B-to-B : Focus on Quality

Six tips for managing leads and improving quality

Long sales cycles. Complex products and services. Limited brand recognition. These are a few of the top challenges B-to-B marketers face that B-to-C marketers usually aren't saddled with on a daily basis while trying to fill the proverbial lead funnel. But that doesn't mean B-to-B marketers have to throw in the towel. Here are a few sensible tips for B-to-B marketers to follow to improve lead quality, while growing their company's digital footprints.

1. Date Before You Propose
B-to-B sales cycles are extended and complicated. Often, especially for small and mid-sized enterprises, recipients don't know a company or its products. Or, at least they aren't as intimately familiar with a company or its products as the marketing team would hope. Yet, far too often B-to-B companies drive their entire communications campaigns around a series of disjointed, tactical and singular communications taking a specific transactional approach.

Marketing communications should be orchestrated like a courtship, not a one-night stand. Most people usually don't propose to someone after a first date. Similarly, prospects aren't going to make large, complex purchases based on a single "special offer" e-mail or outreach. Prospects need to warm up to a company over time, feel comfortable and get to know the company before engaging in a buying cycle.

2. Give, Don't Take
Instead of asking a lead for an order in a series of tactical outreaches, give him something of value—educational content to help get him up to speed on the market, your company, products and specific solutions. Give third-party validation of the solution via customer case studies that demonstrate why and how peers have used the solution or industry reports that illustrate how the product compares with competitive offerings.

Also use content-based marketing to educate prospects about general market trends; which may, of course, lead the prospect to the conclusion that your product is the right solution for her needs. In other words, take prospects by the hand and lead them down a decision path.

3. Short Is Good
Keep communications short vs. long—especially in e-mail outreach. Given the complexity of most B-to-B solutions, it is tempting to send e-mail campaigns, for example, that are detailed with "cool-looking" designs. However, the best performing B-to-B communications are 45 lines long with a subject line of 45-50 characters. And no graphics, unless they're required to make a point. Graphics are blocked by default by about half of all e-mail clients, so your cool designs may never be seen.

E-mails should remain short with clickable links to additional details because people—particularly in a business environment—don't interact with e-mail the same way they read a letter. They skim key points and headlines, and only drill down to read more if the content is of interest.

Video is the exception. Video in e-mail still has a coolness factor, and a well-produced, short and relevant video clip can communicate information more efficiently than words or (blocked) images.

4. Have Measurable and Meaningful Objectives
For marketers, the days of fluffy objectives and basing marketing ROI on "marketing spend divided by revenues" are over. We have more marketing automation tools at our fingertips to measure, monitor and track results than ever before. So let's learn and use them.

How does a sales manager determine a new sales rep's quota for a new territory? She makes a good guesstimate; sets a number (quota); and measures against it. Then, she adjusts each quarter based on results (raises the quota). A quota is both measurable and, for most businesses, very meaningful.

5. Ready. Fire. Aim … Not!
B-to-C marketers have tens of thousands to millions of prospects at their disposal to use for target practice, and they often have the patience, discipline and, at times, longer product life cycles to hold feedback sessions, run surveys, track respondents' digital footprints and monitor feedback on social sites. B-to-B marketers rarely have such luxuries.

Instead, B-to-B marketers can make the time to test their marketing messages on relevant audiences before going broad. Will you be running e-mail campaigns to market products and services? Keep in mind that most e-mail service providers offer easy to use split-testing or multivariate testing tools that can be used to try out campaigns before rolling out to larger populations. It's unwise to pull the trigger before aiming a pistol. Equally, don't push the send button on your e-mail campaigns without first testing to check if the message is on-target.

6. The Customer Isn't Always Right
However, the right customer is always right. As marketers, we're often measured, in part (or at times in full), by the number of qualified leads that come into the sales funnel—a yardstick that tends to change in proportion to the number of days remaining in the fiscal quarter. Have discipline. Know the ideal "customer-product match" and optimize the business, including "funnel building" and sales strategy, around that ideal matchup. The sales team will see fewer leads initially. But over time, they'll appreciate that they have to work less to generate more revenues (and higher commissions) before each quota-resetting dance.

A wise board member (and extremely successful venture capitalist) once said to me, "The No. 1 reason startups fail is lacking the discipline to know when to say no to a customer that isn't an ideal customer-product match." Get the right prospects into the sales funnel and turn them into the kind of happy customers it's easy to say yes to.

Craig Stouffer is chief evangelist at Pinpointe, an SaaS e-mail marketing solution provider based in Santa Clara, Calif. He can be reached at cstouffer@pinpointe.com.

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