How do I?

Answering B2B marketing questions we're asked every day.

You know your company has a lot of proprietary, valuable knowledge locked inside its walls and subject-matter experts.  Now you need to figure out how to extract and leverage that knowledge in your marketing and sales efforts.  Here are some answers to questions you may have already.  If you don't see your question, send it to us!

How do I put together a nurturing program that isn’t overcomplicated but still effective?

This is a great question from a recent visitor (thanks Jessie! And thanks to clients Stefanie and Ryan for similar insightful questions) Since Marketing Automation and other nurturing tools offer so many options it is often tempting to overcomplicate. While nurturing can get very sophisticated, we recommend building a best practice foundation and then evolving it with a test and learn approach.

Here is a four part nurturing recommendation to help get you going and keep it focused:

1. Start with your objectives and business situation, how your pipeline works, and who your customer is. Use this analysis to identify the challenges your pipeline is facing and what you want to solve with better nurturing. Stay focused on solving those challenges.

2. Focus on nurturing prospects to the next stage in their decision process instead of directly to a sale. Use content selection to tease prospects forward in your pipeline and to give you more visibility into where they are at.

3. Start with three basic nurturing pathways: keep in touch (for example a regular content blast), triggered (a communications sequence triggered by an action like a content download or tradeshow booth visit) and big fish (true 1-1 nurturing using the same content and analytics as the other pathways but with a dedicated BD or sales rep handling the communications personally).

4. Keep it simple, test, learn, and iterate based on real world experience.

That is the short answer on how we help our clients put together nurturing programs. But click here if you are interested in detail on each of those recommendations and some links to other relevant resources..

How do I nurture prospects through my pipeline?

Enquiro Research says: “B2B buyers want information that is easy to get to, can be easily transferred within the buying organization, and is relevant to their needs.” You can achieve measurable results by transforming your knowledge assets into sales opportunities. Ask permission to send your website visitors useful information. Use marketing automation tools to deliver timed and triggered emails containing links to your webinars, videos, whitepapers, e-books and more. Build a relationship. Earn respect, authority and trust. Don’t be pushy!

How do I profile prospects with real time data?

Nurture prospects through your sales funnel by using marketing automation tools to share even more knowledge and track their responses. Begin relationships with your visitors by offering to send links to timely, useful and relevant knowledge in exchange for an email address. Reduce friction in your funnel to keep them moving. Be polite. Be friendly. Be helpful. Use lead scoring to qualify the prospects in your pipeline. Assign point values based upon level and type of activity. Nurture to purchase. When the time is right, pass them along to sales.

How do I get more value from my B2B website?

Let’s be frank. Many B2B websites are ‘brochure-nodes’. Their content delivers only 3% of what customers are looking for, which makes the underlying marketing investment much less effective than it should be. When B2B buyers do pre-purchase research online and want to know something, your company — and your website — should work hard to be the source of the knowledge they are looking for. If your website isn’t a ‘knowledge node’, you're losing potential customers, because buyers will get what they need from your competitors.

How do I build more awareness?

Traditional media is saturated with too many companies chasing prospects with directories, vertical media, telemarketing and direct marketing. Basic product data sheets and brochures no longer create incremental demand. Decision-makers and buyers are reading blogs, watching video online and participating in social media like Twitter and Facebook. Today, B2B vendors must offer prospects better content than ever before. Be link-worthy. If you’re outdated, boring or irrelevant, you’re history. So be fresh, interesting and relevant.

How do I use the web and social media to create new customers?

Today, more than 85% of B2B purchases start with research on the web. Savvy B2B marketers are engaging with prospective customers online to generate leads in brand new ways, often before the formal buying process has even begun. What are your prospects saying on social media? Join the conversation. Not to sell, but to share. Be timely, useful and relevant. Remember, access to competitive information is just a mouse click away. Put your knowledge out there. Your prospects will find it and pull it in.

Do you have any tips about implementing a B2B lead scoring system?

Lead scoring is a terrific tool but it is not magic or foolproof!

Here are 6 lead scoring system tips based on our experience working with mid-sized and small B2B companies:

• Get input from your sales team by asking them what questions they use and answers they look for when qualifying a prospect
• Keep your scoring criteria as simple as possible (right size vs wrong size, right industry vs wrong industry, recently active vs not recently active)  
• Position your lead scoring system launch as a "test" to build learning  
• Refine your system on a rolling basis using real data and input from your sales team  
• Understand the data points that drive a marketing qualification vs a sales qualification  
• Include a 60 second human lead review as part of your process 

Why all this caution? Because the volume of leads and customers in most B2B pipelines cannot generate enough statistically predictive data to support a complex lead scoring implementation.

For a practical example of real lead scoring in action, Pardot (one of our Marketing Automation system partners) has detailed the simple but effective way they qualify their own leads in this blog post: The 60-Second Lead Review