1. Web site design/content (65% stated they were increasing budget allocation)
2. Email marketing (54%)
3. Web search optimization (51%)

Great news, right? Good to hear that the economy is picking up, and that smart companies are following current trends in effective Web lead generation.

So why did my “Massive Disconnect” alarm start going off almost immediately?

Here’s why: because indicators show that the majority of companies are terribly, horribly un-optimized to take advantage of the leads their Web marketing activities generate.

Even though the article states that 75% of sales organizations now use a CRM tool of some kind to track and monitor sales activities, MIT research shows that most of them still aren’t following good lead management practices to get the most from their increased marketing spend.

For example, how many of the companies surveyed are currently responding to their incoming, “hot” Web leads in 10 minutes or less? Because if they aren’t, MIT’s research shows they’re potentially losing 20 times the total effectiveness of the leads they generate. Even worse, the research shows that 45% of companies don’t even respond AT ALL to new Web-generated leads—let alone in 10 minutes or less as best practices suggest.

So let me get this straight: the top three increased marketing budget allocations for the next year are all based on Web marketing—yet nearly half of companies don’t respond AT ALL to incoming Web leads.

Hmmmm.

Furthermore, of the companies surveyed, how many call/contact attempts are they making to reach their new Web leads? MIT’s research shows that barely 7 percent of companies make at least 6 total contact attempts by phone and email to incoming Web leads.

Yet according to The Bridge Group, the average number of “touches” needed to convert a new inquiry into a prospect is somewhere between 6 and 7—and dead “touches” like no-answer phone calls don’t even count towards that number.

So tell me again—why are companies increasing Web marketing budgets when statistically only 7 percent of them are even meeting the absolute, barest of bare minimums to get the value they want from their leads?

My “Massive Disconnect” alarm just went into overdrive.

Is it any wonder that in spite of progress, Propelling Brands says that sales and marketing still have a long way to go to align their processes?

I don’t want to steal his thunder, so go read the article, but the major point is that over the past 10 years, the roles of sales, marketing, lead generation, and lead nurturing have consistently become more holistic.

Sales managers are recognizing that they HAVE to have usable, critical intelligence data about how marketing is getting them their leads—and vice-versa, marketing managers are realizing that their efforts have to line up from Day 1 with what sales is trying to accomplish.

Every marketing and sales touch point is becoming increasingly attached and interactive with a half-dozen other touch points along the way—and for businesses to really get what they need out of their marketing spend, it has to be this way.

Trish Bertuzzi and The Bridge Group provided a set of data that added some weight to this assertion. Their survey of 115 companies indicated that dedicated lead generation/lead nurturing employees have nearly doubled in the last three years, and that there’s increasingly a split—almost exactly 50/50—of which department lead gen reports to, sales or marketing.

While there will never be a total overlap between sales and marketing, I don’t think the time is far distant that we may see the development of a new, hybrid department that works as an intermediary between the two. The “Market Oversight” department, or “Sales Analytics” department, will have the specific role of measuring, testing, and developing the ways in which sales and marketing will combine their efforts.

Laura has been studying what she calls the “Marketing Effectiveness Index” which are the most effective methods used by B2B businesses to generate leads since early in 2006.

She uses responses from surveys to give grades from 1 to 5, with 5 the highest, for different methods of lead generation. Click here to see a chart of her results for the last three years.

Another study for 2010 is coming out soon, but her most recent rankings in 2009 are as follows:

1. Inside Sales / Telemarketing
2. Executive Events
3. Trade Shows
4. Webinars
5. Email Marketing
6. Search Marketing
7. Direct Mail
8. Video, Podcasts, etc.
9. Blogs
10. Other Web 2.0

The big news in 2009 was that Inside Sales surpassed Executive Events and Email Marketing moved ahead of Search. Trade Shows hung strong even with significant cutbacks in corporate travel budgets.

The rankings for 2008 were:

1. Executive Events
2. Inside Sales
3. Search Marketing
4. Trade Shows
5. Webinars
6. Email Marketing
7. Direct Mail
8. Video, Podcasts, etc.
9. Blogs
10. Other Web 2.0

I will share the 17 methods ranked first by effectiveness, then by popularity, then by the points of variance up or down. 

Popular isn’t necessarily good, it just means everyone else is doing it (email for example is ranked 1st as most popular, but ranked 7th in actual effectiveness.)  Take especial note of the degree of variance and whether it is positive or negative.  High positive variance shows extreme effectiveness that is relatively unused or unknown by your competition.

I believe that the best methods are those that are most Effective, but least Popular.  So look for a low number on Effective, and a high number on Variance:

At my company, InsideSales.com, we combine the first five (Executive Seminars, Inside Sales, Search Marketing, Webinars, and Trade Shows) to bring us the best results.

My personal background with founding the original inside sales division at Franklin Quest as the largest time management seminar company in the world (my team used to fill up 200+ seminars every month) gives me a pre-disposition towards seminars, so I love Executive Seminars and of course, Inside Sales is the best way to put “butts in seats.” 

Having the name InsideSales.com has ensured we appear at the top of the search engines for the industry we are named after, so search marketing has been a never-ending source of leads for us.  And every single sales demonstration we give is a custom webinar to prospective clients and we are busy trying to expand this offering to larger groups in live and on-demand venues.

One of my personal favorites is trade shows.  I will write my next post about some of the fun strategies we use for this. 

Especially interesting is the effectiveness of TV advertising and Radio, though these two are difficult to target to specific B2B niches, I have found.

