The Challenge

Megan Verkamp, LHP’s Director of Content Strategy, explained that “historically, we’ve dealt mostly with internal combustion companies for traditional gas vehicles, but as we transitioned into more autonomous and electronic vehicle (EV) startups and mid-level companies, we needed effective ways to reach them.”

To start building awareness in the EV space, LHP adopted a simple approach to ABM — some paid social, email and display — but the company quickly realized it needed something more robust. In its first stab at ABM, the marketing team relied on a combination of paid social and retargeting through the company website with mixed results and uneven ROI.

The Solution

To gain more visibility into ABM activities — and build more predictable revenue plays — LHP partnered with RollWorks in 2021 with three core strategies in mind:

• Target and advance accounts in EV space;
• Reach $1BN+ companies in EV space; and
• General retargeting.

The first step for LHP was connecting RollWorks with its CRM, HubSpot.

“The data has been incredibly useful, from intent topics to who’s playing on our website or engaging with our ads,” explained Verkamp. “We track leads coming from RollWorks weekly. From there, dashboards in HubSpot show us who came in, and we’re able to pass that along to SDRs to follow up.”

In keeping with their goals, the LHP team primarily focuses on how many leads move down the funnel in a given month or quarter, which is a significant shift for LHP.

“If we didn’t have the integration, we’d just be tracking vanity metrics like click-through rates, impressions and clicks,” said Verkamp. “Because marketing was never seen as a lead generator until a few years ago, we must show the return for any investment we make. Being able to do that from the connection between RollWorks and HubSpot is fantastic.”

To encourage better alignment with sales, the marketing team also instituted monthly meetings to share metrics and trends.

The Results

Since choosing RollWorks as its ABM partner, LHP has increased leads, brand awareness and lead quality tenfold.

“Since introducing RollWorks over the past 16-18 months, we’ve seen an incremental jump in the quality of leads we’re reaching, as well as the value of those leads,” explained Verkamp. “This year alone we’re already seeing 3X the value of leads year on year.”

In 2022, the company saw so much ROI with RollWorks that the marketing team decreased Google-direct spend and cut back significantly on LinkedIn and Facebook advertising.

“We were doing the same thing on LinkedIn but spending 3X as much and not seeing nearly the same results,” added Verkamp. “RollWorks is getting visibility to customers we otherwise wouldn’t for a relatively low cost.”

The new investment strategy is working. With three recently closed $1M deals under its belt, the marketing team can confidently attribute these wins to the brand awareness and retargeting plays that RollWorks enables.

“Partnering with RollWorks has been incredible for our pipeline,” Verkamp explained. “It would never be on that list to cut the budget. We’re putting more into RollWorks because it benefits the business.”

The post How LHP Grew Average Lead Value By 3X appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Infer, a predictive applications provider, unveiled a new solution designed to increase conversion rates for cold accounts and use customized predictive models to identify high-quality leads.

The Net-New Leads solution blends market intelligence with predictive analytics through partnerships with data providers such as InsideView. This insight positions sales and marketing teams with new target accounts that have a higher propensity to buy. The solution intends to save businesses time and money by pushing pre-qualified contacts into Salesforce databases.

“Most list buys get a bad rap because they’re expensive and require you to sift through tens of thousands of cold leads — often making your reps waste time on outreach and research just to find out that the majority of the leads are duds,” said Vik Singh, co-founder and CEO of Infer. “With our Net-New Leads solution, however, we’re short circuiting that process by helping marketers and sales teams identify their pocket of high quality new targets immediately.”

The post Infer’s Net-New Leads Solution Identifies Account Intent appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Leading-edge tactics such as account-based marketing (ABM) and predictive tools are spurring greater sales and marketing alignment at all levels. According to preliminary results from a June 2015 Sales & Marketing Alignment survey from Ascend2 and Act-On Software, 73% say that marketing and sales alignment is critical to the overall success of their company, but only 17% report that they are completely aligned.

“The integration of marketing and sales technologies is improving over time,” said David Raab, Principal at Raab Associates. “For example, more systems can now synchronize data from custom objects as well as the basic lead, contact, and account objects.”

