All Together Now - An Integrated Approach To Lead Generation

No one claimed Lead Generation was easy - especially when you are in the B2B space. There are so many moving parts that a key problem becomes how to get them all pulling in the same direction. You may have one or more of the following teams contributing to demand generation:

Let's Go Right - No Left - No...

1. Research team keeping track of market developments

2. Contact discovery or database research team building the lists

3. Content creation team responsible for collateral, campaign drafts etc.

4. Social Media team

5. Inside Sales and / or Telemarketing Team

6. Pre-Sales and / or Sales Tea,

You may be getting a sense of the possible complexities just looking at this list. Pretty much every organisation I have spoken to over the last 3 - 4 years has people doing some of these activities. The problem I have usually found is that they all work within their own individual silos. The activity levels are always high and each individual team is usually capable but the result when they come together is generally somewhat underwhelming. My own view is this happens because there is usually no "big picture" view being taken. If you get all these groups working towards a common goal chances are the synergies will lead to much better results. 

Let's consider the example of an organisation that has services to offer to companies in the Cloud space and how an integrated approach would work for them.

1. The team keeping an eye on the market could come up with a finding that of

As an example...

late cloud file storage companies seem to be attracting funding.

2. This could be the trigger for the content generation team to start putting together collateral that would be of relevance to this sector - say a white paper about a technology trend and it's applicability or a user case study of a success story in the same or a comparable space

3. The next step for the content team would be to start working on reasonably customized crafted emails targeted to sub-segments within the larger Cloud File Storage segment.

4. While this is going on the Contact Discovery team could be hard at work building a database of companies and individual decision makers within those organisations who could be receptive to the message.

5.   On getting sufficient content ready the next step is to make it available on the specific social media platforms the target customers are likely to gather on to inform themselves. In the context of the example this may be Cloud focused LinkedIn groups as an illustration.

6. There is also a case for tracking specific influencers in the Cloud Storage space - say the CTOs of the target Cloud Storage organisations. The objective would be to build a map of their social media life - their Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, their blog and so on. Sharing what they have to say in a great way to learn from their experience as also to get on their radar. This is a longer term strategic activity - the objective is to connect with them and engage with them at their own terms on ground they feel comfortable on.

7. Now it's time to launch the outreach campaigns - first email and then telemarketing, assuming that is right for the business. The chance that someone will respond to the outreach is proportionately greater if they have encountered the company or some useful content in the digital or social world previously.

8. Key is integrating the outreach program into the sales process - not only to ensure that any leads that get generated receive the prompt attention they demand but also to be able to build any feedback received at any stage back into the appropriate point of the process.

9. Rinse and Repeat !

My personal view is that if the end objective is that more people should respond positively to your outreach efforts then it's pretty much mandatory that an integrated approach be followed. Chances are otherwise the results will more often than not be lower than the quality of the team and the visible activity level would suggest.         

What to expect when you are Emailing.

First things first - this post is for those still in the early days of flirting with email campaigns. There is plenty of great information out there about more advanced techniques, delivery rates, success metrics & the like but I thought it may be useful to set out first principles - well first !

For the uninitiated then there are 3 types of results that we can expect from emails - all of them useful in their own way.

You've got to Mail !

1. Email read - this is a perfectly valid response. In most cases when we first send an email this is the best result we can expect. The intention of the mail is to let new people know of us or remind people we have been in touch with in the past about us. Think of this as a Shout Out - useful to identify people with whom a longer conversation is warranted or possible but requiring follow thru'. 

2. Clicking through a link in the email - this is much more likely to happen when the email itself calls for that specific action, for eg. the mail campaign itself is talking about a whitepaper & inviting people to download it from the link. In some emails the link is provided only in support of the central message - for instance a link to a webpage. A lack of large nos. of people clicking through this should not necessarily be a cause for concern. What I would definitely recommend is staying connected with  people who do click through such. They are more likely to have some future need coming down the turnpike for which they may be at an early stage of exploration - hence the kicking of the tyres.

3. Email reply - in my personal experience follow-up campaigns sometimes stand a greater chance of eliciting this response than the initial email campaign. Broadly there are 3 kinds of replies - 

a) We like what we hear but we don't have any need right now

b) Don't bother me

c) Something specific in relation to a need or a query 

We have to take care to stay in touch & build a relationship with the people who give the first response, make sure that we do not send any more unsolicited emails to the second category & jump all over the third category. 

Something more specific, links to referenceable work, something cool to showcase etc. is much more likely to have an impact with the first category - there the need is to grow the initial interest so we should respond to their mail with something tailored to their specific area of interest.  

Coming to the dream response - people who have a specific need. To a large extent this is completely unpredictable given that this is only going to occur when there is a live opportunity at the prospect. We can only hope to maximize the probability of this response by covering as much ground as possible through well thought out & targeted email campaigns.

So to all the email campaign newbies out there - start drafting those mails & putting together those campaigns because if you are not reaching out to your prospects your competitors definitely are & chances are they're using mail to do so !