It seems so obvious. Sales people want qualified leads. They want prospects that are already looking for the solution being sold, and are pre-disposed to accept a sales call. Success in lead management includes the pillar of Lead Qualification—the process of consistently providing lead pools with a large percentage of pre-disposed buyers. Putting truly qualified prospects into the lead pool motivates sales professionals and improves the odds of more sales.

Qualification Thresholds: A useful strategy for success is evaluating the qualification thresholds for each campaign in relation to engagement activities. You automatically track activities such as web page hits, video views, collateral downloads, and software trials. Be sure to listen for patterns in feedback from the sales team or channel partners. Consistent complaints about non-qualified leads on a particular campaign might justify fine-tuning the thresholds. Scoring allows you to empirically judge the quality of leads previously designated as “qualified.” Data from a scoring system enables rational adjustment of controls, and helps to minimize passage of unqualified leads to sales.

Multi-Tiered Lead Qualification: In a large, global organization, using an automated, multi-tiered lead qualification process will provide more granular control and accuracy. For example, one of the world’s largest computer manufacturers faced declining revenue from an old channel business. Its goal was to significantly grow enterprise revenue without hiring (expensive) direct outside sales reps. The company created a new program targeting end users that directly used channel partners for fulfillment. A closed-loop lead generation system segmented prospects in an existing database. Results were more than 6,000 qualified leads resulting in $15 million in incremental sales during the first two quarters. ROI was 1,250% with $60 million of incremental pipeline sales (for more info, please view the Success Story on the Crimson Consulting website).

Building a multi-tiered process like this one entails the use of technologies to automate the nurturing of leads, along with a team that can help exploit lead management data. These capabilities initiate a growing relationship with a prospect before it goes to sales. With truly qualified prospects, sales professionals can spend their time responding to people who are ready to engage.

What techniques do you use to ensure your leads are well-qualified?

As we continue looking at best practices in lead generation campaigns, it is important to understand how to segment your leads for campaign success. Developing a strategy and a process that prepares the database for easy campaign segmentation will simplify and streamline campaign list building. Assigning accurate profile data will enable your campaign to use relevant messages and influence and ultimately win prospects faster and easier.

Some ways that Crimson has helped our clients ensure their leads are well-segmented include:

Adding a self-qualification requirement to a web-to-lead form.
This can provide instant value in profiling any potential candidates for a quick, short-term marketing campaign. As part of your data mart for Lead Management, profiling will also serve as a basis for future campaigns.

Look for ways to accelerate profiling new prospects.
Fresh data is better for matching prospects to the right campaign. Inaccuracies or changing customer circumstances make these data worth less over time.

A big challenge is that leads come from diverse sources: web inquiries, purchased lists, sales contacts, partner contacts, and customers. Unfortunately, these are often scattered across the globe in various Customer Relationship Management and other database systems. Such data become relatively insignificant and dramatically decline in value if you cannot tap them immediately for an urgent campaign that presents itself.

We’ve all heard of implementations that were too slow and became useless. For example, one company expended three years to build a marketing data warehouse. As a result, they never used it for a single campaign because the data was so outdated!

In some cases, you may need specialized assistance in order to consolidate and cleanse prospects and customer databases within multiple sources. Investing the time and energy to develop new processes to keep data fresh and profiles accurate may seem counter-intuitive to the sense of urgency around touching your contacts quickly. However, these steps will ensure your long-term lead management practices are repeatable, targeted and productive.

How does your company ensure your leads are profiled quickly and accurately?

With the world’s attention on Vancouver, one thing is certain: people are posting, updating, tweeting, and blogging about it like no other Olympics before. NBC recently launched a pretty interesting way to take a snapshot of that real-time conversation. The Olympic Tracker aggregates tweets about live sporting events and Olympians and then overlays these conversations with images. Click on an image, and tweets clearly targeted by keyword are displayed to share live comments and links. The site even allows users to post directly to Twitter without ever leaving the site.

The tracker is a fun new way to experience the Olympics and NBC has utilized it to set up a hub and spoke approach to their social media strategy. The NBCOlympics.com page serves as a social hub, aggregating tweets from Olympians to provide unique perspectives on the games, using the Tracker to create a fun participatory experience, and linking to a number of blogs to provide in depth information. NBC also maintains a Facebook page, a Twitter handle, and offers widgets and a mobile app, each of which serve as another touch point to tap into the ‘pulse’ of the Olympic games online.

The notion of a social hub has become increasingly important as media broadcasters and marketers look to extend their social media presence beyond the often mundane Facebook fan page. Often it is these unique sites that use open API technology to tap into the social fabric of the web that are truly eye catching and engaging.