Progressive B2B companies are reaping the benefits of sales and marketing convergence. Some examples include:

Thomson Reuters, a B2B media company, was able to achieve a 23% increase in number of leads sent to sales with better alignment of its marketing and sales teams and technologies, which include Oracle’s Marketing Cloud. Other results include a 72% reduction in lead conversion time, and a 175% increase in revenue attributed to marketing. “The new, shared insight into our lead management funnel provides a clearer picture of the quality and quantity of leads needed to achieve revenue targets, enabling marketing to develop lead generation and nurturing strategies to engage the right prospects, in the right way, at the right time,” noted Mike Thompson, VP of Global Marketing Services, Intellectual Property & Science at Thomson Reuters.

Using their CRM and data from their CallidusCloud marketing automation system, Foremost Media started drip campaigns for existing customers. Revenues from their customer base jumped 30% in a year, and sales started getting calls about new projects from customers that had nothing to do with the contents of the campaign. “They were also able to use website visitor tracking to start generating leads from otherwise anonymous visitors to their website and pass those directly to sales, which gave them an entirely new lead flow,” said Giles House, CMO of CallidusCloud.

Technology Management Concepts (TMC), a professional services firm focusing on enterprise resource planning systems, has seen a 70% increase in customer engagement and a 45% increase in lead quality since implementing Marketo and linking it with its Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution. Working with Webfortis, a consulting services firm and Marketo partner, TMC integrated its platforms in order save time and create enhanced synergies between marketing and sales. “By synching our Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics CRM systems, our sales and marketing teams have greater visibility throughout the entire customer journey,” said Jennifer Harris, President of TMC.

ABM And Predictive Driving Alignment

To move forward with predictive tools and account-based marketing tactics, marketers need access to a salesperson’s interactions with a customer and vice versa.

“In order to create strong, personalized account-based marketing, marketers need to know everything going on with a customer and the interactions happening with them,” Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot. “Predictive analytics is no different. It requires really good down stream data like so that they can tie that back to future interactions.”

Both account-based marketing and predictive analytics rely heavily on the data compiled from marketing and sales technologies, but data is only valuable when it’s complete, up-to-date and accurate, noted Chris Lynch, Senior Director and Head of Product Marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud. “Without alignment, data quality can be compromised and teams won’t be able to analyze data effectively.”

As they look toward ABM and predictive tools, many B2B organizations are taking a more granular approach as they seek to integrate CRM and marketing. “We definitely see a lot of sales and marketing operations folks asking how the marketing and sales systems will integrate as they start to look at new solutions,” according to Adam B. Needles, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal at ANNUITAS. “We’re seeing less rogue adoption and a more thoughtful approach.”

Account-based marketing and predictive analytics allow marketers to ultimately deliver a heightened customer experience at scale, said Adam Blitzer, SVP and GM of Pardot, a Salesforce company. “In order for those strategies to be most effective, the customer data utilized to enact them needs to be representative of all the customer’s interactions with a brand, from marketing through sales.”

Still Some Hurdles To Overcome

CRM integrations can be complex due to the differences in individual sales and marketing tools. “The level of effort required to do a native, high performance, fully functional integration is non-trivial. It separates the well-designed and developed platforms from the jerry-built,” noted Atri Chatterjee, CMO of Act-On Software.

There are still many organizations with separate marketing and sales technologies that have been in place for a number of years.

“In organizations who have inadvertently siloed technology, budget for the rationalization of these systems can seem hard to justify,” CallidusCloud’s House said.

Sales and marketing systems were designed for different purposes, which makes integration challenging, observers noted. CRMs use a transaction-processing data structure (read/write one record at a time) while marketing systems use an analytical data structure (read and select many similar records at once). “This means that traditional CRM systems can’t also do large-scale marketing automation,” according to Raab. “It’s why Salesforce had to purchase ExactTarget and even now copies sales data into the marketing database rather than running both sales and marketing on one system.”

The integration of data from other platforms, such as webinars, into the sales and marketing systems is a critical next step. “When marketers use tools that do not integrate with other platforms integral to sales initiatives, they are leaving a lot of data on the table,” said Joe Hyland, CMO of ON24. “When silos remain, ROI suffers.”

