If Charles Darwin were alive today (he isn’t) and interested in B2B sales and marketing (highly unlikely) he would say that outbound demand generation is far from extinct but troubled.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection introducing the theory:

that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection.

The key to survival is the ability of a population to adapt.

It’s not the strongest who survive but rather those with the ability to evolve.

The internet has transformed B2B sales and marketing. Savvy buyers fortified by online research and social networks control the selling process. B2B marketers looking for measurable ROI and grappling with budget cuts are investing more and more in social media and online marketing.

Can outbound demand generation adapt?

One of the pitfalls of outbound demand generation is treating outbound marketing like mass media. The carpet-bombing of prospects with generic pitches through batch-and-blast emails, direct mail or telesales messages was irritating to prospects in the pre-social media days and is mostly ineffective now.

For demand generation to evolve, outbound demand generation must be treated more like direct marketing and less like mass media. This applies to any outbound medium: email, direct mail, event marketing or telemarketing.

The marketing preparation for an outbound program should use best practices in demand generation:

• Analyzing customers to determine the ideal customer profile.
• Appending defining attributes of the ideal customer profile to a customer list.
• Defining and prioritizing target segments.
• Using the profile and customer insight to create personas of target customers.
• Creating relevant and compelling messages for each segment.
• Procuring lists that align to target segments.
• Delivering ‘mass customized’ or 1to1 messages by either email, direct mail or telesales rep.

A well-planned outbound demand generation program delivers what an inbound marketing can’t: a laser-focused targeting of prospects who receive the right message at the right time by breaking through clutter. With precise targeting, responders from an outbound demand generation program will satisfy the target account size and demographic criteria.

Outbound marketing must adapt or face declining returns or even extinction should obsolete practices be used.

Darwin would say that outbound demand generation is not extinct but faces challenges in adapting.

The subject of future posts will focus on how outbound demand generation is evolving based on innovative approaches.

In my first post, I described five buyer types that are best reached through outbound sales and marketing.

Then I reviewed the benefits that accrue to marketing from outbound marketing: ROI, market insight and a robust database.

With marketing contributing at most 40% of sales’ leads, outbound lead generation is critical for most organizations.

It is rare to find a sales team that achieves its goals only based on inbound inquiries and referrals.

Despite the noise in the marketplace, most B2B marketers are looking to develop an optimal mix of outbound and inbound marketing, where each type of marketing works together to enhance results.

But let’s face it…outbound sales is a thorny activity saddled with negative connotations.

Inbound is simple in its elegance: build relevant content and they will come.

However, it’s not that straightforward.

The reality is that most inbound marketers conduct outbound marketing. Yes, even HubSpot has a large, outbound calling telesales team.

It’s important to differentiate between responders and inquiries. Responders have indicated interest in an offer while an inquiry is requesting a sales call. A responder is probably more interested in your offer than your solution.

Inbound marketing will engage many prospects but only a small fraction will ‘raise their hand’ to speak to the sales team.

Sales is then engaged to call responders to identify the buyers vs. the information gatherers amongst highly scored prospects.

This is outbound, unsolicited calling. The responders did not request a call nor did the responders expect to receive a call from your sales team.

Sales organizations are always cold calling. Sales people cold call every day. To expand business in an existing account, a sales person asks for a referral to another division. A sales person calls a new account that shares key pain points with a current customer.

Some would call these efforts ‘warm calling’. Not so. This is a vendor-centric view that recognizes that the sales person is ‘warmed-up’. From a prospect or customer-centric perspective, there is no direct relationship. Rather, the prospect recognizes that the sales person is an ‘informed stranger’ who is conducting a cold call.

Account-Based Marketing is rifle-shot outbound marketing. If your organization sells gear to telcos, the global target market is approximately 40 accounts. Account-based marketing or marketing to accounts as a single market favors precise sales and marketing outbound strategies.

Alignment to sales territories favors outbound marketing. Similar to account-based marketing, the definition of a finite list of named accounts will yield a market that can be communicated to with outbound, customized messaging to unique segments. For example, an organization could target five verticals with 1,000 accounts in each vertical with vertical-specific messaging. Email, direct mail and outbound calling are often successfully deployed here.

