Social Media Marketing and Online Lead Qualification: What is Effective?

A current debate that I’m following — and would love your perspectives on — is whether and when to require a prospect to complete an online lead qualification form in exchange for content, such as a report, e-book, recorded webinar or white paper. I find that traditional marketers and social media marketers disagree about the use of forms or landing pages that appear when a prospect clicks on a link to offered information. Generally speaking, social media marketing professionals claim that the new culture of selling requires open sharing of information (“conversations”) to create trusted relationships. Therefore, in the social and mobile world, the general consensus is that required forms can be an instant turn-off for customers. On the other side of the debate, most traditional direct marketers — and sales managers — suggest that if a prospect isn’t willing to share some information about themselves, their companies and their buying processes, they aren’t qualified and are wasting sales people’s valuable time.

In the Sales 2.0 world, where marketing and sales are closely aligned functions, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with and share ideas with some of the best lead generation marketing thinkers and practitioners. One of them is online marketing manager Dave Ewart, whom I met when we at Phone Works were assessing and improving his company’s inside sales team. Dave’s Twitter campaigns have been a success in terms of generating interest; he knows his message, audience and offer are relevant because of his click rate. But he’s testing several new approaches to improve his rate from click to conversion (to qualified sales opportunity and through the sales cycle to close):

1. Instantly delivered summarized content, tailored to the medium

Dave has created a “social-brief” content format: a mobile-friendly template for all his marketing assets, from white papers to webinars, consisting of about 300 words of high-value content — not marketing speak. This provides immediate value to prospects by instantly delivering what they clicked on. And through invitations to “Share This” embedded in these briefs, he’ll expand his reach even more (and track those referrals).

2. Full content in exchange for an e-mail address

To receive the full content (such as a PDF or recorded webinar), Dave’s prospects will be asked for one thing on a form: an e-mail address. Since the content will be provided by e-mail, he’ll be able to verify  the e-mail address is valid. Dave says, “I didn’t give up on demand generation, just optimized it.”

His view is that this gets the prospect into his CRM system and gives him the ability to develop the opportunity through lead nurturing (“drip”) campaigns. His theory is that when qualified prospects revisit his site, they’ll be more inclined to provide additional demographic information, and he’ll have more behavioral data to score.

By removing “friction from the conversion cycle,” as Dave calls it, he is expecting to see ROI by generating more leads, more re-tweets (RTs) and more followers who should engage additional prospects.

What is your view of using lead qualification forms in social media campaigns?  Is it a valid assumption that the most qualified prospects are those willing to fill out lead qualification forms?

Tags: Dave Ewart, lead qualification, marketing and sales alignment, Sales 2.0, social media marketing, twitter

Social Networking in Sales: Show Me the Money

Last Thursday at the Sales 2.0 conference in Boston, a sales executive from Microsoft was lamenting the growing popularity of social networking in his sales force.  “My sales people are wasting valuable time on Facebook when they should be selling,” he said in frustration during the final presentation of the day (mine) on Social Networking in Sales.  This topic was part of the agenda of the first Sales 2.0 conference to take place on the east coast, which attracted over 200 sales leaders looking for innovative ways to improve sales results. The event featured presentations by sales pioneers at companies who described the ways they are transforming the way they sell using Sales 2.0 practices, or forward-thinking sales strategy, people, and processes, enabled by sales productivity and customer engagement technologies.

In the sales community, there continues to be skepticism about social media’s ability to help sales people sell. This concern is not unique to east-coast-based sales managers; similar doubts were expressed at the March Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco, which I wrote about in an earlier post. As sales managers are struggling to make their numbers in a slowed down economy, they are super vigilant of keeping their sales reps focused on revenue-generating activities.  Other than social networking’s ability to  “like Botox, make us feel younger and fresher”, as a I read on Twitter the day of the conference, it has yet to be proven in many sales organizations as a productive channel for sales people to connect with and close customers.

To prepare for my presentation at the conference, I knew what I had to do: find real world examples of sales and marketing people not just using social tools – but also seeing measurable results, i.e., qualified sales opportunities and revenue. Naturally, I reached out to my network by posting my search for social media ROI on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to sending e-mail.  Here’s what I found:

Dan Harding, Regional Sales Manager at ConnectandSell, is on track to close 25% of his annual quota by using LinkedIn and Twitter.  Within four months of using these tools as part of his sales process, he has filled his pipeline with at least ten highly qualified opportunities representing several hundred thousand dollars in revenue.  He uses LinkedIn to stay in touch with his network of hundreds of contacts by regularly updating the status box to report on events, promotions, and customer successes. For example, Dan’s status box today reads:

Another Great Customer Kick-Off 12 reps, 12 hours, 140 connects, 24 referrals, 17 Demo/Follow-up! Meetings

E-mail is automatically sent to his connections through LinkedIn network updates, which drives people to check out his newly refreshed profile.  This includes a five-slide SlideShare presentation that succinctly describes how his offering helps clients increase their sales results.  Dan says, “LinkedIn helps me leverage referral-selling. I can easily update my network and stay in touch, which is resulting in e-mail and phone inquiries from people I used to work with or those they recommend.”