Looking forward, CRM and marketing integration will enable communications that are more targeted and tailored to customer needs and preferences, Blitzer said. “Sales and marketing have the same goal: to maximize revenue and profit for the company. An aligned sales and marketing operation that delivers what customers want ultimately makes more money, faster.”

The post B2B Marketers Focus On CRM Integration To Improve Lead Quality And Visibility appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The report features analysis of how high performers excel in key marketing metrics; offers insight into 2014 marketing strategies; and identifies tips to improve overall marketing performance.

Some key finding of the study include:

• The majority of organizations have aggressive growth goals and conservative budgets, creating a potential misalignment of expectations;
• Organizations founded post-1990 are more social media savvy, have higher marketing technology utilization scores, and are better at creating and distributing content;
• Organizations lack strength and diversity in their lead sources. Key digital channels, including organic search, social media, blogging, and premium content, are all rated on average as weaknesses;
• Organizations lack confidence in their internal marketing teams, which are particularly weak in key digital marketing skills;
• Many organizations lack, or are underutilizing, fundamental marketing technologies, including call tracking, marketing automation, and marketing analytics;
• Marketing automation high performers have significantly stronger lead-to-sale conversion rates, cost of customer acquisition, and overall marketing scores; and
• Blogging high performers dominate all others in a number of critical marketing performance metrics, such as web site traffic, lead volume, and lead quality scores.

Click here to download the full report.

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The survey was designed to gauge marketers’ demand generation spending plans for 2013 and how those budgets compare to the overall marketing budgets. The survey also looked at how marketers will allocate their demand generation dollars in the coming year.

Below is an exclusive first look at some of the key findings:

Demand Gen Keeps Pace With Overall Budgets

The increased spend on demand generation parallels the rise in overall marketing budgets. While 32.6% expect their demand generation budgets to increase by more than 20%, 31.4% anticipated a 20% rise in their overall marketing budgets for 2013.

About one third (30.2%) expect their demand generation budgets to rise by up to 10% in 2013 and 16.3% said they would remain unchanged, also closely mirroring expectations for overall marketing budgets.

There was a steady rise in demand generation and overall marketing spend compared to 2012, when 38.4% reported that their demand budgets were 1% to 10% higher and 39.5% reported that their overall marketing spend was up by 1% to 10%.

This is not surprising, as 86% noted that demand generation became a higher priority in 2012. An overwhelming majority reported that their demand generation budgets will either rise or remain the same, with only 2.3% reporting a decrease.

Marketing campaigns, and demand generation efforts in particular, are expected to make a significant contribution to total revenue growth. When asked what percentage of annual revenue is attributable to marketing-sourced leads, approximately one forth said 24% to 50% of revenue was fueled by marketing-driven prospects. Nearly one fifth (19.8%) reported that marketing leads were responsible for 11% to 25% of revenue growth.

When asked about the total amount of revenue growth their companies anticipated in 2013, 36% said they expected growth of 1% to 10%; while 31.4% expected revenue growth of more than 30% and 25.6% forecasted revenue growth of more than 30%.

Marketing is also increasingly measured by its contributions to the sales pipeline and revenue. More than one third (33.7%) of respondents said their marketing organizationshave lead-based and revenue-based quotas in place, and another 15.1% plan to establish quotas in 2013.

Lead Quality A Priority

While lead volume is still important to marketers who need to keep the sales team stocked with prospects, and those prospects must be hot. The survey revealed that nearly half (46.5%) of marketers surveyed ranked focusing on lead quality over lead quantity as a top priority in 2013.

Data accuracy was also high on the list of priorities, as more marketing organizations emphasize data integrity and properly crediting leads to marketing or sales. More than one third (33.7%) rated this a four out of five in terms of importance, while 20.9% rated it a five and 31.4% rated it a three, so database maintenance is clearly coming to the forefront as an issue.

Top Tactics

B2B marketers expect to turn to social media more frequently in 2013 as a demand generation tactic. While 9.3% of respondents rated it a five on a scale of one to five in terms of importance in 2012, 21.4% said social media will be of high importance (five) to their demand generation efforts in 2013.

