NetProspex - Blog

Four Ways to Ratchet Up Your Prospecting ROI

It’s the classic sales and marketing paradox:  The tighter the economy, the tighter the marketing budget – even as sales’s demand for more and better leads increases exponentially.  In an economic downturn, demonstrating a quantifiable return on each marketing dollar spent is more important than ever.

But successful prospecting is about more than simply getting as many leads for as little money as possible.  As Aaron Ross of Salesmachine.com states, “The truth is that sales people care very little about the cost of the leads we generate. What they really care about is how many of those leads will actually become viable sales opportunities.”   

For this reason, the most effective lead generation programs adhere to four key principles:

1.    Focus on opportunity building, not brand building. According to Mac McIntosh of the B2B marketing blog Sales Lead Insights, successful online and database-driven marketing campaigns that have an immediate impact on sales make it easier to cost-justify continued marketing investment.  “Yes, brand image is important to your company’s success,” he says.  “But unless you can spend a half-million dollars or so on brand advertising, such efforts probably won’t move the sales needle much.”

McIntosh recommends allocating one third of your marketing budget toward building a high quality database of viable leads leveraging what has worked in the past.  “Review your existing database and identify the most profitable clients or customers.  Create models for the best types to target with one-to-many marketing programs.  Then acquire a database containing information on these kinds of companies through database marketing services.”

And this doesn’t mean trolling through the same old list providers either.  Several new services and applications are changing the database market for the better by providing accurate, detailed information that enables you to more precisely target the appropriate decision makers for your offer – enabling you to maximize not only the dollar value of each lead, but the productivity of each team member.  As NetProspex customer Rachel Bair of Lore Systems explains, “Inaccurate or incomplete data is a tremendous waste of time and dollars.  And it’s hard to keep your team motivated if every lead turns out to be a dead end.”

2.    Use lists strategically as well as tactically.  Every seasoned salesperson knows that pre-call research can mean the difference between a call that is returned and a voicemail that is deleted.  Mining key data elements from your list – title, geography, industry – as part of that pre-call research effort can help craft an approach more likely to resonate with your prospect.  As Jill Konrath writes on her blog Selling to Big Companies, “To get into big companies, you can't make a 100 cold calls saying the same thing to everyone. Several years ago corporate decision makers stopped answering their phones and rolled all calls to voicemail. The only way to capture the attention of these corporate decision makers was to create a very personalized message based on in-depth research in their firm.”

At NetProspex customer Quintiq, the Director of Marketing agrees, adding that leveraging multiple touch points across a single company can also increase the likelihood of success.  “For us, it’s all about the value proposition – and that’s something that is very specific to a prospect’s title and functional area.  Many times, we’ll roll out parallel campaigns targeting both the business and the IT side of the same company.  Understanding who we are talking to – and presenting a value proposition that appeals specifically to that individual – gives us an extra edge.”

3.    Make sure your CRM system can keep up – and vice versa.  As prospecting and marketing automation tools grow more sophisticated, compatibility with CRM and SFA systems becomes even more critical.  Integrating a current, accurate prospect list into an existing SFA application makes it easier to develop a seamless, easily trackable campaign that can be analyzed, adjusted, and duplicated within minutes.  Inside CRM’s Chris Bucholtz explains:  “Knowledge of customer preferences, behaviors and needs empowers you to plan marketing campaigns faster and execute them more quickly. It also displays results faster, which allows a campaign to be tweaked once under way on the basis of customer feedback.”

In addition, CRM systems that offer advanced segmentation and other analytical capabilities can help make the case for increased marketing investment.  “Explaining a marketing campaign's rate of return can be difficult,” writes Bucholtz. “Although no system can deliver a perfect analysis, integrated CRM/SFA solutions let marketers examine the efforts made from first contact to the close of an opportunity and attach a price to the process.”

4.    Keep opportunities fresh through continuous review and refinement.   Maintaining a constant, constructive feedback loop between sales and marketing helps ensure the right information is being sought and captured.  Lisa Cramer of FirstWave Technologies recommends developing a simple scoring system that assigns point values to sales leads based on specific behaviors or responses to previous offers.  For example, a prospect who registers for – and attends – a webinar might score higher than one who downloads a free white paper.  Analyzing the relationship between prospect behavior and actual close rates will help you reduce unproductive activities – and replicate successful ones.

Cramer cautions, “No one devises a perfect system from the start. Your system will never be perfect, but it will improve with each marketing effort. Get started with a plan to review results and tweak as you go.”

