A common scenario in lead generation programs is below-expected levels of inquiries resulting from marketing efforts. Even when companies distribute information to tens of thousands of recipients, they’re often underwhelmed with the response rates. Or, they drive tons of traffic to their website only to produce minimal truly qualified requests for additional information.
With many lead generation programs, the problem isn’t targeting thousands of prospects. It’s converting these prospects into viable leads that can be developed through the sales pipeline process.
Marketing is a costly function and executives want to see positive returns on their investment. It doesn’t cut muster if a good portion of your marketing budget goes to contributing leads, but then very few leads are converted to qualified prospects and closed-won new business.
Getting More Qualified Prospects from Lead Generation Programs
Unfortunately, the scenarios described above are fairly common. To be successful, marketers must work hard at developing the right lead generation programs, converting prospects to viable leads, and then nurturing the leads until they convert to new customers.
These steps take time, money and a lot of work. If marketing and lead generation were easy, every company would have more business than they could handle. But, it’s not. So you need to develop strong, productive lead generation programs that result in impressive conversion rates that produce a good return on the marketing investment.
The Steps in Successful Lead Generation Programs
First, you want to generate a significant number of inquiries that convert to qualified leads. In other words, you need to contact enough of the right prospects to generate an acceptable percentage of interest.
Two factors contribute to a good response rate: the quality of the list you use and the appropriateness of your message in your promotional and informational material. If you aren’t communicating to the right contacts (e.g., titles, roles, companies, etc.) in your target markets, then you probably won’t generate significant interest or qualified leads. At the same time, if you’re communicating to the right prospects, but your message holds no interest for them, your lead generation programs will also fall short of expectations. Relevancy is the key.
Sometimes you need to tweak your messages and lists. If something isn’t working, find out why and then change it. You may need to only change your message or offer to increase your response rates.
The next step deals with increasing your lead conversion rate. Simply put, you need to diligently work the leads generated from your campaigns and in your sales pipeline. Ignoring generated leads is a recipe for failure. In fact, The Yankee Group, a well-known research firm, concludes that 40%-80% of new leads are not converted because they’re ignored.
That’s a lot of lost business simply because marketing and sales professionals didn’t follow-up with the prospects from lead generation programs. If you want a prospect converted to a customer, you need to quickly and regularly respond with information of use to them.
Finally, marketers need to explore technology solutions to help them run sophisticated lead generation and lead nurturing programs. Several cost-effective marketing automation systems exist and companies need to find the right one to match their program goals. Technology can help you capture and manage your follow up with leads in a relevant and well-timed manner, which can increase your conversion rates, especially when blended with high quality contact data and high-impact telemarketing and teleprospecting programs.
Most every company needs to grow its business. And, the investments they make in lead generation and lead nurturing must show a good return. Develop a system and use it to bring in more prospects. Then, diligently work these prospects to increase your conversion rates. The end result will have a dramatic effect on your company’s top-line revenue performance and return on marketing investment.
For more information on lead generation programs, contact Televerde today or continue to read our company blog.
B2B Marketing Research: How to Get Reliable Information for Competitive Positioning
Larry Fleischman
3:10 pm on May 15th, 2012
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B2B marketing research serves many purposes. One major function is to find the right competitive positioning. By doing so, you can ensure you’re communicating to the appropriate target market and are effectively differentiating your company from its competitors. But how do you go about deciding how to position your company’s brand against the competition?
Finding the right answer to this question can impact the success of your marketing programs. And with most marketplaces becoming increasingly competitive, your B2B marketing research has to be spot-on. Constant review and adjusting of your competitive positioning strategies need to become an established practice.
How to Use B2B Marketing Research to Determine Competitive Positioning
To find the proper positioning of your brand against your competitors, you need to focus your research in three areas. First, you need to find out what’s important to your target market. What features do they value and what benefits are they looking to gain? What challenges are they facing today and may have to deal with in the future?
Next, your B2B marketing research must help you determine how your product or service stacks up against your prospects’ requirements. Do your product features meet or exceed what your prospects need? Do they produce the benefits they would expect to achieve?
Finally, you need to conduct B2B marketing research on your key competitors. Just as you compared your solution’s performance to prospect requirements, you need to do the same with your competitors’ products.
Answers to these questions can help you start fine-tuning a positioning strategy. Your research must produce as much detail as possible to draw meaningful conclusions. It’s a good idea to develop a framework for the information gathered. In other words, you want to organize your findings in a way that strengths and weaknesses surface for both you and your competitors’ products.
When your B2B marketing research highlights these findings, you can develop positioning strategies much easier. You’ve got very useful and valuable information to properly determine competitive positioning.
For example, does your solution do something your competitors’ does not? Is your service better? Do you have unique capabilities within your organization that your competitors can’t provide? Your B2B marketing research should generate the information you need to highlight how you are different from your competitors.
You want to develop your content around those differences. Highlighting your strengths not available from the competition should be a focus. And, any deficiency in your solution should be shored up and re-positioned in your messaging and value proposition.
Some Considerations When Finding Your Competitive Position
Make sure you focus on what your prospective customers find important. Your B2B marketing research should provide this information and make it easy to identify. Some companies get misguided by developing their positioning based on a certain attribute prospects really don’t care that much about. Your company may be unique in one regard, but if it’s not important to prospects, your competitive positioning will be off.
Also, you want to bridge any gaps between what you think your prospects know about your capabilities. You want to determine your strengths your company has that are also important to your prospects. Then, you want to make sure your prospects see your company as having those strengths.
In some cases, a disconnect exists between how a company thinks its prospects see them. You want to make sure your competitive positioning is based on what you and your prospects know as your strengths. You need to promote your attributes to the market, especially if your competitors are deficient in this area.
The most important aspect of B2B marketing research when determining competitive positioning is to find an attribute your company can be associated with and rise to number one in terms of mind share. Think about some examples in the market today. Volvo is by-far the one automaker associated with safety and Google is the first company that comes to mind with search.
If your competitors do the same or better as you in your positioning attribute, then you haven’t successfully positioned your company. And if you don’t have the unique attribute, you need to create it.
Contact Televerde today to see how our B2B marketing research can help your company reach your target market or continue to read our blog for additional information.