Channels like Twitter and Facebook are quickly becoming utilities that are directly integrated into every website experience. The challenge for marketers then is figure out how to utilize multiple communication channels to achieve their marketing objectives. Each social tool should be used to its own strengths, but all touch points must ultimately find continuity. The hub and spoke approach to social media allows the marketer to do just that. By integrating social interaction and popular social network channels into a centralized site, companies or broadcasters can maintain a focus in their communication without spreading themselves too thin. Social hubs also have the potential of creating a community beyond the Facebook fan or Twitter follower. Soon we may see Facebook or Twitter serving as just a gateway to an even more vibrant and close nit online community found within a branded social hub. It may be these more niche online communities that make social media even more impactful than today.

At Crimson, we have recently added a lead management practice, designed to help our clients with their prospect management challenges. Demand generation is the deliverable produced by marketing that connects ready and willing buyers with a sales team. Improving demand generation entails a chain of processes laced with marketing lingo like respondents, lead profiles, bounce rates, open rates, and conversions. These universal terms, commonly utilized by marketing professionals, don’t signify the end of a campaign. Rather, the bottom line is only one thing matters: placing qualified buyers in the call queues of every sales person within the organization.

Some key factors that we believe help increase the effectiveness of demand generation include:

• Lead Management Process Development: Successful marketing organizations control the processes of demand generation with Lead Management. The tactic we use at Crimson to implement Lead Management is usually a closed-loop approach that meticulously tracks campaigns and marketing programs from the point of launch to the point of revenue using online tools and analytics.
• Automation: We have found that automation of common tasks and analysis processes gives our clients reliable access to immediate, real-time data which chronicles the success of each program. It also allows clients to quickly test a new concept, measure it, and evaluate any form of progress that ensues.

Continually tuning lead management practices on a timely basis can result in dramatic improvements to demand generation. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing additional “best practices” for enhancing lead management and demand generation.

Does your organization follow a lead management process that tracks the entire life of a lead?

Properly used, you get bigger and stronger.
 
Most likely your marketing and sales organizations are using a combination of SaaS and software applications that promise to meet your objective of bigger and better demand generation.
 
Never before has marketing and sales been presented with such an array of productivity-enhancing opportunities. The side effect of all of this capability is that we are often unprepared to tap into the potential of our marketing systems. We get locked into a few features here and there. Whether due to lack of vision, lack of manpower, or lack of training, the result is a weak and lackluster program. Many begin to question the overall effectiveness of their marketing systems, wondering: Are they generating the ROI that is expected or desired? How many of these types of systems are in use and are they effectively working together to meet objectives?

So how do you get the most out of your current systems when you may be using a combination of marketing systems, including:

• Social media monitoring tools (e.g. Radian6, Visible Technologies)
• Website analytics (e.g. Omniture, Coremetrics)
• CRM/SFA (e.g. Salesforce, Siebel)
• Marketing automation (e.g. Eloqua, Marketo)
• Social CRM (e.g. Lithium, Helpstream)
• Enterprise Marketing Management (e.g. Aprimo, Unica)
• Partner Portals (usually built internally)
• Other

By analyzing the number of systems and their interconnection, we often find a variety of challenges that allow us to identify opportunities for improvement:

• Issues of properly set expectations and objectives - Do you really know what you want to do and are you able to measure it using your systems?
• Ownership of results - Who really needs the info and are they getting it?
• Right people in place to implement - Is your staffing at an adequate level to truly make the systems shine?
• Training - Are the people administrating the systems expert in their implementation?

What is the next step? Pull a team together with the purpose of identifying these opportunities. Call in a few experts who can identify the points of integration. Evaluate your campaigns and how well the systems have handled each phase.

Evaluating the systems in use and providing insight, strategy, and execution to tap into the best of what you have will provide you with the shot you needed to improve your demand generation results.

These days, brands are looking for loyalty wherever they can find it. With consumers increasingly careful about spending, and even health insurance being seen by some as discretionary, brands need to hold onto as many customers as possible. Our recent work for a health care client suggests that what seem like automatic renewals may lull brands into a false sense of customer loyalty.
 
Think about it. When it comes to health insurance, most Americans still get their insurance through their job. Every year, Open Enrollment is the one time everyone can change health plans or coverage, no matter how dissatisfied they become with their plan or coverage. The rest of the year, people are locked into their health plan and coverage barring life events (e.g., birth, marriage, divorce).

Back in the day when people rarely changed jobs, it was also rare to change insurance providers. In fact, in our recent research with consumers who get their insurance through work, over a third have had the same insurance coverage (and the same job) for 10+ years, and over half have had the same insurance through work for over 5 years. However, job longevity is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

When it comes to changing health insurance coverage, just the thought of it can make people anxious. Consumers are skeptical of the motives of most players in the category (insurance companies, drug companies, employers), find it difficult to understand the total costs of treatment under different plans, and prefer anonymity for fear of repercussions on-the-job at renewal time.