Unlike in previous economic downturns, today’s e-marketing tools and techniques make it much easier to not only maximize the value of our marketing investment, but to measure what is working in hours, rather than weeks, and adjust efforts accordingly.  This mix of measurement, rapid analysis of returns, lowered campaign costs and scalability should have a very real – and positive – impact on how sales and marketing react to current conditions.

Is Web 2.0 Killing Marketing?

I’ve written a lot lately about the premature reports of the death of outbound sales in the Web 2.0 world.  Now I’d like to add to that:  Marketing is not dead either.  Nor is it resting, or becoming the same thing as sales, as Nigel Edelshain postulated recently in his Sales 2.0 blog post No Need to Close the Gap between Sales and Marketing.  As Nigel rightly points out, new sales tools have allowed sales people to generate their own, precisely targeted prospect lists.  Tools like NetProspex have brought additional depth of coverage and accuracy to the mix, aiding the incursion of sales into what has traditionally been a marketing role – lead generation.

So, does this mean marketing is irrelevant because salespeople have the tools to go directly to the customer?  Sure - if you believe lead generation is the only value marketing offers to the sales organization.  But while it's great that salespeople now have the tools to reach out to customers directly without waiting for marketing to tell them whom to contact, they still need to present a relevant, coherent message that will "hook" that customer. The true value of putting more and better lead generation tools in the hands of the sales team is that it frees up marketing to create sales-relevant messaging that maximizes the value of those prospect lists. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle with a constant feedback loop that enables continuous improvement.

Laura Ramos of Forrester makes a similar point in her article B2B Lead Management Market Heats Up, pointing out that innovation is improving efficiency in lead flow and lead utilization and, as a result, is removing friction between sales and marketing.  But as we approach this brave new world, proper implementation and a two-way flow of information will be the key to realizing a solid return on the sales and marketing investment:

-    Marketing needs to understand what sales is hearing in the field and craft their message accordingly. Customer needs and objectives can fluctuate, and last year’s message may not be as relevant in this year’s economy. The salespeople on the ground are the best sources of intelligence for this kind of information.

-    Sales needs to not only tell marketing what’s not working, but tell them what is working. If a campaign or offer strikes a strong chord with a specific segment or buyer profile, marketing needs to know this and see if the approach can be adapted or replicated elsewhere.

-    Sales AND marketing need to work together to create relevant, targeted campaigns that map offers to customer objectives – not the other way around. Most organizations now understand that benefits, not features, sell a product, but those benefits must be meaningful to the customer. Salespeople have unique insight into their customers’ strategic objectives and can help marketing position offers that will help advance these objectives.

Using Saved Search Features

When searching online for sales contacts or marketing campaign lists, a saved search feature can help you quickly update your list, or set up controlled campaign tests.  Once you have created a search that matches your most productive customer profile, save the search and rerun at regular intervals to pick up any new prospects that have been added to the source database.  Be sure the service indicates which records have been previously captured. (With the NetProspex Saved Search feature, you can see which records have already been downloaded, and you won’t pay again for any records that are already in your account folders.)

The saved search feature can also be used in testing variable marketing campaigns.  Save searches with different variables to test against a particular marketing program.  You can also test successful searches in different geographic markets by altering the geography filter to create a new saved search. 

At last Web 2.0 Generates a Winner in B2B Social Media!

The sale of Boston-based Generate Inc. to Dow Jones on Friday is the first piece of good news venture capital can point to in B2B social media space. There have been surprisingly few successful exits in the space in the 5 years since the funding of the first wave of B2B social media companies like LinkedIn. Generate brings together next-generation search and extraction technologies with great client relationship mapping and is clearly a second generation play. Generate’s approach has been to carefully look at the experience of early entrants like TrueAdvantage to locksmith a superior solution that really works for sales. LinkedIn continues to build a great franchise but no exit yet, despite rumors of acquisition last year with Murdoch’s News Corp.

There are three types of Web 2.0 plays in the space:

·         Better search engine and organization of online content for sales - like Generate

·         Dynamic community - like LinkedIn

·         Knowledge trading from the community - like NetProspex

LinkedIn is popular with business development executives and for sales people in relationship sales environments where business introductions matter. But LinkedIn doesn’t help transactional sales executives, who don’t have the leverage to get someone to open their network for the process of selling lower ticket items. This is a big space as the vast majority of B2B transactions are below $50k.

