The Inbound Lead Optimization Engine:

A Blueprint for Filling Your Funnel Fast

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Everybody talks about leads and everyone wants leads. Executive teams measure marketing teams based on how many leads they generate. Lead management is a numbers game. 1,000 inbound leads could turn into 400 qualified leads. From that, maybe only 60 will be real opportunities from which just 6 deals are won. How can organizations win at this numbers game? While ideas on how to capture leads exist, many organizations lack the best practices needed to optimize leads.

For your Lead Optimization Engine to drive the expected value, several interconnected disciplines need to come together on a constant basis: 1) thought leadership content creation, 2) lead generation, 3) lead conversion and management, and 4) lead measurement. If you don’t have the entire engine in motion, results won’t follow. You must think holistically. Lead optimization occurs when lead gen and lead management come together with great content.

Inbound vs. Outbound: This is an article about inbound

Inbound marketing is like net fishing (broad, wide, drawing people in). Outbound marketing is like spearfishing (targeted, precise, arrow in the hand). The term ABM (account-based marketing) is really synonymous with outbound. To be clear, this paper is about inbound marketing. Not because we feel it’s more important than outbound… it just is. Balance between inbound and outbound is really important. For most organizations, we recommend a 50/50 split of time, resources and budget between inbound and outbound. But every organization is different.

This is a paper about generating inbound leads. As we say in Iowa… “if you build it, they will come!”

Thought Leadership Creation

Lead Management

Lead Generation

Lead Measurement

The Lead Optimization Engine

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Target Audience & Buyer Personas ALWAYS come first!

As growth leaders, we’re going to make the assumption that everything you do starts with your target audience. You certainly have a strong, proven go-to-market strategy and you know which industry verticals, size of company, market segments, and buyer personas you’re going after, right? If the answer is YES, then please proceed. If the answer is NO, then proceed with caution. Most of the time, when growth leaders skip over, or gloss over this crucial step – either intentionally or inadvertently – then the Lead Optimization Engine usually does not work or meet expectations.

• Yes / No / Not Sure We know which industry verticals and segments we need and want to sell to (healthcare, CPG, retail, financial services, insurance, education, non-profit, etc.)

• Yes / No / Not Sure We know the size and type of companies we need and want to sell to (size, stage, funding, location, etc.).

• Yes / No / Not Sure We know the buyer personas we need and want to sell to (titles, levels, personalities, etc.).

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Thought Leadership Creation:

It All Starts With Content Marketing

Great inbound lead gen is all about getting people in your target audience raise their hands and say “I want to learn more!” You do this when you share something new, different and exciting with just the right amount of sizzle – yes, just like a sizzling plate of steak fajitas – thought leadership also needs to bring the right amount of sizzle to the party.

Content fuels lead generation. You need a solid mix of broad, targeted and product content.

• BroadContent: Applies to all clients/prospects, big industry trends and opportunities, mix of strategic insight and tactical execution.

• TargetedContent: Verticals – like Retail, or CPG, or Entertainment, etc., uses industry-specific vernacular so readers feel at home, and cases studies and testimonials add industry credibility.

• ProductContent: Talks about ROI of investing in specific capabilities, don’t make it a sales pitch – keep it educational and best practices focused, and focuses on use cases and applications – what problems does this solution solve?

Packaging Makes All the Difference in the World

Just like during holidays and birthdays, packaging matters. What size box do you want to put your content in? What paper do you want to use? What type of bow do you put on top? White papers, byline articles, keynote presentations, case studies, videos, mobile application, games, podcasts – these are all common vehicles for packaging your content for maximum impact. Packaging of the content all comes down to your audience.

What Makes Good Content Good?

Obviously, really good content needs to stand out. It needs to be easy to consume, easy to understand and easy to share. It’s like telling a joke.

The things that always stick with me about a really good joke are a) it’s funny, of course, b) it was easy to tell, c) it was easy to remember and d) the ability to go re-tell that joke to someone else. The same is true with business content. Imagine a joke that wasn’t funny, was overly long, delivered horribly and when it was all said and done, you couldn’t remember a thing. Not a very good joke, huh? The same is true for business content.

