LeadFocus

1. Quality vs. Quantity and Understanding the Real Cost Per Lead (rCPL™)

Marketers have learned the hard way that a poor quality lead, even if it came at a very low price, will cost a lot of money and time to follow through, only to end up with no deal closed. In the long run, that list of low quality, low cost leads that you just picked up may require more time and effort to convert than the sales-ready leads that seem to be a bit out of your budget. The Real Cost Per Lead (rCPL™) takes into account the amount of time and resources your sales people need to engage, nurture, and eventually close a lead into a sale, and adds that figure to the initial lead acquisition cost. Identifying the rCPL™ for a lead purchase may in fact show that purchasing premium, higher quality leads will actually cut costs in the long run.

2. A/B Test Lead Generation Sources and Strategies for Measurable Results

Apply the core principles of the scientific method to your marketing strategy:

1. Assign a single, testable variable. People respond differently to different ques. Something as simple as the color of the text on the page can increase lead conversions and click-throughs by leaps and bounds. Make sure to test one variable at a time in order to accurately attribute success/failure to the correct factor.
2. Conduct the experiment. Launch each campaign under the same circumstances to minimize bias from external factors such as differing times of day, etc.
3. Record your findings. It’s as easy as writing down how many clicks, downloads and conversions each campaign generated.
4. Analyze and identify the successful variant for future use. Answer this question based on your findings: Why did campaign A generate more leads than campaign B?
5. Repeat! Experimentation never stops. Create new and improved tests using the knowledge you’ve acquired to build upon, and replicate past success.

3. Identify Decision Makers & Influencers

Lots of people play a part in a typical B2B purchase decision and naturally, identifying them is an important activity for any influencer relations program. You need to know who they are, including their name, job and location.

Start by thinking about the different kinds of people likely to be involved in purchase decisions for your products and services. This exercise helps you form a more complete picture of the influencer landscape. It also helps you avoid falling into ruts. This step encourages you to think about new types of influencers that may have emerged in your market and types of influencers your company tends to overlook. Once you’ve identified who buys and who influences the buy, you can begin focusing your sales efforts by priority.

4. Understand Marketing vs. Sales Perception of Qualified Lead Generation

Aligning both marketing and sales is an extremely important issue that should be addressed in order to ensure a positive lead generation experience. Hundreds upon thousands of pages have been written about the inherent communication gap between marketing and sales efforts within a company. Here’s our recent take on it.

5. Don’t Count Your Chickens Before They’ve Hatched (cliche, we know, but it’s still applicable)

The same conversation happens so often:

Sales: Marketing does not know what they are doing, their leads are bad

Marketing: Sales is not smart enough to follow-up on our leads

The core of the problem in lead generation management is the definition of a lead and metrics that are used to measure marketing success. You should consider taking the time to meet with your sales team to determine specific buying personas and define your company’s definition of a lead. It is better to take the time to work through these details to keep both marketing and sales efforts on the same page.

In most cases when working with a lead generation vendor, you’ll find that simply acquiring a lead report and uploading it into your CRM or marketing automation platform is not that easy. Unavoidable issues will arise, like renaming the form-fields, manually translating field values to match yours, having to navigate through different views and roll-ups, etc.

We developed Custom Templates as a direct response to these pain points, and we really think that you’ll love it.

Here are some of the features:

Flexible Email Delivery Settings allow you to receive custom lead reports on specified dates, fitting in seamlessly with your existing lead management workflow.

Form Field Translations give you the freedom to fully customize lead report field names and automatically map them to those predefined by the Madison Logic platform.

Custom-Map Field Values. Say your campaign has “Country” listed as a form field, with a drop-down list of available values to choose from (i.e. “United States.”) Custom-mapping field values will display all the country values by default, and gives you the option to assign your own country codes that correspond to your database or CRM system set up. For example, we display “United States”. Your system requires “US”.

Custom Values for Smarter Lead Tracking and Scoring. Add a custom lead score to every lead generated with the Madison Logic platform by creating a static value tag, and your CRM system will automatically attribute the tag score to Madison Logic. For example: For each Madison Logic lead, you would like to append a “Lead Score” value of “Sales Ready” Simply  enter “Lead Score” in the field “Additional Column Header” and “Sales Ready” in the static value field.

Easy.

Enhanced Lead Delivery Templates are a small part of our initiative to reinvent online lead generation for B2B marketers.