To the sales executives out there who are worried about social networking interfering with their ability to make their numbers, I say this: Sales managers who hire the right people –those who are self-motivated and driven to achieve – and set the right objectives, supported by the right compensation – can expect that these reps won’t waste time on non-revenue-generating activities. Quota-carrying reps and managers can easily experiment with social networking and figure out whether they help or hurt their individual productivity and ability to deliver revenue.

Social media also can be very effective in sales lead generation marketing(depending on whether your target audience engages in those media), as I found in another example. When Tealeaf became a client of my consulting company, Phone Works, we quickly learned of the company’s impressive results using Twitter to attract executive-level attendees to their Customer Experience Management seminars.    Tealeaf’s director of online marketing, Dave Ewart, has generated 10% of event registrants using Twitter and over 50% of them are in the company’s target audience – almost twice the percentage than registrants coming from traditional media marketing campaigns. Over $200,000 in potential sales has already been generated via social media marketing campaigns, which launched only a few months ago. Dave designed the event registration campaign to be viral by including an “invite an executive colleague” link in the confirmation e-mail as well as a “tell followers you’ll be attending” link for Twitter users.  Here’s what this looks like:

annekeseleyI just registered for Tealeaf’s executive Customer Experience Summit in D.C. on May 19, Join me. http://cli.gs/vy24LT (via @tealeaf) #wa

It is too soon to tell how many of these opportunities will close, given the length of Tealeaf’s sales cycle and the short amount of time that the company has been piloting these new programs.  Dave maintains, “Twitter helps us find prospective customers that we’re not reaching through other media, especially because new prospects are referring other prospects. ”

These are just two examples of how forward-thinking sales and marketing managers are generating quantifiable business results leveraging existing relationships as well as reaching new prospects using social networking.

What are your experiences with social networking in sales and marketing? Can you attribute measurable results such as sales or qualified leads to new media?

Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Phone Works, ROI, Sales 2.0, Sales 2.0 Conference, social media, social networking, twitter

Twitter: Friend or Foe of Sales?

Last week I attended the oversold (500 people plus) Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and was invited to participate on the panel discussion, “Accelerating Productivity: New Sales 2.0 Tools”.  A week earlier, I was the guest speaker at the inaugural Social Media Breakfast San Francisco meeting (see online video), during which I was interviewed, Fresh Air style, by social media guru, Chris Kenton. There was a common theme between these two events: the most engaging (or should I say heated?) discussion topic was the use of twitter in the sales process.

People are passionate about twitter, whether they love it or hate it.  To the majority of sales executives I know, twitter is seen as perhaps only second to Facebook as a major distraction for the sales force and drain on its productivity.  Garth Moulton, cofounder and VP of Community at Jigsaw,  sums it up in his recent blog post, “Not Digging on Twitter” that “for a working professional Twitter is totally stupid.”

He might be right.  But I’m not willing to accept that until I give it a chance.

Like my dermatologist who tries out every new procedure on herself before subjecting her patients to it, I  have immersed myself in the twitter community and am experimenting with it. A few weeks ago, I didn’t know what a hashtag, retweet, or @reply meant, but I’m enjoying learning about a new communications medium that so may people (some sources say 2,000 new user accounts are created on average per day)  are flocking to. During the opening session of the Sales 2.0 conference, I tried my hand at “live tweeting” the content: broadcasting it out to an audience of twitter users who were following the conference online in real time. You can read some of these “tweets” in several blogs written by members of the Sales 2.0 community: Michael Damphousse’s Smashmouth Marketing, Parker Trewin’s B2B Marketing for Faster Sales, and Andrew Lennon’s The Daily Anchor, among others.

My theory is that when new technologies are adopted enthusiastically by the mainstream, they may just have a place in the buying cycle.  In B2B sales, that might not be the end of that cycle – it’s hard to imagine someone placing a million dollar deal via twitter – but never say never. Twenty-four years ago, I was told I was crazy to expect the sophisticated customers of Oracle Corporation to buy its complex products by phone.

How are YOU using twitter in the sales process? Is it improving or decreasing sales productivity in your company? And most importantly, what revenue has resulted from a twitter interaction with a prospect?

Tags: Andrew Lennon, B2B Sales, Chris Kenton, Garth Moulton, Jigsaw, Michael Damphousse, Oracle, Parker Trewin, revenue, Sales 2.0, Sales 2.0 Conference, Social Media Breakfast, twitter