IZEN Telemarketing and Demand Generation Blog

The days of one-sided, self-serving dialogue to the masses are over for B2B marketers. We must instead consider our audience as individuals for whom we tailor communications and conversations based on their needs. Failure to do that will result in, well, failure. For example, if you met someone new at a networking event and you jump right in there with ‘Hello, let me tell you all about me’, you couldn’t really be surprised if any eventual response was abrupt and unenthusiastic.

With today’s savvy buyers, we have to consider every single individual we are touching and influencing and think about their perspective, their pains. The exact same rules apply for any good B2B telemarketing agency when they engage with your customers and prospects.

7 x 10 touches to close a sale

But there’s more to it than that. It used to be said that it took ‘seven touches to close a sale’ – driven by outbound, push-based interrupt-driven marketing strategies such as telemarketing, web landing pages, events, advertising and press relations.  Now, in B2B marketing, it’s more likely to take 10 times that – around 70 touches or ‘moments of truth’ to close that sale.

The importance of first impressions

This makes first contact critical. The modern marketer must capitalize on the opportunity by providing value and education to the prospective buyer. You must address their specific areas of interest, and earn the right to engage more fully – even before they are ready to buy.  And don’t forget – customers are people too, so they will continually seek to verify information with their peer groups, analysts and other stakeholders. These influencers are very important to you, too.

The big four of content: information, timing, format, place

So how do you know you are giving your customer or prospect the right information at the right time, in the right format and in the right place? This really isn’t as difficult as you might think. Customers leave tracks and clues about themselves and their priorities all over the place. You just need to look and apply.

For example, if you have a repeat web visitor, make sure you map what they do and why they did it. Maybe they received a telemarketing call which spurred them towards a particular landing page to download a relevant white paper. To keep them engaged in the buying cycle, you can take this information and perhaps suggest another relevant white paper, guide them to a customer video on the same subject – or invite them to a webinar or to sign up for a relevant newsletter.

Ultimately, to achieve great results, you have to recognize your audience as individual people and take a considered, human, two-way approach.

Find out more in our ‘Demand Generation: the no-nonsense guide’ eBook.

Your customer value proposition is crucial to the positioning of your B2B telemarketing campaign. Taking the time to think, investigate and continuously refine your proposition as your campaign progresses, could make a world of difference to the lead generation success of your campaign. Let us look at how to work out your value proposition for a mutually beneficial customer engagement.

Planning: your value proposition in context

In a well-planned lead generation B2B telemarketing campaign, by the time you come to develop your value proposition, you will have already worked out your “ideal customer” and planned your data acquisition. Now it is time to investigate how best to present your offering to your prospective customers.

Challenge: give and take

Essentially, your value proposition will act as the basis for a telemarketer to uncover in your prospect an “active pain”, while at the same time ensuring that telemarketing is kept on-message and aligned with your go-to-market initiatives. NB: it is not a word-by-word script.

In such a competitive and time-starved business environment, what precious little time you may have to connect with your prospect needs to be used incredibly smartly. You need to develop a compelling reason for them to listen.  Do you have a solution? Do you have a compelling offer? How can you convince them that they are benefitting from this conversation?  Can you use it to find out more about them, perhaps?

Solution: do your homework – what does your customer see in you?

The best way to work out your clearest customer value proposition is to interview key stakeholders such as your sales team, your client services directors and maybe even your customers. They will have extremely valuable insights that will help you get under the skin of your prospective customer and quickly engage their pains in relation to your offering.

For a really compelling value proposition, make sure you consider these core aspects:

1. Market – the specific group of customers you are targeting
2. Value experience – benefits minus cost, as perceived by customer
3. Offerings – the product/service mix you are selling
4. Benefits – how your offering delivers clear value to your customer
5. Alternatives and differentiation – how you are different from and better than the alternatives
6. Proof – provide substantiated credibility and believability of your offering.

As your B2B telemarketing campaign progresses and you glean more information from the field, you must continually refine your proposition. And remember, keep the format and language simple and the tone real.

For more hints and tips, download our eBook: “The Definitive B2B Telemarketing Toolkit”.

Congratulations! After careful thought and planning you have finalised a great B2B telemarketing lead generation campaign and your telemarketing team is ready to hit the phones any day now…but have you forgotten something?

How will you know if your campaign is actually working and that you aren’t just pouring all your lovely budget down the sink?  Whether you are using your in-house people or an external telemarketing company, it’s critical to your campaign success (and, I expect, to your personal success) that you have the confidence that your telemarketing team has a strong process in place to make sure that you know at any point in time whether your lead generation campaign is working. And you must do make sure of that BEFORE you kick off.

