[Title Goes Here]

An Informative E-book from the Marketing White Paper Series Sponsored by

WinGreen Marketing Systems

Defining Success in Online Lead Generation

Using Content Marketing to Grow Sales Pipelines

An Informative E-book from the Marketing White Paper Series Sponsored by

WinGreen Marketing Systems

Defining Success In Online Lead Generation

The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

Page 2

Contents

Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 3

What is Effective Lead Generation? ..................................................................................... 3

Quantity ........................................................................................................................... 5

Quality ............................................................................................................................. 5

Cost ................................................................................................................................. 5

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 7

Defining Success In Online Lead Generation

The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

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Introduction

As 2013 is coming to a close, now is the time to take action to be ready to gain the benefit of a rising economic tide. As the economy improves, technology budgets will thaw, and companies will start to plan new purchases accordingly. The companies who get out ahead of their competitors stand to win the most new business. The savvy marketing professional should be running through the mental checklist now:

Products, services, and technologies in place?

Check.

Brand awareness programs in place? Check.

Distribution channels figured out? Check.

Sales people hired, trained, and motivated?

Check.

Sales automation and CRM systems in place?

Maybe…

Pipeline of hundreds of interested leads?

Oops.

If you’re one of the few people reading this who honestly can say “Check” to having a CRM system loaded with a pipeline of hundreds of leads for your sales force, then you can save 10 minutes of your day and skip reading the rest of the paper. If you’re in the vast majority of marketing and sales organizations who haven’t made consistent

use of 21st century marketing (opt-in, online, self-identifying, warm leads, inexpensive), and don’t have at least 100 new leads per salesperson in a CRM system, this paper is a starting point for you.

This paper will provide you with the definitions of effective lead generation to get 2014 off to a running start. (Look for future papers in the WinGreen series for tips on running effective campaigns, tools and techniques, and marketing assets.)

What is Effective Lead Generation?

Effective lead generation is the successful achievement of objectives for quantity, quality, and cost of new business leads delivered to the sales force for follow-up and closing. Note that all three objectives for lead gen must be met in order to consider the effort to have been effective.

Further, we recommend that these objectives be mutually agreed upon between the marketing organization and the sales organization. Too often we see organizations where the marketing group says “We did our part” only to have the sales team say “We aren’t getting enough good leads”.

Most sales organizations use a common vernacular for describing their pipeline or “funnel”. Typical labels describing phases or level of quality of leads would be:

Defining Success In Online Lead Generation

The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

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Contact Interest Evaluation Qualified Win/Lose

Suspect Prospect Qualified Prospect Close/Lose

Contact Interested Lead Pre-qualified Qualified Close/Lose

For the purposes of this illustration, let’s use the last nomenclature1

Most business-to-business, large-ticket technology companies (i.e. those with individual transactions of $25,000 to $500,000) should expect ratios approximately like those in Figure 1. Of course, all businesses will vary from these ratios, some by large factors. Still, it’s a useful starting point.

1 “Contacts” are known entities that may or may not be within the target market. Examples would be badge swipes or business cards from trade shows or contacts from individuals’ previous jobs or perhaps purchased contact names. “Interested” leads are people from within the target segment(s) who assertively demonstrate an explicit interest in learning more about the company’s products/services/industry, but haven’t yet necessarily shown interest in a purchase. Examples would be people who attend a webcast on the company’s area of expertise and are from the target segment. “Pre-qualified” is typically defined as “Interested plus is a decision maker or strong influencer plus expresses direct interest in the company’s product (possibly through an evaluation or demonstration) plus agrees to take an in-person sales appointment.” “Qualified prospects” are decision makers with authority to purchase plus the budget in place to purchase plus a demonstrated need for the product/service plus an explicit agreement to make the purchase within a reasonable (usually no more than 90 days) timeframe.