Best-in-class thought leadership content offers a strong and unique point of view and is not a regurgitation of old industry thinking. It needs to be squarely centered on solving problems and should shed a light on the most important audience to all of us – the end consumer.

World-class content is the shining star of your Lead Optimization Engine. The better the content, the more effective each of the lead gen programs discussed in the next section will be at capturing the hearts, minds, and wallets of your target audience.

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The best content and campaigns over index on customer-centric messaging. Turn down the what and how focus, and turn up the WHY focus. Spend more time talking about solving problems and less time selling.

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Lead Generation:

Prospects Raise Their Hands When They Get Excited

Lead gen is all about catching peoples’ attention and getting them to act on it. It’s always been a challenge to get people to do this and it’s gotten even harder because people are so busy managing information overload and other distractions these days. How do you get through to someone and say, “open your eyes and ears to something new and better? It will help you do your job better!”

Activating content is really fun because you’re out in the market doing innovative, clever, and exciting things. Marketers have lots of inbound lead generation tactics at their disposal to activate thought leadership content and engage the target audience.

1. Webinars

2. ContentSyndication

3. EmailMarketing

4. DirectMail

5. SocialMedia

6. PaidSearch,SEO,SEM

7. Advertising-onlineandoffline

8. PublicRelations/AnalystRelations

9. MobileMarketing

10.IndustryEvents/TradeShows

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Here are some of the most common techniques used to generate inbound leads:

Architecting The Right Lead Gen Playbook Determines The Winners

Pre-season and before every game, a football coach is always formulating and re-formulating the playbook. Calling the right plays and having the right players on the field ultimately determines who wins the game (and sometimes a little luck!). The Lead Gen playbook is the same. The marketer needs to come up with a “big picture” lead gen plan that forecasts across the entire year. This playbook needs to establish the priorities, timing and budgets.

Each individual lead gen campaign or program also needs its own playbook. For example, what are all the steps that will be taken to achieve success with a webinar? What other programs will be deployed in parallel?

We should promote the webinar at an upcoming event, and do PR outreach promoting the webinar. Let’s unleash a mobile marketing campaign, and let’s do some online banner advertising. All of these activities work together – like the coach’s playbook – to bring home the ultimate prize – a healthy pile of qualified leads.

It’s also important to remember that you will rarely choose just one a la carte menu item for a campaign. You will have several activities running simultaneously, creating a ground swell. The marketing budget needs to be closely monitored and funds need to be strategically allocated. This is the stage where the marketing bill can get run up very quickly. Sometimes you need to throttle back on spending and other times you’ve got to seize the opportunity and “double down” your investment.

A solid content activation program should engage the targeted prospects/clients multiple times and from multiple places.

But there is a unifying force that’s consistent across all of these – it’s the call to action. All of these activation levers need to drive people to download the content or register for the webinar or event. In doing so, we are collecting information from people who are raising their hands. We now have the info we need to move to the next phase. If you’re not introducing that “tell me who you are” step, how would you ever be able to turn interest into dollars?

All the while, you’re building your prospect and client database. In this era where we read and hear about how “big data” is the future and data is now the CMO’s most potent weapon on a daily basis, we know just how vital our own customer database really is.

Staying Top of Mind Is Everything

Remember back to Marketing 101 in college – marketing is all about repetition, repetition, repetition. Staying top of mind with your key prospects and clients is vital so when they’re ready, you’re there. If you’re not there, your competitors will be.

Top of mind programs need to be designed and deployed alongside the lead generation programs to maintain a strong 1-2 punch.

• 1 = generate immediate interest• 2 = maintain on-going interest

Techniques for staying top of mind include newsletters, meaningful news/PR alerts and continuing to segment your client database so your targeting is personalized.

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Lead Conversion:

Where Most Organizations Fail

Now the marketing and sales teams have a huge pile of leads. Not a few stragglers, but a groundswell of takers. Many marketing organizations struggle with the “what now?” syndrome. What do we do now that we generated all this demand?

This applies to a race, a baseball game, and turning inquiries into cash. It’s time to convert at scale. Lead Management is a discipline in and of itself and certainly deserves its own paper. Here are some highlights that help bring the Lead Optimization Engine to life.

