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Always good to share a “Best of” list at the end of year. Don’t you agree? And everyone is finding this one very popular.
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If you’ve invested in Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop, Pardot or the like, this post is for you. (Find New Customers is a Gold partner for Silverpop and closely aligned with Eloqua and Marketo.)
I’m the President of Find New Customers and I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage, in a podcast. (Jim is currently recovering from major surgery and we wish him the best.) I asked Jim for an example of why great content is so important in B2B lead generation.
“Can you share an example, Jim?”
Jim said “Content the bait on the your hook. Or the gas in your sports car. Without it you catch no fish and your sports car won’t move.”
Jim’s well-crafted response makes a key point. Great, compelling and remarkable content is much more important for B2B lead generation than which marketing automation platform you choose. The quality of your content plays a very important role in the success of your marketing automation project - regardless of vendor.
JB: Sure. This is a specific example, but frankly it’s so universal I think it’s extremely relevant.
Most people think that the marketing automation technology itself is going to start to address the problems of generating leads and tracking that lead activity.
Working with a company that implemented this almost two years ago, but they did not have a defined program in place. They didn’t define what a lead was, for example. They didn’t define a nurturing plan, they did not define even a scoring plan. In fact, what they said was when we send something out if a buyer clicks that’s a lead. And that lead was instantly dumped into salesforce.com and the little bell rang for the salesperson, you’ve got a lead, and as you can imagine salesperson came to realize that those were not what we would call sales ready leads. As a result, a little over 14 months later they had virtually no pipeline for new business.
In the last six months we’ve been helping them with a series of efforts around producing content — first defining what leads are and what it means to be a sales ready lead, secondly defining a nurturing process that also involved inserting a telesales group in the middle between the click from some campaign and the hand-off to sales, but also mapping out a seven-step nurturing process and building out the content. And now they’re starting to get to a point where they’ll have 10 to 12 marketing qualified leads a week and building. So this is a dramatic change from just a few months ago after 14 months of — really of drought despite the investment. And I think that’s very, very common.
We think the technology’s going to solve the problem and it isn’t. It requires a process, it requires a program, and that I think of marketing automation and fishing with a hook, but the content is the bait. And that’s the key. Without the content, you’re not going to get people clicking on your various links to give you the information you need.
Thanks for the interview, Jim. You can check out content marketing expertise by visiting Avitage.
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To learn more about Jeff, please click on Who is the Fearless Competitor?
Update: In less than two weeks, we added another 1,000 readers. We just passed 36,000 readers! (Since we wrote this a couple of days ago, we passed 36,584 as of late last night - on a holiday week!) In fact, we were featured on the Eloqua blog tree. (Click the underlined words to read a great blog article by Scott Monty of Ford - a famed social media expert.)
Grades at Grader.com (by Hubspot) We’re proud of these too! Especially since our domains were stolen just four months ago. Find New Customers dropped to a 49 then.
Find New Customers - 98.9 out of 100
@fearlesscomp on Twitter - 100 out of 100
It’s a bit mind boggling, but if you read this b2b lead generation blog, you should know how incredibly popular it has become.
This week Fearless Competitor, the sales lead generation blog, passed the 36,000 reader mark. That is a massive number of readers and something I find quite humbling.
Thanks to each of you from the bottom of my heart.
What do you think? We love comments and people who share.
Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor” - a fun show about lead generation marketing. Find New Customers is one of a few lead generation companies in New York.
Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) deliver marketing lead generation developing and implementing lead generation marketing programs to improve the way you use B2B sales lead generation to find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in b2b lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.
To contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers, please use the form below.
Click to download How to Find New Customers, our remarkably popular white paper, which is sponsored by Marketo, one of the winners below. It's the first year of Fearless Competitor Favs - my favorite B2B marketing ideas from this past year. We'll do this each December from now on. I want to hear your favs too. What did I miss? Please send them to jeff.ogden at findnewcustomers.com or via Twitter at @fearlesscomp. Maybe you're asking "Why not prin … Read More