I am speaking of the email blast or direct mail piece that is one-size fits all.
Or the telesales call that is the same for every conversation and simply asks: are you buying?

Buyers react negatively not because lead generation and outbound marketing interrupts their day but because the message is not appropriate and brings no value.

A relevant and timely message will override concerns on privacy and interruption.

Here are some approaches for customizing messaging or honing target segments even if you may not have full visibility on the prospect:

• Target prospects who look and feel like your best customers;
• Talk about your customers that are in the same segment as your prospect: size of account, industry, geography or accounts held by a competitor.  Note how pain points were addressed and impact achieved.  Everybody loves a good story;  
• Use the language of your buyer and explain your value proposition using their words;
• Target prospects who are flagged based on buying triggers such as office moves, executive changes, corporate expansion / contraction or weak competitors.

With these points in mind, the buyer is much more likely to be receptive to responding.  Try testing different messages and see which brings the best results for your lead generation.

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The value proposition resonates, the offer is tempting and the graphic design is pleasing to the eye.

Your reaction: disappointment and frustration.

Why?  You are already a customer and have been spammed by your vendor.

An example: a data provider to my organization sent an email to me with an offer to upgrade our solution.   However we had already upgraded.

Another data provider sent an email with an offer to me with no recognition that we had recently downgraded our subscription nor that we were already a customer on the basic version.

In both cases it was a data provider who sent a Batch & Blast email to the same email address that I had used to register our subscription.  Clearly, the data providers did not run their email list against a suppression file of customers.   In an earlier post on Batch & Blast email, I describe how the market is moving away from this approach.

It’s ironic that both data providers who promote the quality of their data, do not take the extra step of treating customers differently that prospects.   Neither are small vendors.

Second, if email is widely recognized as more beneficial for retention than acquisition, why are customers not treated with distinct messaging?

When I read a recent post from Adam Needles on taking email segmentation to the next level, I can’t help but feel that the next level is a quantum leap for many B2B marketers whose email marketing is at the rudimentary Batch & Blast stage.

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.

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A few weeks ago, my firm was invited by a large California-based tech organization to respond to a telesales RFP.

Given the terms & conditions that were included, the client’s legal counsel was involved in the creation of the RFP.

Yet, this organization requested that each bidder record all calls.

The irony for this tech company in California calling Californians, is that their request could create a legal liability.

If your telesales team is making calls from the USA to California, it is illegal under California law to call record and call monitor without the consent of all parties on the call. See an excerpt below from the California Penal Code (Note: for appropriate interpretation of the law, please seek legal counsel as this blog post does not constitute legal advice. Sorry my one college course in business law doesn’t cut it.)

632. (a) Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment.

There are eleven other states that require this consent from all parties on a call: Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington. (For an overview by state and by country, see Wikipedia’s coverage of telephone recording laws).

Beyond the legal implications, there are nagging questions about the business case for call recording and whether viable alternatives have been adequately considered.

I sense that many executives believe that all front office contact center functions should record calls. However the nature of the beast is very different for inside sales versus technical support and customer service.

Certainly those customers with a strong relationship could be judiciously targeted by inside sales. A customer would be more receptive when notified of a call recording.

Here are a few reasons why I believe that recording calls is a poor practice for inside sales when calling prospects (rather than customers).

Announcing the intent to record the call will address telephone recording laws but will leave prospects cold. When a customer calls tech support or customer service, most customers are willing to be recorded as common practice and as a reasonable exchange for having their issue addressed. Imagine outbound calls to prospects from inside sales that would be prefaced by: “This call may be recorded for the purpose of quality assurance and quota attainment” . Prospects will have no patience or inclination to cooperate with inside sales by agreeing to record the call, especially when their relationship is marginal at best.

Listening to call recordings is drudgery and unproductive. Any manager with a team quota and a sense of priority will minimize the time spent on listening to recordings.