Many marketers have learned the hard way that a poor quality lead, even if it came at a very low price, will cost a lot of money and time to follow through, only to end up with no deal closed. In the long run that list of low quality, low cost leads that you just picked up may require more time and effort to convert than the sales-ready leads that seem to be a bit out of your budget. The Real Cost Per Lead (rCPL™) takes into account the amount of time and resources your sales people need to engage, nurture, and eventually close a lead into a sale, and adds that figure to the initial lead acquisition cost. Identifying the rCPL™ for a lead purchase may in fact show that purchasing premium, higher quality leads will actually cut costs in the long run.

Take these two scenarios for instance:

Assume that your average deal size is $15,000 and your sales rep costs you an average of $7,000 per month fully burdened (Salesperson fully burdened (Salary, Commissions / Expenses) – this could vary significantly up or down based on location of hire).

Scenario 1
Let’s say that you acquired 10 leads, each at $25 for a total of $250, and provided these to your sales rep. Two closed after taking 6 months to close. Therefore, it cost you $42,250 plus commissions to earn $30,000 in revenues.

Scenario 2
You decide to try another vendor that offers higher quality leads, but at a slightly higher Cost Per Lead. You received 10 leads each for $120 or for a total of $1,200. However, four of these leads closed within three months. During the same six months, with these higher quality leads, you are able to close 8 deal, generating $120,000 in revenue for a total cost of $43,200 plus commissions.

Although the first set of leads looked ten times cheaper at only $20 versus $200, the quality of these leads was so poor that they ended up costing you nearly three times as much as a percentage of revenue generated—i.e. it cost you $1.41 for each $1 of revenue you produced to process these leads. In the meantime the “expensive” leads cost you only $.37 for each dollar of revenue, since their quality was better–they closed at a higher rate and faster than the much cheaper deals.

It is very important that you factor in closing ratios and sales cycles when you calculate the cost of leads, not just what those leads cost you per unit when you acquired them. Ultimately what you want is revenue and not leads. Since you have to process the leads until they are closed won or lost, you have more costs to factor in than just input cost of leads.

Our resident Healthcare Category Manager, Lauren Conroy, has just come back from the HIMSS12 Annual Conference in Las Vegas. We had a chance to catch up and get her take on the show and why it matters for healthcare marketers.

ML: What did you think about the show?

LC: The show was great. There were close to 1,500 exhibitors, 300+ education sessions on the latest advances in healthcare technology, including mobile health, business and clinical analytics, connecting with consumers, care coordination, accountability for care and meaningful use. I would say that the only negative comment I found was that the show was quite overwhelming.

ML: Why was it important for you to attend?

LC: HIMSS It is the most comprehensive and authoritative knowledge event in Healthcare IT today. The healthcare industry is undergoing a massive transformation and healthcare IT has taken a leading role in streamlining the delivery of new models of care. HiMSS provides a platform for industry leaders to convene and demonstrate solutions that can truly impact efficiencies in healthcare. It is important for Healthcare marketers who are faced with more and more challenges to be cost effective and efficient to know that there are other ways to generate leads outside of events marketing, google adwords and email marketing.

“Meaningful Use” was definitely a main topic for all exhibitors and attendees. For all Healthcare advertisers and marketers, it has been crucial to understand the needs of all the healthcare institutions and requirements deemed by the government. It has been a hectic time for all healthcare institutions meeting the qualifications listed in “Meaningful Use” rules. Smart healthcare advertisers and marketers can help by publishing beneficial digital assets to these institutions to make this transition as easy and worthwhile as possible.

ML: What specific strategy were you discussing with these marketers?

LC: Healthcare marketers are definitely understanding, and welcoming programs that are most cost effective on their marketing dollars. Building up branding and awareness is always important to any marketer. When we are able to tie that into qualified leads for their sales team, the entire business reaps the benefits and the marketer is the hero. The Direct Leads program drives cost effective healthcare lead generation through marketing efforts and brand exposure on premium healthcare publications.

ML:Any final words?

LC: I can’t wait for HIMSS13!

Google and Compete also polled more than 1,600 B2B executives in the US and tracked the online activity of Compete’s panel of US web users to and from a select set of B2B websites. In addition to a high preference for search engine use among B2B influencers, the study also showed an increased reliance on more visual information sources. Data collected from Feb 2010 to March 2011 showed B2B-branded searches on YouTube more than doubled in number during that time. And as more brands use video content assets to share product-specific information, provide demos and offer testimonials, these numbers should continue to grow.

Since June of last year, Madison Logic has been launching site search across all its 300+ publishers as another media outlet for marketers to target their best buyers.  When a user is researching for products/services, relevant white papers, case studies, and events will appear in the search results. On average, we are seeing upwards of 5-7% CTR.