NetProspex, also out of Boston is another second generation Web 2.0 business that parallels the Generate approach. The first entrants in contact trading, like Jigsaw are finding that data quality is just as important as trading. Without it, abandonment rates make it difficult for a user-maintained system to get enough users on the system to keep the data clean. Like Generate, NetProspex has used the lessons learned to build a better mousetrap. NetProspex allows sales people to trade their internal prospect lists, but scrubs the data during and after the transaction. Sales contacts are a perishable commodity, a bit like fish…they soon go off. NetProspex technologies filter and validate contributed data to greater than 99% accuracy. Why is this important? Sales needs a higher level of accuracy, because it can get really irritating if every other phone number or email address is wrong. NetProspex expects that with the quality issue resolved, there is no reason why sales people shouldn’t have a great prospect map of their territory to find those customers they don’t yet have.  It’s an exciting market and a very large opportunity, and as these second generation businesses realize the potential in the B2B social media space, more success stories will follow.

NetProspex Releases Free Sales Lead Validation Tools

Waltham, MA, March 28, 2008-- Reaching the right person with the right offer is the key to effective selling.  Now, a new set of sales lead tools from NetProspex, a leader in providing accurate sales information, helps sales professionals validate their contact information. The tools are free, and available on the NetProspex web site. 

“The new suite of sales lead tools increases NetProspex’s value as a time management tool for sales,” says Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex.  “The goal of NetProspex is to reduce the time sales people spend digging for accurate, targeted information so they can spend more time selling, which has a direct impact on sales cycles.”

“Our core competency is ensuring data accuracy of user-contributed content,” continues Halliwell, “which we achieve through several layers of quality control.  No one else in the industry is doing this, so we can go deeper into mid-management and provide a higher level of confidence in our data”.  Customer David Haas, vice president of strategic exhibitor services at BDMetrics agrees. “NetProspex's deep coverage into mid-management level contacts augments our database significantly.”

The NetProspex Sales Lead Toolkit:
•    Got a contact name but need an email address?  NetProspex Company Email Pattern Lookup fills an important gap in sales contact information.  Use this tool to select a company, and NetProspex will return the email pattern for that organization.

•    Want to be sure the email address for a prospect is valid?  NetProspex Email Checker evaluates an email address without actually sending email to a recipient.  This is useful to check individual emails for validity or to verify a group of email addresses, to evaluate the overall health of a campaign list. 

•    Got a list of target company URLs? The NetProspex Leads by URL tool maps available executive contacts in target companies.  Simply input a target company URL, and NetProspex returns any matching records from their database of over 2.4 million contacts. 

•    Find the contacts you need using the NetProspex Custom Search function.  The NetProspex search interface allows sales professionals to easily evaluate NetProspex coverage by sales territory.  Specify job function, title, industry, company type and size, geographic location, and more.

NetProspex is a database of sales information, including over 2 million contacts that go deep into mid-management decision-makers at over 350,000 companies across North America, complete with title, phone, address and email address.  What sets the Netprospex model apart is adding value to community-contributed content by actively ensuring data accuracy with rigorous quality control measures before the data is published to the database.

NetProspex offers both subscription membership to its database of business executive contacts (for as little as $25 per month) as well as the free NetProspex Exchange service, for users who wish to trade in existing contact information in return for new contacts.

About NetProspex
Founded in 2006, NetProspex understands that effective sales efforts require the most in-depth and accurate prospect data. The company's core product line overlays user-contributed and commercial sales lead data with layers of quality control to produce an entirely unique and highly effective sales and marketing contact database. With over 2.5 million accurate business contacts across 350,000 companies, NetProspex is a major new source of contacts - including difficult-to-find mid-management decision makers across North American businesses.

In its first year of business, the company has seen significant sales growth and already has over 300 enterprise clients across a range of industries including technology, media, business services and financial markets. The company recently secured Series A funding from angel investors.  For more information or a free trial, visit www.netprospex.com.

HotProspex: News, advice and trends in lead generation from NetProspex

March 2008

Welcome to the inaugural issue of HotProspex, NetProspex’s monthly roundup of news, advice, and trends in the world of lead generation and sales effectiveness. 