Outbound sales and marketing play a vital role in complementing inbound and filling gaps that inbound cannot address. With optimization of the mix between inbound and outbound, B2B organizations will enhance the alignment between sales and marketing and build better demand generation programs that meet buyer needs.

Photo Credit: Robert Lesser

Outbound marketing or lead generation is used to directly contact ‘cold’ prospects through tactics such as direct mail, email, events and teleprospecting.

Depending on the size of your target audience, the spectrum of programs could vary from either a mass direct marketing program targeting small businesses with a volume sale type of solution or a high touch, account-based marketing program targeting enterprise accounts with a complex sale solution.

Despite the noise in the marketplace, most B2B marketers are looking to develop an optimal mix of outbound and inbound marketing, where each type of marketing works together to enhance results.

Today I want to highlight (not hype) some of the key benefits uniquely associated with outbound marketing. The first benefit, marketing ROI, provides an immediate payoff on outbound marketing while the remaining benefits pave the way to success for future marketing programs.

Marketing ROI – For most B2B organizations, especially those selling complex solutions, outbound marketing can deliver a sizable return on marketing investment (ROMI).

The higher costs of outbound marketing are affordable for organizations selling complex solutions that often start at $10,000 (or much more). By focusing on well-defined, high potential segments with large deal potential, just one close will pay for the outbound marketing program many times over.

Primary Market Research – What if you could define a vertical market segment comprised of 1,000 accounts in a region and be provided with a detailed report on that market? Unfortunately most technology analysts are unable to drill down to small-sized market segments in their research efforts.

By conducting an outbound marketing effort, you can profile segments in a precise way and use criteria that are meaningful to you. This insight gained is a bonus spin off from the core goal of generating qualified leads.

Market Segmentation – An outbound marketing program can provide very actionable information for B2B marketers to segment their markets and generate higher yield programs.

This information can be leveraged for trigger marketing and solution selling.

Accounts that are not converted to leads can be used for segmentation and are often profiled using the following criteria:

The challenge with inbound marketing is that you are profiling accounts that are not within your target market (as defined by size, industry and geography) and who maybe responding to an offer, rather than to your value proposition. This skews the results of the profiling.

Robust Database – A clean, well-profiled database provides the foundation for future marketing programs. Given that 20% of a list decays over a year, marketers are well-served if data can be cleaned as a by-product of outbound marketing efforts.

Less wastage on marketing to poor data and the cumulative impact of relevant messaging creates a compelling case for frequently touching key prospects through outbound marketing.

This database provides intelligence should a prospect respond through inbound or outbound marketing efforts.

What unique benefits do you associate with outbound marketing?

Photo Credit: jot.punkt

For some types of buyers, outbound marketing is the only way to engage (e.g. direct mail, email, events, teleprospecting).

These buyers require intervention through outbound marketing:

The Unaware Buyer – this buyer is evaluating but is unaware of your solution despite your high level of marketing activity (including inbound marketing). Outbound marketing may be your only option to reach these buyers.

The Puzzled Buyer – this buyer has some misconceptions that have precluded consideration of your solution. By persuading the buyer through direct, interactive, phone or web-based communication, these buyer’s misconceptions can be corrected through dialog.

The Buyer with Unmet Needs – in this case, the buyer may have underlying needs that have not been openly discussed with a third party. Or perhaps, the buyer was unaware of a solution that would address her needs so had not initiated an evaluation. Early stage solutions that are new-to-market often target buyers with latent needs.

The Tuned-out Buyer – not all buyers participate in social media or conduct online searches. Some buyers expect that some vendors must reach out to them as a precondition to considering their solution.

The Buyer at the Tipping Point – B2B marketing is part art & part science. Given the length of the marketing and sales cycle, we can often identify many of the touches that led to a closed sale but we are unable to pinpoint the catalyst that converted the buyer. Perhaps those accounts that closed through online marketing were prompted by the cumulative impact of both online and offline touches through both inbound and outbound marketing.

Through our outbound marketing efforts we have converted these types of buyers into opportunities. Depending on the stage of their evaluation, these buyers can vary in terms of their potential to close.

What results have you seen with these types of buyers?

Photo Credit: henrybloomfield