By identifying life events that cause people to take stock of their situation – like getting married or starting a family or by providing or publicizing coverage options consumers really do care about (e.g., wellness and preventative care) — shrewd marketers will have an opportunity to take share in the health insurance category. And as people who have been unemployed and unable to afford coverage hopefully find jobs and begin to enjoy coverage again, health plans will have a unique opportunity to increase enrollment.

Health care is not generally known for brand innovation, and customer has clearly been taken for granted, historically. That might change if a competitor found a way to get consumers’ attention and make it easy for them to act on their dissatisfaction with incumbents during open enrollment or when life events occur.

Have questions or comments? Let me hear it!

Back in June 2008 when I wrote my blog and presentation titled The Mobile Internet Revolution is Here, there were some detractors who said that others had predicted that for years with little results to show. In that presentation, I applied the principles outlined in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
 
The latest data indicates explosive growth over the past year. The Fierce Mobile article about a Quantcast report points to 148% growth in the mobile web usage in 2009. According to this source, mobile page views represent 1.3% of all web page views for North America. And the report seems to focus just on page views from browsers, so misses all the other mobile internet traffic generated by client software on mobile devices that receives and sends email or Twitter messages, pushes of news stories, etc., meaning that the true number is doubtless higher.

The Mobile Internet Revolution is, indeed, already here. Are you ready?

The recent New York Times article, Is Our Data Too Vulnerable in the Cloud?, points out the real concerns and risks of our storing all our data in “the Cloud”.
 
While some of the commenters point out that many of these security concerns apply as well to data stored on enterprise servers, laptops, and desktops — the perceptions and fears are real. Any further hiccups in cloud computing can set back the growth of these services, as a result of low user confidence. As evidence, consider how many people we all know still fear paying bills by internet.

What is needed is for cloud computing service providers to display the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” to certify their data security is up to the standards of the best enterprises. This will help consumers and CIOs feel more comfortable leaving their data in the cloud.

To be effective this certification needs to address network and physical security, and also needs to apply global standards to meet the different needs of different jurisdictions. For example the theory of cloud computing is that we should not care where in the world our data is stored; but EU enterprises have stricter privacy rules than many others and need to know their data security is up to EU standards regardless where it resides.

Who will provide this certification? Perhaps auditors? Perhaps anew entity that creates a trusted brand? Someone ought to. Soon.

I am often amazed by how much Google understands and practices good business logic. The latest is their support for the Data Liberation Front. This is a group of employees with a common mission: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.”
 
There is much evidence that Google wants to be a leader in cloud computing, and they seem to realize that cloud computing is attractive only if it is possible to cost effectively and easily make our data portable. The old web strategy of trying to create “Stickiness” usually involved having customers invest much time and effort to add their own data and meta data, and thus, make it difficult for them to move. But instead, Google has realized that people could be reluctant to invest themselves totally in a specific cloud computing application (such as in Google Apps) if it is difficult to get their data out somewhere down the road and move to another service. Fixing this increases the trust level.

I wholeheartedly support this approach. I have found myself checking on several cloud computing sites (PBWorks and Evernote to name two) and have invested in their use only when I saw I could get my data out in some common format — such as XML.

Good for Google! This type of initiative sets a great standard for others to follow and may it help cement Google’s leadership.

A recent post in eMarketer, titled Putting Targeting to Work, points out that online publishers are offering increasing options to target advertising, advertisers get tremendous improvements in efficiency (quotes 400%), but that few advertisers are using these tools well.
 
The leading types of targeting offered included:

• Geography (presumably regional, but capable of more precise targeting),
• Contextual (what is the user doing or wanting at the moment),
• Demographic (self-explanatory),
• Time-targeting (presumably different ads for different times of day).

Interesting that behavioral targeting is near the bottom of the list. As an advertiser, the rank ordering of these categories equates to my experiences. I got caught up in such things as psychographic segmentation in the 1980s, but soon found that it was a dead end for marketing efficiency.

As advertisers learn to appreciate the value of these other types of targeting, they will turn more and more to the Mobile Web, where there is increased information about the location and context, and a greater opportunity for advertising efficiency and “ambush marketing” . The industry is still caught in the inertia of the former business practices, and so change is slow. But we are soon approaching a day when the only marketers who will be hired will be the ones that understand the advantages of the new technologies for targeted advertising, and who know how to use the tools. Perhaps we are approaching that “tipping point” now?