x-atlantic » Creating pull

The single best way to generate B2B leads on a shoestring budget

rondekko — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:58:33 +0000

InMail: your best Lead Generation bet

LinkedIn inMail – Picture by LinkedIn

Just imagine: you have a tiny budget to grow your (B2B) Business. How do you spend your scarce, hard-earned marketing money to get into accounts and close these new crucial deals that will make your business soar?

My recommendation is a direct and ‘warm’ approach via LinkedIn’s ‘InMail’ feature.

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn’s InMail feature, you can find out more about it here. The lowdown: LinkedIn sells InMail messages, which you can send to any LinkedIn member*. Before you sign up for this and start shooting messages: here is some advice to boost the response rate of your InMails to the 10% – 20% range.

Step 1 – Scouting

One of InMail’s neat features – if you think about it – is that it is a paid e-mail. Sending an InMail costs approximately €1**. The good news: this keeps the spammers away from your intended audience. The cost of the InMail makes undifferentiated mass-messaging extremely un-economical. The downside: the onus to select the right recipients is on the sender, as each message carries a (virtual) €1 stamp. This is why ‘scouting’ (finding the recipients for your InMail campaing) is so important. Here are the 2 first ground rules:

Contact only LinkedIn Members with whom you share another LinkedIn contact or a Group Membership – recipients are vastly more likely to respond to someone with whom they have a connection or a Group in common.
Only approach LinkedIn Members who are open to ‘Deal Making Contacts’ (under ‘interests’, in the LinkedIn Profile) – this is the closest there is on LinkedIn to an ‘opt-in’ permission. Not everybody appreciates an InMail message, so be respectful of someone interestes.

Beyond this, it is up to your creativity and imagination to find the lucky ones who will receive a message from your good self. LinkedIn allows you to select on criteria ranging from geography, industry, function, seniority, company name, and so forth and so on. My recommendation is to define searches that yield 100 – 200 results. For example, if you’re offering a private cloud computing solution and you have good reference customers in the financial services industry looking for propsects in the Boston area – perhaps prior to planning a sales trip to the area in a couple of weeks – your search criteria might be:

Location: within a 50-Mile Radius of ZIP code 02115 (Boston)
Industries: Banking and Financial Services
Function***: Information Technology
Seniority Level: Director, VP, Manager, Senior
Years of Experience: 5+ years

Run this search, weed out the results, and store the contacts you want to send an InMail in a LinkedIn Folder. It is wise to keep track in a spreadsheet which searches you have ran. Scouting for the right prospects is not an exact science, but rather a trial-and-error process, with lots of tweaking. You will get better over time and develop an instinct for searches that deliver the best results.

Step 2 – messaging

Your InMail should be sincere & modest: ask for assistance in something small. You can ask, for example, if the recipient knows who would be the best person to contact within their organisation/company for your software/product/service. However, the most important element in your message is the subject line. I recommend to use a simple question for the subject line, and put someone’s name in the header: the job of the subject line is to make someone curious enough to read the InMail message. You can (and should) keep it sweat and simple, such as: ‘Can you help me, John?’ or ‘Are you avaible to speak, Mary?‘.

Finally, use a standard and generic message, don’t be temptetd to tweak or individualize it (besides changing the recipients name and company).

Step 3 - Follow ups

The exciting and rewarding part of this method is seeing the replies to your InMails crowd your inbox. If steps 1 and 2 are done well, you will receive a good amount of messaging in the following categories. I have taken the liberty to suggest responses to thes

“No interest” – Thank the recipient politely, as he or she has taken the trouble to respond.
“This sounds interesting, but not right now. Please contact me in 3/6/9 months” – Send a ‘Thank You’ note, and make sure you add a reminder to your calendar and/or your CRM system.
“I’m not the right person, but you should talk to Jim in Department XYZ” – Send a ‘Thank you note and contact Jim, making sure that you mention that ‘Joe’ has recommended to talk with Jim.
“This is great, let’s schedule a call” – Response with a number of time slots.

As a general rule, respond to these within 24 hours, but if at all possible as soon as possible.

Benefits and costs

My personal experience**** is that InMail-based approach to lead generation is the single most effective campaign thinkable. The upfront investment is a LinkedIn membership (I recommend an Executive Membership, which is a little over €70) . The lionshare of the cost is the mantime-investment in scouting for potential recipients and sending InMails (there’s no ‘Mail Merge’ in LinkedIn). The bottom line: the cost to generate a qualified lead are a fraction (in the 50% – 75% range) of other direct approaches (cold calling, E-Mail Marketing Campaign, VITO letters), the approach is scalable and results are achieved in days, if not weeks. This makes it the most attractive lead generating approach for small business and large corporations alike.

* Unless a LinkedIn Member opts out of receiving InMail. This is rare.

** With a €71,95 executive memberships come 25 InMails with a ‘Guarantueed Response’. See details on the LinkedIn Website on how this works.

