Lead Nurturing - 7 Steps to Improve Campaign Yield

Yesterday I was invited to present to around 70 UK B2B marketers at a breakfast seminar organised by Fox Parrack Singapour in Berkshire, UK. It was a great event with lots of thought-provoking content.

David Fox opened the session with an overview of market trends around lead generation in the age of the empowered consumer. Lots of good data from Marketing Sherpa, Google and several others around the shifts to pull-based marketing and the impact that will have on us all as marketers, as well as consumers.

Zina Manda from Mardev (the database marketing division of Reed Elsevier) then did a super job looking at some of the challenges around getting an appropriate balance between Push and Pull marketing

I've posted my talk called From Click to Cash. Here I tried to provide a "warts and all" overview of the journey I'm on in IBM to improve the yield from campaigns. As you'll see from the deck I've boiled the challenge down into 7 key focus areas

1. Developing a Service Level Agreement with the sales organisation to ensure they are hungry for what your planning to serve them
2. Capturing all the campaign responses into a single view, whether produced online or offline
3. Aligning your nurturing offers with the buying process
4. Scoring the consumers of your nurturing offers according to their activity
5. Developing a set of "blueprints" for each response type to help you plan the key nurturing steps from initial response to sales-ready lead
6. Ensuring the salesforce have visibility of all the valuable insight that's been gathered through your nurturing, and not just the basic contact info
7. Establishing a set of end-to-end measurements from response to closed sale (and beyond) to allow you to identify improvement areas

The material seemed to be well received and I'd really welcome any additonal comments here, as I passionately believe this is an area that all of us in marketing need to focus on MUCH more.

A couple of further observations. I referred to some of the research sources, blogs etc that I'd been using to develop my thinking. Spookily both I and the preceding speaker referred to some of the excellent work being done by Brian Carroll in his publications and B2B Lead Generation blog. It was great to find a fellow marketer who had been similarly influenced by his thinking. I suspect Brian may see a small uptick in hits to his blog from the UK in the next week or so, since none of the rest of the audience were familiar with that work.

It also re-inforced that within the marketing community we are not using the resources that are freely available in the Blogosphere (hate that term) sufficiently. And furthermore only a handful of yesterday's audience had yet recognised the practical assistance that tools such as RSS readers can provide to us. I'll make this a topic for my next post.

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