In other words, to make one technology sale of $25,000 to $500,000, the sales organization should expect to win one out of every five qualified prospects, convert one out of every two prequalified prospects into qualified prospects, and get one pre-qualified prospect out of every 10 interested leads. The net is that it takes 100 interested leads to create a single sale. (Obviously, each ratio can be either better or worse at each individual organization, but this diagram serves to illustrate the orders of magnitude of funnel economics. )2

2 In a future companion paper, we will investigate the “leverage” aspect of focusing on these specific ratios to improve results. For example, just improving the ratio of Qualified to Close from 5:1 to 3:1 reduces the number of

Defining Success In Online Lead Generation

The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

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Since we earlier defined effective lead generation as the successful achievement of objectives for quantity, quality, and cost, we can determine the mutual objectives for marketing and sales:

Quantity

If an organization has five sales people, each of whom is expected to close a $100,000 sale each month, the lead generation activities need to deliver 100 interested leads per rep into the top of the funnel each month. Therefore the total objective is 500 interested leads each month.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of having the sales and marketing leaders work together to agree on objectives. Furthermore, we recommend a wide-open approach that involves all constituents in defining what a “quality” lead is, setting objectives, and agreeing to all aspects of the lead generation function. Invite field sales, inside sales, marketing management, copywriters, and anyone else who contributes to the process to work together, communicate openly, and understand deeply what the numbers mean and what the quantity expectations are.

Quality

We chose to use the nomenclature “Contacts/Interested/Pre-qualified/Qualified/Closed” for our example. Sales and marketing must mutually

“Interested” leads necessary to deliver a sale from 100 to 60. Or, to put it another way, improving the closing ratio from 5:1 to 3:1 means that sales can double with just a 20% increase in Interested leads at the top of the funnel (100 to 120).

agree to the definitions of what constitutes a lead or prospect at each level of the funnel. The best target type of lead for marketing lead generation activity is to deliver interested leads. Contacts – or “suspects” -- are not sufficiently interested and will waste salespeople’s time. At the same time, in our experience, using marketing or an outside firm to deliver live appointments or qualified prospects is too expensive, and often yields questionable results, as the people tasked with qualifying/disqualifying from interested leads have no vested interest in the final sale, and often “throw the prospect over the wall” to the sales organization while claiming success. We recommend that sales and marketing mutually agree to define the quality objective as “leads who have self-identified and have expressed direct interest in what our products can do for them… or better.”

Again, the importance of mutual definition of “quality” cannot be exaggerated. Even the tiniest disagreement or misunderstanding can grow into a canyon between sales and marketing when quota and revenue pressures mount. It’s critical for sales and marketing leadership and employees to get together, discuss objectives and definitions openly, and commit to regular reviews of both their results and their assumptions.

Cost

Traditional marketing methods – direct mail, trade shows, and cold calling – will typically deliver interested leads for around $675 per lead. Online marketing methods, when executed by experienced digital marketers, can generate

Defining Success In Online Lead Generation

The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

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interested leads for between $50 and $100 per lead. Therefore, the final objective to be agreed between sales, marketing, and (now) the budget gatekeepers, is to deliver quality, interested leads, at less than $100 per lead.

From the WinGreen white paper, 21st Century Marketing for Effective Lead Generation:

The marketer of 1995 might conduct a direct mail campaign to a list of 50,000 people at a cost of $0.75 per name and address, $2.50 per color printed promo letter, $2.00 per insert, $1.00 for postage, and $0.50 per mailing house drop -- $337,500 for the campaign (without the telephone follow-up, if outsourced) – and get a 1% response rate (500 responses). That’s $675.00 per “interested lead”.

The 21st Century marketer prepares PDF versions of collateral, builds

interactive, informative, drill-down web pages, creates professional quality video and audio, and adds 21st century marketing assets like white papers, podcasts, webcasts, and online surveys. Thousands of interested potential leads opt in to more communications. Thousands more are offered marketing assets in email campaigns and

subsequently self-identify. Digital marketing assets are passed along by recipients, leading to more opt-ins. The typical 21st century use of digital marketing assets allows the marketer to conduct a campaign to thousands of contacts, deliver them an invitation to download a marketing asset of interest, and receive perhaps 500 interested lead responses for about $50,000.