First of all, this absolutely must be a collaborative effort between sales and marketing.

Thissayingisimportant:

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It’s not how you start; it’s how you finish.

The process needs to be hatched collaboratively by both, effort needs to be applied collaboratively by both

and both sides of the coin need to stay committed to the crucial task

of capitalizing on the interest.

Marketing

Sales

Simplified Lead Conversion Process

The process is a critical foundational piece. A simple framework that goes like this…

There are lots of details within each of these steps, but at the end of the day, this is what needs to happen. 12

Step 1:Leads come in and go to marketing

Step 2: Marketing does a first pass qualification and assigns them out to a BDR/SDR team and/or directly to the sales org (each company handles this routing a little differently)

Step 3: BDR/SDR team and/or Sales follows up on the leads and determines if they are real opportunities

Step 4: If they are real deals, then the leads enter the pipeline

Step 5: Sales works the sales cycles and ultimately the deals get closed (most of the time... we hope!)

In order to execute lead conversion at scale – for hundreds or thousands of leads – a few things are important.

1. You’ve got to have at least one resource dedicated to this process. It can be a more junior marketing coordinator or sales support specialist but this work is not getting done on its own. Although this work isn’t rocket science, taking care of the volume of leads is time consuming.

2. Marketing automation technology greatly helps with this process. Systems like Marketo, HubSpot, Pradot and Eloqua do a beautiful job of automating, helping you grow your database, and nurturing it in ways that drive real revenue. Automation is a wonderful thing when it comes to lead conversion.

3. CRM plays a big role in this process too. Systems like Salesforce do a really nice job of making it easy to automate everything. It’s the recording system for opportunity tracking so you’ve got everything lead-related under one roof. Having a CRM system in place that sales embraces and uses on a daily basis is very helpful. I’ve seen organizations struggle with clunky CRM systems that no one, namely sales, likes to use.

Lead Conversion can be a lot of fun when it’s a collaborative process between sales and marketing and leads to hearing the cash register ringing regularly. The entire organization rallies around this significant event so spending time to get sales and marketing working together up-front is the way to go.

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Lead Meaurement:

Strong Growth Leaders / CMOs Are Like Investigators

Speaking of hearing the cash register ring… how do we know if this whole system is working or not? How do we know if the money we put into this process is giving us a solid return? The answers lie in the last, but not final, step – Lead Measurement.

Some might call this reporting, but I like to think of lead measurement as answer finding. It’s all about discovering answers to really important questions. Which campaigns are having the most impact? Which customer segments are responding to which programs? Which content is performing best when we try this test? Which creative gives us the best results?

Great growth marketing executives like to ask lots of questions and every question has a very specific reason. We need to get to the bottom of things so we can learn and assess how we’re doing and answer the all important question every CEO and Board member asks… what have you done for me lately?

All disciplines in business are now managed and assessed based on KPIs (key performance indicators). Marketing is certainly no exception. I’m a big believer in establishing a Growth Engine Scoreboard that delivers important information about Lead Conversion success without going too crazy.

The executive and sales teams don’t need 55 pages of Excel spreadsheets outlining every last detail about lead gen progress. They need a dashboard that charts progress on a regular basis and outlines key metrics.

Earlier I mentioned that lead measurement is the last, but not the final step. The final step – learning and improving – is really a perpetual step in that it never ends. We’re constantly learning, improving and evolving this entire engine making it better and better as we do it more and more.

Scale is an important dynamic to consider when thinking about lead conversion best practices. Everything we’ve discussed needs to be set-up and managed for scalability. When you have this holistic Lead Optimization Engine up-and-running, your business isn’t just growing 3, 5 or 7% a year. It starts to double and triple its growth and beyond. Getting this engine in place can be tricky and it does take time and the right type of leadership, energy and money, but when you get it right, your customers, investors and employees will be high fiving you all the way down the hall.

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Getting Started:

5 Steps to Jump Starting Your Lead Optimization Engine

Hopefully after reading this paper you’re amped about the possibilities of setting up your own Lead Optimization Engine. But, you might also be feeling a bit overwhelmed. Below are five steps you can start taking today to jumpstart your Lead Optimization Engine.