Lead generation – a definition

Firstly, what exactly is “lead generation” telemarketing?  A good lead generation process can be clearly defined from end-to-end and includes:

• Contact acquisition
• Account profiling
• Lead qualification criteria
• Agreed calls to action
• Lead reporting
• Measurement and analysis

Make sure you/your telemarketing agency have addressed each of these steps, that you understand the processes involved and know exactly what to expect and when.

Lead generation telemarketing – best practice

So now let’s look at what we mean by a good lead generation telemarketing campaign. In line with industry best practice, make sure that you/your agency have the following four crucial elements in hand.

A debug process – this should be set up to enable real-time campaign analysis and performance monitoring.

Red alerts – make sure you can identify potential problems and whether they are due to internal factors, which you can influence, or external factors such as data or market/competitor forces.

Effectiveness measurement – this is important when it comes to:

• Number of calls made
• Number of target contacts reached
• Ease of contact
• Extent to which prospects are within the agreed segmentation and TMS
• Extent of prospects’ understanding of campaign messaging, as gauged during the call.

Next steps – possibly most importantly, make sure you can identify and qualify all relevant business opportunities, ready for further engagement.

If you follow these simple pointers, you should be confident at any given time of exactly how your lead generation telemarketing campaign is faring.

With your experience, how do you define a successful lead generation campaign? To make sure you’re getting the most out of your telemarketing service, take our free five-minute assessment.

How you or your telemarketing agency treats your data can make or break a telemarketing campaign. Good data management creates the foundation of any successful campaign. If you haven’t got to know your data properly before you launch, or if you treat your data poorly, it could all get very messy, stressful and horribly expensive.

And as for a future? Well…

To help you, here is our Cassanova’s guide to data management for successful B2B telemarketing lead generation.

Your first date: pre-campaign audit and de-dupe

Your data sources are likely to be multiple and of varying quality. For example, you’ll source data from events, webinars, brokers, sales reps and your CRM system. So before you get going on any campaign, you need to perform a data audit and de-dupe, making sure you have an agreed format for your consolidated data.

Finding security: cover your assets

Data is critical to your success or failure as a business. Your data integrity is vulnerable in two key areas: data loss from unprotected systems and infrastructure disruption; and data theft by disgruntled employees leaving the organisation.

How do you avoid this?

1. Make sure you review the security behind how you/your agency hold data, transmit data and protect data in the event of key staff departure.
   Make sure you’re clear on how your staff/telemarketing service manages data in CRM systems.
2. If you require an agency to access your system, whether on premise or remotely, find out their experience, procedures and processes. For example, make sure your telemarketing agency can provided dedicated end points through a virtual private network (VPN).

Getting deep: stripping bare the heart of your data

The deeper you can delve into your data the better. Data sourced from companies such as D&B, Hoovers and Harte-Hanks are fairly superficial; they won’t help you when it comes to organisational structure, business units and those campaign crucial, deeper levels of segmentation. Nor will they be able to identify the increasingly obscure, emerging job roles.

Instead, what you want is additional data sources that will really spark up a B2B telemarketing campaign. You want not only to identify specific job roles, but also gain meaningful insight from your data. For example, how many servers does the business have, what are their license renewal dates and budget cycles.

If you take these steps in data management, you’ll have a good, solid start to your successful B2B lead generation telemarketing campaign.

Do you have any secrets to avoiding data heartbreak? What works for you?

To make sure you’re getting the most out of your telemarketing service, take our free five-minute assessment.

IZEN are currently in the process of being accredited to ISO27001 (Certificate Number IS590769), the global industry best practise standard for Information Security Management Systems (ISMS). The objective is to provide comfort to customers that all IZEN client data is managed securely. The Certificate is issued by the accreditation organisation BSI is based on a schedule of training courses, pre-audit assessments and a final audit completion date of June 2013.

Critical security processes include but are not limited to the following:

• Protection against data theft by full or part time employees and contractors
• Processes to protect against third party data corruption, accidental data loss or theft (such as forgetting laptops during travel, or stolen mobile devices holding data)
• Documented data and information management security procedures and training programs

We believe that any agency responsible for handling customer data in any capacity should have such accreditation, so that client companies can have peace of mind that their nominated agencies are adhering to well documented and independently audited policies and procedures.