Custom landing pages are also gaining favor as demand generation tools: More than one third (34.5%) rated custom landing pages a five for 2013, up from 22.4% in 2012.

Marketers are also warming up to video as a demand generation tool. While 16.5% rated video a five in terms of importance in 2012, that number rose to 22% in 2013. Online advertising, in the meantime, moved up to 16.7% of marketers rating it of highest importance in 2013, up from 9.4% in 2012.

Standard lead generation tools such as white papers, email and webinars saw small increases in their predicted importance for 2013, while live events and telemarketing saw declines.

Lead Tracking And Analytics Continue to Grow

Most marketers are using the wide variety of demand generation and lead tracking tools at their disposal. Web analytics ranked high among the current technologies in use (82.6%), followed by custom landing pages (74.4%), automated lead nurturing (65.1%) and lead scoring (64%).

When asked about the technologies they plan to deploy in 2013,custom landing pages was at the top of the list, cited by 66% of respondents. Campaign management and web analytics were both mentioned by 61.6% of respondents.

More than half of all respondents (57%) said that they would install social media tracking/monitoring tools in 2013 as social media outlets become more important to B2B marketing efforts.

Lead scoring tools were on 55.8% of respondents’ planned deployment lists, followed by automated lead nurturing at 52.3%.

Complete the form below to receive the report when published:

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To create your own “Offer Planning Matrix,” roll up your sleeves and follow this simple four-step framework.

Step One: Prioritize – Organize and rank your existing offers by their value to the buyer. Make sure to assess the value of the content from the buyer’s perspective. We recommend using a simple ranking system such as: “Best, Good, Average, Poor.” Next, weed out the low-ranking offers that fall into the “Poor” category.  Then take the remaining viable offers and write a brief summary that describes the benefit of the content to the reader. Lastly, identify which target segment the offer is most appropriate for. An offer can be relevant to more than one target segment, but it may have different value to each segment.

Step Two: Place – Align your highest-value offers (Best, Good, Average) across the buy cycle for each target segment. The goal is to match each offer to the mindset of your buyers, depending upon where they are in their buy cycle. Properly mapping your offers has a direct impact on your results. If you send a Stage Three offer (such as a product demo) to a Stage One prospect (one who is still unaware of their problem), that prospect simply won’t respond — and you’ll waste time, money and an opportunity to make a good first impression. To map your offers, create a simple grid sheet with the four stages of the buyer’s mindset across the top (“Status Quo, Questioning, Committed to Change, Ready to Engage”) and your segments down the side. Then take your list of prioritized offers from Step One and place the offers under each appropriate stage.

Step Three: Prepare – After Step Two, you will be able to identify offer gaps for each segment and buy stage. Once you identify the missing offer content, you can decide what content you need to develop for future programs. Get with your industry team to create a plan and budget for content development to fill the gaps. (Note: It’s common to identify limited lack of offer content for senior level titles.  Most companies focus on creating great content for technical buyers or users, but they struggle with having enough high-value content for senior executives.)

Step Four: Plan – Use your “Offer Planning Matrix” to create your quarterly cadence and outline a plan for longer-term marketing programs to nurture different buyers’ mindsets.

Remember to stay informed about your new offers, and frequently update your Offer Matrix by continuously evaluating against these four steps. You’ll see the fruits of your efforts pay off in higher-quality responses, a more productive sales team, a reduction in campaign fire drills and more time to focus on marketing strategy beyond next quarter’s campaign.

To access WebReply’s offer matrix best practice worksheet, click here. 

Caroline Bishop is VP Marketing at WebReply. She has more than 18 years of experience in B2B marketing, messaging strategy and demand generation.  WebReply is database-marketing firm that specializes in improving its clients’ pipeline quality via reactive and adaptive individualized destination portals that deliver high value, relevant content on an ongoing basis. Contact Caroline at: caroline@webreply.com

The post Improving Campaign Effectiveness And Lead Quality: 4 Steps To Build An Offer Planning Matrix appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Framework for Key Metrics
Lead generation marketing plays the critical role of surfacing and engaging potential buyers to provide new and better prospects for the sales organization. For lead generation, key metrics must provide insight into lead quantity, lead quality, lead outcomes, and cost management. In addition to managing total leads to ensure business goals are met, the most critical metrics are those that assess marketing effectiveness in contributing to the primary profit drivers for the business, which include, 1) sales conversion rate, 2) incremental profit per customer, and 3) the cost per sale (see diagram below).