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Step 1 Develop your own editorial calendar

• Media companies and publishers live and breathe by the editorial calendar and so should marketing organizations committed to developing great thought leadership content. • The editorial calendar should… o Spaell out the type of content that needs to be created – broad, targeted, and/or product and solution focused. o Outline the ideal packaging for each piece – white paper, article, keynote, video, case study, etc. o Define the timing and sequencing of the content – by the week/month/quarter/year.

Step 2 Formulate your Lead Gen Playbook

• Great things rarely happen without great plans. Documenting your Lead Gen Playbook is essential. • The Lead Gen Playbook should… o Articulate the big lead gen campaigns that will occur throughout the year. Getting the timing mapped out at a high-level and a more specific timeline is essential. o Outline the marketing programs that will be deployed for each campaign, strategically selecting the best combination of tactics from the a la carte menu. o Specify the budget and resources. Lead gen programs can be executed on a shoestring using guerilla marketing tactics and/or can be brought to market in a very big and bold way with significant capital investments. What are you working with?

Step 3 Get with Sales and Cast Your Own Lead Conversion Process

• To capitalize on all the leads, sales and marketing need to be fully aligned, and ready to take action. • The Lead Conversion process should… o Define an overall process for managing leads. What are all the steps that will take place? o Specify who’s going to do what. How much qualification will marketing do? When does sales want to see the leads? How should we rate the quality of the leads (hot, medium, cold)? o Confirm the resources that will be in place to manage the volume of leads.

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Step 4 Build Your Lead Optimization KPI Scorecard

• Creating a pragmatic lead scorecard should be fairly simple and straightforward. Don’t over think this step and try to over engineer the reporting framework. Keep it simple! • The Lead Optimization Scorecard should… o Outline key metrics for a specified period of time such as: number of leads, lead gen goal, % of goal, opportunities, conversion rate, pipeline value, deals close/won, value of deals won, etc. o Make sure you formulate a game plan for how you’re going to get at this data. Which systems? o Determine who will access the data and maintain the KPI scorecard.

Step 5 Establish A Growth Leadership Forum

• Going back to the first point made in this paper, everyone loves to talk about leads. There are always lots of ideas and energy surrounding this topic from the executive team. To harness this energy, we’ve always found it very valuable to engage the executive team in this process from start to finish. • The Growth Leadership Forum should… o Provide the entire executive team with the ability to share their ideas and input about lead optimization efforts – past, current, and future. o Deliver benchmarks, both internally and externally in the marketplace, which help everyone see and feel the progress. Are we winning, losing or just maintaining steam? o Create an environment where the leadership team comes together to hatch big marketing ideas, discuss lessons learned and celebrate successes.

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Ready to scale your Lead Optimization Engine? SEG is your Growth Partner.

Building your Growth Engine is arguably the most strategic, and the most important part of your overall business. Many go at this quest alone, flying solo. For those we commend you and we are rooting for you.

Other companies realize that the stakes are too high, and time is too limited, so they team up with a “Growth Partner” who can help them get a high-performing revenue acceleration engine up-and-running quickly and cost effectively.

That’s where Sales Empowerment Group (SEG) comes into play. For the past 10 years we have partnered with over 100 high-growth companies to do everything you’ve read in this eBook… and more. Rather than an us vs. them mindset, we do everything together! We serve as one, integrated team driving growth and accelerating revenue.

You can learn more about how we partner with B2B companies looking to take their growth to the next level by checking out our robust library of case studies on our website.

We also invite you to watch a brief video featuring over 15 happy SEG clients explaining their experiences. Given that the BDR team is at the core of the Growth Engine, you might also like to check out the video of our alumni talking about their experiences going through the SEG program. Check out these videos below:

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Video testimonials Alumni showcase

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Sales Empowerment Group provides revenue acceleration services that help companies exceed their numbers through a unique BDR Farm System program. We work with private equity firms, fast growing startups, mid-size companies to Fortune 500. Our proven methodology, technology, and systematic approach allow us to determine the key areas for immediate revenue growth. We have the expertise, the talent (over 100 team members) and execution models to accelerate revenue for our clients. Visit our website to learn more: www.salesempowermentgroup.com