Your B2B marketing budget has to work harder than ever to produce better return on investment (ROI) and faster. A foundation to  any successful demand generation program is getting the process right from the start. If you perform rigorous data segmentation –you will avoid wasting time and money on poor target companies and contact data.

Data segmentation is the process of taking your data and separating it so you can use it more efficiently in your marketing and operations. It can make all the difference between a healthy, B2B demand generation and telemarketing campaign and a sickening waste of budget.

However, it’s no longer viable to rely only on top-level segmentation such as geography, turnover, employee numbers and standard job titles. Traditional ‘vertical’ approaches to segmentation have evolved into a far more rigorous process, so you can drill right down into micro-segmented ‘buyer personas’ for more sophisticated, one-to-one marketing.

Sizing up your segmentation variables

This is the starting point. You need to define these variables so you see the clear differences between segments, and how each group will respond to your marketing efforts. For example, ask yourself these questions:

1. Measurable – what’s the company’s age, size and preferred method of buying?
2. Relevant – is the group large enough to demand your attention and different enough to warrant a distinctive marketing strategy?
3. Operational relevance – what kind of approach does the way they operate demand something different, like a unique product, special messaging, different pricing, alternative distribution channels or varied selling approaches?

Getting to grips with your buyer personas

Once you’ve worked out the variables, you should consider:

• Demographics such as the SIC code, company size and location
• Operations - for example what technology they use
• Purchasing approach – what’s their structure/ policy
• Situational factors, such as how they would implement your product/ service
• Personal characteristics for the individual buyer – look at their motivations and perceptions.

These steps should bring you neatly to your buyer persona.  So what exactly is a buyer persona? We define it as a segment of people within a particular target market that share common demographics and interests. It’s a detailed profiling that marketers can use to clarify which goals, concerns, preferences and decision processes are most relevant to their customers. Once you have that understanding, you stand a much better chance of communicating and persuading them to act as you would like.

An example of a buyer persona

“Mark is a 35-year old individual, authorised reseller in the top 20 per cent (80/20 rule). He is one of 212 reseller reps authorised to sell the manufacturer’s products and is very good at finding the best deal for his customers and prospects. He is sales-driven so, when it comes to suppliers, he isn’t brand loyal. Mark processes $5-50 million in orders each year. With such a high volume of weekly transactions, he can end up losing out on orders, clients and personal income due to delays and misinformation from suppliers. Mark’s key priority is having the right information at the right time.”

If you’d like to find out more about how customer data segmentation can help you achieve ROI in your B2B demand generation and telemarketing campaigns, check out our eBook, “Demand Generation – the No-nonsense Guide”.

Unlike a beach towel, there’s no such thing as ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to demand generation. Communications today have to be relevant and timely. You’ve got to have the right content, delivered in the right format through the right channel to your target customers. So use the summer time well so that you’re in a strong position to generate year-end leads.  Here’s how demand generation should work for you.

Talk to the man, don’t shout at the crowd

Intelligence and insight is fundamental when it comes to customer communications. Before you do anything, find out who they are and how they behave online. Prospective customers first solicit peer approval and references from social networks and communities, so use some of the available tracking and analytical tools to assess their behaviour.

Also, check out:

-          Demographics such as the SIC code, company size and location

-          How their company works operationally, for example what technology they use

-          Their purchasing approach – what is the power structure or purchasing policy

-          Situational factors such as how might your product or service be implemented

-          Personal characteristics for the individual buyer – look at their motivations and perceptions

Be useful

Identify what content is useful to them – help them, educate them, make them want to come back for more. Do this well and you can create a valued, needs driven customer relationship.

Gauge, too, where they in the buying cycle so you can select the most appropriate content format. For example, direct mail or email is appropriate during their discovery phase, while a telemarketing service could clinch the deal if the customer is already at the point of selecting a vendor.

Use best practice lead scoring

To avoid misinterpretation of one-dimensional lead scoring, segment explicit information such as industry, size and budget and assess implicit activity such as visits to your website or seminar attendance. With this greater level of information, you can trigger certain activities, such as knowing when to pass over an opportunity to sales or whether they’re qualified for particular offers.

Make sure it measures up

Finally, you’ve got to make sure your activity measures up – that it’s clearly demonstrating an ROI. This is where we suggest you measure the following key performance indicators:

1. Marketing-sourced pipeline
2. Marketing-influenced pipeline
3. Investment-to-pipeline
4. Investment-to-revenue

For a deeper understanding of demand generation, check out our eBook: “Demand Generation: the No-Nonsense Guide”.