*** This is a search filter for LinkedIn Members who have a paid subscription.

***** I have sent well over 5000 messages out

2013 B2B Marketing Plan-o-Gram Template

rondekko — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:52:33 +0000

Get your copy of the 2013 B2B Plan-o-Gram templates. This document will help you plan tweets, Facebook promotions, LinkedIn updates, emails and more to amplify your content and coordinate your messaging.

See on content.netprospex.com

The 5 Commandments of Social Media B2B Lead Generation Bliss

rondekko — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:16:24 +0000

Amen?

Your website can be a great, cost-effective tool to attract and nurture B2B leads. How to reach this state of lead generation bliss? Pay obedience to the following 5 Social Media Commandments & sing Hallelujah!

1^st Commandment - “Thy shall offer great content”

Come & taste my honey

You catch flies with honey, not with vinegar. Use this deep biological wisdom to your advantage. Offer great content on your website that is unique and provides lots of goodness (insight, education, and entertainment). Leads will flock to your website and stick to it.

2^nd Commandment - “Thy shall be found”

There’s an entire Wikipedia entry on the debate about “if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest-and –nobody-hears-it-does-it-make-a-sound? (Click here if you must read the article)”. The Social Media morale of this story: don’t let your great content end up like the fallen tree. Make some noise!

Did anyone notice?

3^rd Commandment - “Thy shall not babble about thou self”

It’s about ‘You, yourself, and yours!

You don’t have to be Dale Carnegie to understand that incessantly yepping about ‘me, myself and I‘ is not a great conversation-starter. Is your website about what your customers and prospects are yearning for – or does it resemble an entry for the award for ‘the industry’s most obnoxious self-obsessed player’?

4^th Commandment - “Thy shall be social”

Why do the hard work of promoting your website, when you can get others to ‘facebook-like’, ‘Google-plus’, ‘re-tweet’ and ‘Link-you-In’ your content? Sprinkle Social Bling all over each piece of content. Be generous. Don’t hold back. Go for viral.

Pimp my website, Baby

5^th Commandment - “Thy shall call to action”

Gotcha!

This is where you’re finally getting selfish. After all, the whole point of building awesome content and shout from the rooftops , is to build up a nice, fat pipeline of leads and prospects. The ‘Call to action’ is the hook to achieve that, and it looks something like this: “Did you like my 10 tips on how to motivate your team? Well, here’s my the definite & awesome whitepaper on leadership, why don’t you give me your e-mail address in return? “

Rev it up: building the ultimate sales machine. Part 1 – lead generation

rondekko — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 11:47:57 +0000

Introduction

You have to excuse me for my gear-headedness, but I have spent 8 years of my career in Detroit. In Motown, acceptable topics for polite conversation with strangers at a birthday party are the latest car-models or the woes of supplier so-and-so. B2B sales organizations show lots of similarities with engines. The Ultimate Sales Machines is firing from the following three cylinders: creating pull, building revenue and exciting clients. This is installment one: creating pull.

Picture 1: The 3-cylinder revenue engine

Cylinder 1: creating pull

Cylinder 1 is the fuzzy front-end of the sales cycle: generating a good volume of strong leads, the lifeblood for sales. To make this cylinder hum you’ll need to:

understand who the buying personas are,
what ‘keeps them up at night’ and
where they hang out when they look for solutions to their problems.

The lead generation matrix

Once you have this insight, you can start crafting your lead generation cylinder. Essentially, it will be a mix of the 4 different lead generation options (inbound or outbound or offline vs. online) from the picuture below:

picture 2: the 2×2 lead generation matrix

Each of these options has it’s own characteristics, which I have summarized in the following table:

Table 1: Characteristics of the 2×2 lead generation matrix

Main takeaways

Online lead generation beats offline lead generation from a cost perspective: the cost per qualified lead is significantly lower. Always do this first, unless your buying persona are simply not online.
Inbound lead generation beats outbound lead generation from a cost perspective: the cost per qualified lead is significantly lower. This should always be your long-term strategy.
Outbound lead generation yields quick results (qualified leads generated in days or weeks), inbound lead generation takes months of effort and time. If you need to show quick results, focus on outbound, and try to do it online.

There’s no complete free choice in how to generate leads. For example:

The inbound vs. outbound dimension depends on your timeframe: short term or long term? For example, entering a new market needs to be done by a combination of expensive but quick outbound lead generation in conjunction with the establishment of an inbound program. The goal is to reduce outbound once the inbound program starts to yield enough high-quality leads.
The offline vs. online dimension depends on where your buying persona hang out. My personal advice (at least for B2B Technology companies) is to not spend a nickle or cent on outbound at all for lead generation, unless you have overwhelming proof to the contrary.

What’s next?

The installment of this mini blog-series is building revenue’ – turning qualified leads into Purchase Orders.