In this issue:
Think Beyond the Numbers Game:  The Real Key to Sales Success
Expand Your Sphere of Influence to Capture More Customers
Boost eMail Marketing Success with Free Trials

Quick Links:
Gary's Corner
Blogging Around

Gary’s Corner:

The sales game is changing as business use of the web continues to evolve and new Internet sales and marketing tools hit the market. A lot of the focus has been on innovation in inbound lead generation tools.  Sometimes we hear that outbound solicitation such as phone and email is a thing of the past.  I think that's over-simplification. Outbound sales tools are starting to get interesting. If the market weakens further, then I suspect more than a few CEOs will increase their focus on outbound lead generation.  It's a lever that, when used properly, provides a lot of control in hitting targets. Better visibility into potential customers is like shining a light into the recesses of a sales territory. It really helps to be able to acquire greater knowledge on who the potential customers are, especially with the targeting ability tools like NetProspex provide. Outbound has become less scattershot and more focused.  New tools like this help you dig deeper into a company to identify the right target for your particular message, and help you assess the accuracy and validity of your information.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is in finding and evaluating the best tools for your needs. Assess your priorities – do your require ease of use, low cost, data accuracy and freshness, depth of coverage, high volume?   And don't be shy about your needs - if you don't see what you want out there, ask for it! Technology has broken down many of the barriers to development, and smart companies will listen intently to customer needs.

New Product News:  Contact Trading
NetProspex’s new contact trading mechanism allows users to trade old contacts for new. Check it out! I'm sure you'll find it a great way to get new prospects...FREE. We've made it extremely easy. Just upload a file of contacts to our database and then we take care of all the rest - matching, checking and validating the data so that when the data is put into the database, it’s clean and accurate. We have lots of new tools in development and I'll use this space each to let you know about them.

More HotProspex>>

Blogging Around

We'd like to share with you some of the blogs we've been looking at recently:

Sales Machine
DemandGen Report
Sales 2.0
Forrester's Marketing Blog
Selling Power

Back to HotProspex>>

Boost eMail Marketing Success with Free Trials

If you’re a marketer looking to jumpstart your demand generation program, consider this time-honored tactic:  try giving your product away.

For a short time, that is.

With online services and hosted applications assuming greater prominence in the market, “try and buy” offers are not only a smart marketing tactic – they’re an essential step in the sale process.

“You can’t sell online services today without letting people try it first,” says Seth Godin, author of Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Synch? Because customers are both value and risk sensitive, “if you can answer the risk question and you can answer the value question, then you are going to get the sale. One of the best ways to do both of those things is to put in front of people and get them to try it.”

As important as these offers are, it’s equally important to target them appropriately to ensure adoption. David Lewis, president and founder of DemandGen, a marketing automation consultancy headquartered in Danville, CA, advises marketers to pre-qualify trial users, as well as to create a sense of urgency so that the trial customer will be driven to test the product in a real world environment. Lewis also advises companies to implement an effective “nurturing” program to complement the trials, keeping in contact with trial users and being available to answer questions or provide assistance. 

With an effective nurturing campaign in place to support free trials, Lewis estimates that companies can expect 70% to 80% of people who sign up for a free trial to actually use the application, and from there conversion rates to actual customers can reach between 20-30%.

The success of companies like Salesforce.com bear this out – in fact, Salesforce promotes its trial-to-conversion ratio as a selling point.

“When you are evaluating the digital body language of a prospect,” Lewis concludes,  “signing up for a free trial is one of the strongest indicators of real interest.”

More HotProspex>>

Expand Your Sphere of Influence to Capture More Customers

“Stop obsessing over the decision maker.”

So says  Aaron Ross of Sales Machine.com.  According to Ross, the decision making process is now more important than the decision maker.  While collaborative decision making involving different people and teams approving a purchase has always been an important element of B2B sales, it is now the rule at most organizations.

Ian Campbell, CEO of Nucleus Research, takes this concept a step further, and advises technology sellers to re-think their prospecting targets.  “Technology decisions, including purchasing decisions, are being taken out of the hands of CIOs and handled instead by line-of-business managers,” he tells Information Week.  This means that successful prospecting includes identifying all potential members in the network of decision makers and creating a variety of offers to appeal to the various players.

A recent study released by the Direct Marketing Association, The B-To-B Sphere of Influence: Best Practices in Reaching the Right Person, confirms this approach.  The study shows that 60% of marketers rely on prospect titles or reports from the sales force to tailor their messaging and value propositions to each recipient.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean prospectors should ignore the “decision maker” entirely, cautions Ross.  “You do want to build a relationship with the decision makers early, but don’t ‘sell’ them until you’ve begun winning over the influencers.”

More HotProspex>>