Lead Generation metrics can be organized into the following categories:

Funnel progression metrics – covering conversion rates from initial contact through closed sale

Customer value metrics – covering the financial value that results from the leads generated

Cost management metrics – covering the expense side

Goal attainment metrics – ensuring quantity and quality come together to meet business objectives

Funnel Progression Metrics
We can break funnel progression metrics into the following four sub-categories that provide insight into conversion quality:

New Leads

Sales Acceptance

Sales Readiness

Purchase Velocity

For each of these, we have a number of key metrics to consider.

New Leads
This first set of metrics is used to assess marketing effectiveness in terms of generating the right number and the right type of leads.

Marketing Qualified Lead Rate combines several stages in the funnel to incorporate a quality component into the marketing effectiveness assessment. This metric looks at the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) that are generated from all marketing contacts. This ratio improves as your marketing initiatives become more effective at generating more qualified leads, or more efficient at screening out low potential contacts.

Marketing Qualified Lead Rate = # of MQLs / # of total marketing contacts

Example – Direct marketing campaign promoting Webinar to 10,000 contacts reached 800 Webinar participants and generated 200 marketing qualified leads

Marketing Qualified Lead Rate = 200 / 10,000 = 2%

As an alternative, you can split the marketing qualified lead conversion metric into two metrics. This will provide more detail but the metrics must be used with caution, since improvements to the single metric may not align to improved business results. You will see that the two examples below match up to the example above.

Engagement Rate, in some cases referred to as a response rate, indicates how well Marketing generates some form of action from its targeted contacts. It is focused more on lead quantity than lead quality. Some marketing programs will generate fewer, high quality leads while others will attract a high response among lower quality of leads. This metric can be used to diagnose problem areas or compare how different marketing programs can be used in the marketing mix but is a low priority metric in terms of managing lead quality and goal attainment.

Engagement Rate = # of contacts taking action / # of marketing contacts

Example – Direct marketing campaign promoting Webinar
10,000 contacts reached 
800 Webinar participants

Engagement Rate = 800 / 10,000 = 8%

Lead Qualification Rate is used with the engagement rate metric to determine how many of the “engaged” contacts qualify for Marketing to hand off to Sales. This screening step is not always included as a marketing responsibility, however, as we have noted in the first three articles of this series, it is a step that significantly impacts marketing profitability.

Lead Qualification Rate = # of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) / # of leads generated

Example – Webinar participants qualified via marketing screening process
800 Webinar participants
200 marketing qualified leads

Lead Qualification Rate = 200 / 800 = 25%

Sales Acceptance
Sales acceptance of marketing-generated leads is the next critical step in the process. If Sales is rejecting or even ignoring marketing leads, the marketing budget is not likely to be generating good ROI. The definitions for marketing qualified lead screening should align to the requirements for sales qualified leads (although not as strict).

Sales Acceptance Rate is one of the best indicators of lead quality, and could easily be labeled as the “Lead Quality” metric. It is the ratio of sales qualified leads to marketing qualified leads. It serves as an excellent indicator of how well Marketing is qualifying and screening leads to maintain high quality levels. A good target to aim for is 70% – 80% MQL to SQL (see our archived article from Denny Head for insight into his experience with this at Avaya).

Sales Acceptance Rate = # of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) / # of MQLs

Example – Marketing qualified leads from Webinar passed to Sales generated 200 MQLs passed to Sales and 120 leads accepted as SQLs

Sales Acceptance Rate = 120 / 200 = 60%

Opportunity Rate tracks lead quality at a more precise level than the Sales Acceptance or Marketing Qualified Lead Rate metrics. Opportunities are typically defined by the Sales organization as leads that have clearly defined needs, purchasing authority, an expectation to purchase within a reasonable time period, and budget. This metric is assessing Marketing’s ability to generate leads that are generally ready to buy. It is based on the percent of leads generated converting to an opportunity.

