going for the quick sale – i.e. focusing your demand generation campaigns on identifying only highly qualified, “ready to meet with us” prospects, is not only inefficient, but can be a colossal waste of marketing dollars.

Demandbase: Converting More Web Visitors into Leads

An average conversion rate for a B2B landing page, if you believe the people who claim to measure such things, is around 4 percent. Conversion rates for organic traffic to a corporate Website may be as high as 10 percent or more. But even at those lofty standards, fully 90 percent of Web visitors remain anonymous. Put another way, as many as 90 cents of every marketing dollar will fail to generate a measurable, actionable lead.

Helping companies tap that 90+ percent of unconverted Web traffic is the focus of Demandbase, a marketing database and technology company based in San Francisco. I had the opportunity recently to learn more about Demandbase solutions, and came away intrigued by the potential their service offers for B2B marketers looking to squeeze a better return out of Web traffic, and in the process, make their demand generation dollars go further.

Top 5 Lead Management Excuses (with Poll)

According to a recent industry survey by Demand Gen Report , fewer than 10 percent of marketing executives who responded have automated lead nurturing strategies and processes in place. Furthermore, only 15% of those same respondents planned to deploy or expand their lead management initiatives in 2009.

As someone who sees clients achieving very real, tangible benefits of lead nurturing on a daily basis – higher click-to-lead conversions, fewer leads rejected by the sales force, shorter selling cycles, increased ROI from demand generation, and so on – it’s tough, frankly, to understand why automated lead management hasn’t been adopted by more organizations with greater urgency. Consider the facts:

5 Reasons to Include Branded Terms in Your Paid Search Campaign

A client writes: “If we include our company and product names as keywords in our PPC (paid search) campaign, won’t we simply be cannibalizing our SEO effort, i.e. paying for clicks that we otherwise would have generated for free?”

Answer: It’s true that you may have generated Web traffic from the same people anyway, but there are a multitude of reasons why including branded terms in your paid search campaign is a good idea. We find that including branded keywords in a PPC/SEM program can not only generate significant ROI but also improve the overall performance of a company’s search initiative. Consider the following:

Generating Blog Traffic (and Leads) Using Email Subscriptions

Either by the time you read this (or, if not, soon thereafter) this blog will have undergone a design facelift, its first since we launched it two years in April 2007. The new design is in sync with a similar upgrade (coming soon) of the CDI Website, as well as the monthly bulletin that goes out to all of you who subscribe to the blog via email. (A comp of the new email design is below – kudos to Don Joslin, our talented art director, for a fine job.)

As I have documented previously in this space (here and here), this blog was conceived as a replacement for a monthly e-newsletter that I had written dutifully, every month, for 10 years starting in 1996. As such, the fact that email subscriptions have played such a key role in the blog’s growth since then is not (alas) a result of any great strategic foresight on my part. In fact, quite the opposite – initially, the blog itself was simply the permanent repository for the content broadcast monthly to email subscribers.