Notably absent (this study was early last year) are the social medias like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  The jury is still out for me on these three, I’m seeing the buzz, still questioning actual research that demonstrates any sales being made for all the time that is spent.

If you are finding results out there in these areas, please let me know.

I hope this is helpful.

Gerhard Gschwandtner - Founder of Selling Power Magazine

A friend of mine, Gerhard Gschwandtner, the founder and owner of Selling Power Magazine, just took some time and wrote a post on his blog about when is the best time to call back on leads. 

The post he wrote came from our landmark research study conducted with Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT that was originally presented in October of 2007 at the MarketingSherpa B2B Demand Summit 2007 in both Boston and San Francisco.  This study was the genesis for the new industry called Lead Response Management; a subset of Lead Management that focuses on responding immediately, continually, consistently, and optimally to increase contact and qualification rates of web-based leads.  The interesting information involves the incredible changes in your ability to reach people by calling on the best day of the week, time of the day and most importantly, calling back immediately; as in 5 minutes!

BEST DAY OF WEEK TO CALL

To quickly summarize Dr. Oldroyds research: Tuesday is the worst day to call, while Thursday is best.  In fact, if you call on Thursday you have a 49.7 percent higher chance of reaching a prospect than on Thursday.  Monday and Friday are almost as bad, but Wednesday is nearly as good as Thursday.

BEST TIME OF DAY TO CALL

The next stage of the research was focussing on the best time of day to call.  Early in the morning (8am to 10am) and late in the day (4pm to 6pm) are much more productive than calling between 10am and 4pm.  By calling at 8am your chances of making contact go up 164% versus calling at the worst time of the day, which is from 1pm to 2pm.

IMMEDIATE RESPONSE HAS THE BIGGEST IMPACT

Day of week and time of day make noticeable impact on contact rates, but calling back within 5 minutes versus even waiting 30 minutes increased the odds of making contact BY 100 TIMES.  And possibly more important, the ability to qualify or set an appointment also went up BY 21 TIMES.

In summary… Call back NOW!

This information has changed the lead response management strategies that companies have put in place.  It has become clear that in an internet age people want information now; they don’t want to wait.  Their attention spans are shortening, so you had better reach out to them immediately.  Don’t let a lead sit in an inbox for even half an hour; that is a big problem when most sales reps don’t even attempt a first phone call for 24 to 48 hours and only make 4-5 attempts to reach a lead.  If the average contact rate is 10% (which our research among 450 clients shows it to be) then that means only 45% of all leads ever get contacted!

When we learned this internally at InsideSales.com, we immediately designed our dialer and lead management CRM technology to capture the lead on a website, look up which rep should get the lead, dial the rep, get them on the phone, and start dialing the lead… all in 8-10 seconds on average.  We couldn’t get our own reps to be able to do it by hand fast enough by just asking them (or even mandating) to call the leads back fast enough.  The best they could seem to do was about 30 minutes, which missed the whole window of opportunity.  So our phone dialer software was the key ingredient that launched a new industry that is getting the likes of Gerhard and Selling Power Magazine, the premier media provider for solutions for sales management to recognize it as a key ingredient in the Sales 2.0 initiative.

• Leads generated on a website sit in the webmaster’s box until she checks it.
• The webmaster checks her box once each day and sends any accumulated leads to the sales manager’s box until he checks it.
• The sales manager checks his box once each day. He sorts the leads and sends them to the appropriate sales rep.
• The sales rep types the lead information into a tracking system—a spreadsheet or contact manager—before calling the lead. After making 4 or 5 attempts to contact the lead, she moves on to other leads.

The process from lead capture to first contact attempt often takes between 48 and 72 hours. The time to first contact can often be as long as two weeks—plenty of time for the prospect to forget your company or sign up with your competition.  Lead management is nearly as important as sales yet it is often the most overlooked process.

Why?

The lead management process is often where the marketing department hands off the leads it generated to the sales department. Leads are often lost in this “gray area” and neither department wants to take responsibility: marketing blames sales for failing to follow-up and sales blames marketing for sending them unqualified leads.

Another failure in most lead management processes is found in the lack of automation. Leads are routed through a slow pipeline that could easily be replaced by technology and reduce the time between lead generation and first contact from days to minutes.

Best Practice: Effective lead management includes such disciplines as:

• Lead Capture
• Lead Routing
• Lead Response Management
• Lead Qualification Skills
• Lead Tracking
• Lead Reporting
• Lead Source Analysis

Create a clear process for each aspect of lead management. Invest time in the process and money in the systems to leverage the ability to quickly and effectively qualify and sort leads and you will find hidden increases in productivity.

It’s all about the leads. We don’t see nearly as many successful companies leaving the lead generation process to their sales people.  If you don’t provide pre-qualified leads, at least provide your sales teams with good lists to call. Good lists cost roughly 5% to 10% of the money you spend on labor costs and can increase results dramatically (we have seen results as high as 1300%), yet some companies we studied left their reps to spend as much as 40% of their time looking for someone to call. Not only are you wasting your most valuable resource—your sales team—you risk losing your most effective sales reps to companies that are willing to give them a higher rate of success by providing warm leads.

We also advocate using dialing technology to triple or quadruple the contact rates of new leads and allow salespeople to spend less time between conversations with decision-makers. Dialers that connect your sales reps to a live call as soon as he or she has ended another call will keep your sales reps busy making sales—increasing their success and profitability.

Best Practice: Invest in good leads or lists. The Internet is already the fastest growing and least expensive source of leads for almost every business. Create an effective website and generate leads.