Setting an objective of $100 per interested lead is a reasonable goal for most organizations in technology businesses. As we showed in the above example, organizations that run in-house campaigns very efficiently can deliver interested leads for a cost within the range of $80 to $150 per lead.

In our example of five sales people, each of whom is expected to close a $100,000 sale each month, the economics of online lead generation are quite compelling. We noted in the example that it would take 100 interested leads (at a cost of $100 per lead) to yield one closed sale (at $100,000). Therefore the value of each interested lead is 100,000/100 = $1000. Since marketing costs are already factored into the financials and income statements, it’s fair to say that the incremental cost of $100 per lead yields incremental revenue of $1000, for a return on investment of 900%.

Defining Success In Online Lead Generation

The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

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Lead generation is not only an essential piece of the marketing mix and sales inputs, but should be considered to be the starting point for achieving the organization’s sales objectives.

Effective lead generation requires the marketing and sales organizations – from top to bottom – to communicate openly, get in sync, and stay in sync on objectives, definitions, and expectations. Time and time again, we’ve seen this seemingly simple point ignored, with subsequent shortfalls in sales. If you are a marketing professional reading this paper, get in touch with your sales counterpart and talk about the principles discussed here. If you’re a sales professional reading this paper and looking for more leads from marketing, reach out to your marketing counterpart and open up a real discussion about your needs and expectations. Wide-open communications and mutual understanding and agreement between sales and marketing are absolutely critical components of effective lead generation.

There are three objectives for lead generation: quantity, quality, and cost. Effective lead generation requires that marketing and sales focus on all three simultaneously.

When the entire organization – marketing, sales, finance, operations – is pulling in a single direction, every stage of the sales funnel is at or above the mutually defined goals, sales people are harvesting and closing sales at or above their quota every month, and the economics of online marketing are leveraged into healthy growth and profit for the firm.

Conclusion

Defining Success In Online Lead Generation

The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

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WinGreen Marketing Systems is a content marketing agency specializing in inbound marketing, outbound marketing, and high-impact lead gen-eration programs for technology companies in the United States and Canada. Headquartered in Downingtown, PA, the company was founded in 2009, and is a business partner of Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Ringlead Inc., and Predictive Response.

WinGreen’s content marketing services include authoring and publishing of client-branded content in all digital forms, including white papers, e-books, articles, blog posts, social media posts, webcasts, videos, and podcasts. WinGreen delivers compel-ling content that attracts target buyers and influencers across the entire spectrum of buyer personas and buying phases.

The company’s inbound marketing services utilize WinGreen-authored content in its many forms to attract and engage target buyers and influencers to its clients’ websites.

WinGreen uses Hubspot’s world-leading inbound marketing automation to manage content, campaigns, and analytics. The combination of content published by WinGreen and inbound marketing supported by Hubspot tools is unbeatable for building prospect pipeline and revenue growth.

WinGreen also provides outbound content marketing services for predictable, reliable, cost-effective lead generation. In addition to author-ing all required content, WinGreen also builds target email databases, delivers mass email marketing, plans and executes regularly scheduled campaigns, and utilizes its own commercial-grade, cloud software infrastructure for all marketing automation. WinGreen’s outbound content marketing is the perfect way to get immediate lead generation results while building long-term inbound marketing engagement.

Contact WinGreen at www.wingreenmarketing.com/Pages/contactus.aspx or call (650) LEAD GEN (650-532-3436). Learn more at www.wingreenmarketing.com.

About the Sponsor

© Copyright 2009-2013, WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All Rights Reserved. This document and its contents may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of WinGreen Marketing Systems. WinGreen Marketing Systems, The WinGreen System of Marketing, and The WinGreen Systems Architecture are trademarks of WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.