{"id":26,"date":"2014-09-26T18:57:11","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T18:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?page_id=26"},"modified":"2014-10-03T15:11:33","modified_gmt":"2014-10-03T15:11:33","slug":"marketing","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?page_id=26","title":{"rendered":"Marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marketing\u2019s New Role: Lead Generation Engine<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Today, best-in-class B2B marketing is a demand generation engine for sales.\u00a0 For most companies this is a massive change from marketing\u2019s traditional role.\u00a0 As Forrester<\/strong> principal analyst Jeff Ernst puts it in a recent blog post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cB2B marketing is going through an essential transformation. Historically, our focus has been on events, PR, and collateral. Now, our CEOs and board are demanding that we\u2019re directly driving revenue growth. This requires a whole new set of skills and activities across marketing and sales teams: content marketing, inbound marketing, lead-to-revenue management, revenue-cycle analytics, account-based marketing and selling<\/strong>, to name a few.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a big change, but there is plenty of data that validates the importance.\u00a0 Here are two significant success factors identified by leading market researchers in recent surveys of hundreds of B2B sales and marketing teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Best-in-Class create 50% of sales pipeline<\/strong>from marketing generated leads<\/td>\n\n

Aberdeen Group<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

Optimizing the Marketing to Sales Lead Lifecycle, 2011<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
On average, organizations that nurture their leads experience a 45% lift in lead generation ROI <\/strong>over those organizations that do not<\/td>\n\n

Marketing Sherpa<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

2012 Lead Generation Benchmark<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

My Priorities If I Were Your Chief Marketing Officer
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have one singular objective as your head of marketing: creating B2B sales ready leads for the sales team.\u00a0\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t mean I don\u2019t care about brand, reputation, image or any of those other \u2018marketing\u2019 responsibilities, but leads are where marketing\u2019s rubber meets the road.\u00a0 If we are not filling the company\u2019s sales funnel none of the rest of that stuff matters.<\/p>\n

To get there I have six areas of focus.\u00a0 This is all I\u2019m concerned with until the CEO, the Chief Sales Officer and I are convinced we are well down the path.<\/p>\n

1. Sales Alignment<\/strong><\/p>\n

My team\u2019s first meeting is with our Chief Sales Officer.\u00a0 We need to hear first hand from her what she needs when it comes to leads.\u00a0\u00a0 Our second meeting is with her sales managers and members of the sales team \u2013 they are new focus group.\u00a0\u00a0 From their we will schedule as many team discussions as it takes to flush out sales\u2019 definition of their ideal prospect and what a qualified leads means to them.\u00a0\u00a0 Together we will also decide how to measure our combined efforts for finding, qualifying, and moving leads into the sales pipeline.\u00a0\u00a0 No silly slogans, we\u2019ll simply set our goals and start counting our results.<\/p>\n

2. Marketing Automation<\/strong><\/p>\n

We will have a marketing automation platform integrated into our website, fully tested and ready to go in 90 days. \u00a0This is paramount to our future success as a marketing team.\u00a0\u00a0 We won\u2019t make this a science experiment!\u00a0 \u00a0We don\u2019t have a year to think about it and build studies.\u00a0 Our first targeted campaign will launch 90 days from today; the sales team is depending on us!\u00a0 I\u2019ve told my team that if they need outside help finding the right software and put everything in place, to please get it.\u00a0 \u00a0If we create one good lead which sales closes it easily covers the entire first year of this program.<\/p>\n

3. Social Media<\/strong><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t need meetings to decide \u201cShould we be on Facebook, do we blog, or are companies like ours really using Twitter?\u201d\u00a0 We will<\/em> have a company social media strategy, in-bound lead plan and monitoring program ready to launch in 90 days that engages our executives, subject experts, customer service and sales team.\u00a0 It won\u2019t be perfect, but we\u2019ll improve on it as we go.<\/p>\n

4. Prospect Database<\/strong><\/p>\n

An accurate lead database of our targeted prospects is critical for our marketing automation program\u2019s success.\u00a0 It\u2019s not \u201csales\u2019 job\u201d to go find these leads, it\u2019s marketing\u2019s.\u00a0 However, with sales we are defining our ideal prospect and creating a sweet spot matrix so we all agree who goes into the database.\u00a0\u00a0 These leads will also be segmented and ranked based on our target markets and our sales team\u2019s alignment with those verticals and geographies.<\/p>\n

5. Content Creation<\/strong><\/p>\n

We have two objectives for our content creation initiative:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Create plenty of strong content that is easy for our prospects to locate, read and share.<\/li>\n
  2. Make sure we have the technology and processes in place to score and nurture those leads that engage with our content until they are sales ready.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The content we create will work with our marketing automation platform and new web site (as you\u2019ll hear below,) to engage, educate and qualify our prospects.\u00a0 We consider this a full time responsibility of marketing, not just something that will happen in between other tasks so we have created the new role of content director and built a formal job description based on the best practices of leading B2B content marketers.<\/p>\n

    Our blog and web site will be the hub for our content, but it will also be integrated into our social media strategy and of course feed our outbound marketing efforts as we start our nurturing campaigns to our new prospect database (via our new marketing automation platform of course)!<\/p>\n

    6. Web Site<\/strong><\/p>\n

    There is a great blog post<\/a> from Anneke Seley<\/strong>, the author of Sales 2.0<\/a>, on the role today\u2019s website has in the selling process.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what she says, \u201cIn the Sales 1.0 era, prospects had to talk to\u00a0those of us in Sales in order to get information about our products and services. Today, they check out our websites first, quickly forming a first impression.\u00a0 And, if we\u2019ve done our jobs well, our websites become their \u201cgo to\u201d resource throughout the buying cycle and often beyond.<\/em>\u201c<\/p>\n

    She then provides four reasons why (and how) today\u2019s websites need to be part of a Sales 2.0 strategy.\u00a0\u00a0 They are:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Websites can help generate prospects and keep them engaged<\/li>\n
    2. Website analytics reveal what prospects are interested in<\/li>\n
    3. A 2.0 website can show when and how your prospect is engaged \u2013\u00a0and how qualified they are to buy<\/li>\n
    4. Sales 2.0\u00a0website + marketing automation system + CRM integration = increased sales productivity.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      We know our website needs a lot of work to become a \u201cgo-to resource\u201d and deliver these results.\u00a0 We will get there based on our efforts with sales on market segmentation, plus the new capabilities from our marketing automation software, along with social media integration, and not least of all the output from our new content initiative.\u00a0 All of this will come together on our new website launching at the conclusion of this first 90 days.<\/p>\n

      Which bring us back to where we started; that \u201cSales and Marketing are in this together!\u201d \u00a0Sales is our customer as far as the marketing team is concerned and we will do everything we can to make them successful.\u00a0\u00a0 When they win, we win, the company wins!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Marketing\u2019s New Role: Lead Generation Engine Today, best-in-class B2B marketing is a demand generation engine for sales.\u00a0 For most companies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8111,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26\/revisions\/8111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}