I was working with a client recently who wanted to improve their lead generation. They just weren’t getting enough quality sales leads. Budget and effort weren’t the problem; they were utilising email, telemarketing, PPC, white papers, direct mail and events. But none of these were working that well.
After spending some time looking at the individual components of the lead generation activity as well as their approach to lead generation, I came up with a number of conclusions.
– Different departments took charge of different elements. PPC and online was from the IT department, telemarketing was within the sales department and email, DM and events were in the marketing department.
– Although they used multiple communication methods, they weren’t integrated and nobody took ownership for the whole lead generation process.
– The emails just weren’t getting results. There were two different formats that were sent out – a newsletter and a white paper each month. They were getting a 5% open rate and a 0.5% click through rate, but nobody was actually looking at this and making decisions on the information.
– The telemarketing staff had a script that the most successful telemarketer had prepared, but for most of the team they were constantly getting rejected at the first hurdle, before they had even got through to the decision maker.
– The PPC campaigns had been set up 12 months ago and not been looked at since, they were getting a lot of clicks but these were very expensive. Some of the links didn’t even go through to live pages and some of the pages weren’t relevant to the adverts.
After sitting down the MD, Sales Director and Marketing Director and going through the issues it was a remarkably easy fix. However it was going to take a lot of effort from everybody involved in the lead generation process.
Every activity needed to be tested on a small scale before going live and once it had gone live the results needed analysing in great deal so that this intelligence could be used in the future.
The email campaigns were studied to see what the market place was clicking through to, which campaigns had been successful, which day of the week or time of day got the best results, the frequency of emails was tested as was different subject lines, formats, styles and content.
The telemarketers scrapped their scripts and each of them worked on their own opening that fitted in with their own styles. They each had to come up with three openings and for half a day test them to see which was the most successful. We tested different call goals from face to face appointment to seminar bookings and online demonstrations.
The PPC campaigns were all analysed. The keywords changed as were the adverts, landing pages and bid values.
The beauty of B2B lead generation is that the results are often instantaneous, or at least very quick. This means that you can test everything that you do before committing lots of money or time to a campaign or project. Small things often have a large impact in lead generation so ensure you test all the variables to maximise your ROI.
If it’s not working change it and if it is working do it more.
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