Opportunity Rate = # of Opportunities / # of MQLs

Example – Marketing qualified leads passed to Sales and qualified as opportunities. For example, 200 MQLs passed to Sales generated 80 leads converting to Opportunities

Opportunity Rate = 80 / 200 = 40%

You can substitute number of leads generated in place of the number of MQLs passed to Sales if that works better for your organization.

Sales Pipeline Metrics
Too often, Marketing does not have system access to track their leads through the sales pipeline. As we have established in the first three articles of this series, Marketing must have insight into and contribute to influencing prospects at all stages of the purchase funnel. Marketing can have a significant role in creating “sales readiness,” especially in those firms making the argument to invest in branding to create stronger differentiation, and the best measures to understand the impact of those efforts are in the conversion rates within the sales funnel. The other significant benefit in tracking sales conversion rates is to understand sales effectiveness and where additional marketing support can improve the net sales rate (remember from Part 1 that improving conversion rates late in the purchase funnel has high ROI potential).

Opportunity to Close Rate summarizes the overall sales pipeline performance from the point of identifying a viable buyer to winning the sale. This can be further split into conversion rates for each major stage in the pipeline (such as opportunity to meeting, meeting to proposal, proposal to close) to provide more detail, but these two points work fairly well in representing the area that Sales manages. This detail is extremely valuable in diagnosing weak areas in the sales cycle.

Opportunity to Close Rate = # of Closed Sales / # of Opportunities

Lead to Close Rate (or Lead to Purchase Rate) captures the net outcome of the leads generated. This assesses how many leads passed to sales (MQLs) convert into sales.

Lead to Close Rate = # of Closed Sales / # of MQLs

Sales Capacity (or # of Leads per Rep) is also a good indicator of sales performance. This is the number of active leads managed divided by the number of sales people managing those leads. There is a point where the number of active leads begins to hurt sales effectiveness and this metric should show when that point is reached.

Sales Capacity = # of Active Leads / # Sales Reps

Purchase Velocity
Monitoring the pace of leads moving through the sales cycle provides additional insight that is often missed. There are two high priority metrics in this category.

Lead Contact Velocity is the average number of days between leads being handed off to Sales and Sales making initial contact (or contact attempts). It is an excellent indicator of sales capacity and can help in understanding why lead quality might mistakenly be viewed as declining. We had a client who could not determine why fewer and fewer leads were converting to opportunities, only to discover that the average days for the first contact had changed from 3 days to 14 days.

Lead Contact Velocity = Average # of Days from lead passed to lead contact

Lead to Close Velocity, also referred to as the sales cycle time, is the average number of days between a lead being handed off to Sales, and the closed sale date. As the sales cycle duration increases, it increases the cost to the sales organization, increases the number of active leads that need to be managed, and typically means a lower sales conversion rate. This metric lets the marketing organization know if additional effort needs to be put against sales readiness, or if additional tactics are necessary within the sales pipeline.

Lead to Close Velocity = Average # of Days from lead passed to closed sale

This concludes our 4-part series on Lead Generation ROI. There is clearly a significant opportunity to improve the ROI of lead generation marketing with better measurement and management processes. Whether it is better alignment with sales, better metrics, or leveraging new insights to guide marketing strategies and tactical decisions, every step forward will result in improved marketing performance and profitability.

Jim Lenskold is President of Lenskold Group and author of Marketing ROI, The Path to Campaign, Customer and Corporate Profitability (McGraw Hill, 2003). Founded in 1997, the Lenskold Group (www.lenskold.com) provides consulting services to deliver a comprehensive approach to marketing ROI management, marketing measurement and analytics, and profitability planning tools. Jim’s career began in the mid-1980’s at AT&T where he managed a $20 million marketing budget for retention marketing and new strategy development. He also successfully launched and grew a technology firm before starting the Lenskold Group. The Lenskold Group serves Fortune 1000 and emerging companies in the US, Canada and Europe. Jim can be reached at jlenskold@lenskold.com

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