Prospect satisfaction is not on the corporate radar screen. Technical support and customer service are critical to customer retention. Call recording is standard procedure for these two departments. But for inside sales, is prospect satisfaction a priority? Win/loss analysis is common but I have yet to find an organization that survey’s its prospects early in the buying cycle to gauge the impact of inside sales.

Let’s take a closer look at some alternatives to call recording:

Call Monitor, don’t Call Record – for the states where this is permissible, monitor the calls of inside sales but do not record the conversation.

Role Play – if the goal is to train and coach inside sales, role playing is preferable to recording calls. It is very beneficial for inside sales reps to role play with internal staff who have customer insight. An even better approach is for inside sales reps to role play with cooperative customers. We have found this to be invaluable given the rich feedback provided instantaneously by the customer.

Exception-based Assessments – rather than measuring the activity (i.e. conversations), focus on measuring the results (qualified, sales-ready leads, pipeline impact, closed sales). Leakages from the pipeline should be tracked to determine trends. Interviews can be conducted with prospects who ‘leaked from the funnel’ to see if buyer needs were addressed and if the telesales rep was successful in meeting those needs.

For example, the field sales team at one our clients complained about the quality of the leads that we generated. According to sales, the prospects were not evaluating.

An audit of those leads by my firm indicated that not only were those prospects evaluating but the leads purchased a solution from a competitor to our client.

When presented with this information, the sales team sheepishly admitted that those leads were never contacted.

The moral of the story is that a call recording of our initial conversation would not have addressed the issue raised by our client’s sales team. Only by conducting a post-mortem lead audit, could we uncover the truth.

Are the penalties and enforcement of call recording laws inconsequential to you?

Or have you implemented alternatives to call recording?

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The irony of course, is that the deliverable for sales is crystal clear – the sale. The contract is signed and the PO received. The heavy lifting from sales is finished and that of accounts receivable begins.

But for marketing, whose key deliverable is often the qualified lead, the picture is confusing: the definition of a sales lead can be all over the map. Is a lead an appointment or a qualified lead (or both)? Is a lead an inquiry, a trade show visitor, a webinar registrant, a downloader of a white paper or a referral?

To some, a lead is defined as an interested responder. To others, a fully qualified BANT lead (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe).

A poorly defined lead is one symptom of a crippling disease: sales & marketing mis-aligment (see my post on ten signs that sales and marketing are mis-aligned).

In the simplest possible terms: a lead is a prospect that sales agrees to accept, engage and close. Best-in-class sales & marketing organizations will add richer criteria to the definition, but the willingness of sales to accept a lead from marketing is elegant in its simplicity.

It also takes into account an important distinction: the definition of a lead may vary by the sales rep. For example, a new sales rep with no sales funnel may accept ‘loosely’ defined leads versus a sales rep who has a full funnel who will only accept ‘strictly’ defined, fully-qualified leads.

Unfortunately, the term ‘lead’ is frequently taken out of context by the vendors that sell to B2B marketers. This may artificially enhance the perceived value of the vendor’s solution but adds to the malaise and confusion in the market.

Ask yourself after reading the examples below and apply the simple acceptance rule: can you fathom a field salesperson accepting these ‘leads’?

Data Vendors – A significant number of data vendors continue to merchandise their lists as ‘leads’. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are lists of ‘Accounts and Contacts’.

CRM Vendors – Most CRM solutions have separate buckets for accounts/contacts and leads. Although I agree that leads need a home in the CRM system, the lead bucket seems to be a dumping ground for all flavors of inquiries and marketing responders. A more applicable label would be ‘Prospects’

Marketing Automation Vendors – A popular and vital process in the demand generation process is ‘lead nurture’. I agree that this is an easy to understand term for describing the cultivation of prospects until the prospect is sales-ready. However, these contacts are not leads but are prospects that are not yet ready to speak to sales. At one time, some of these prospect may have spoken to sales and subsequently disqualified. A better term would be ‘Prospect Nurture’.

It is important for marketing to under-promise and over-deliver to sales. It makes sense to ask their vendors to do the same.

Call me a stickler if you want, but until we see greater success in sales and marketing alignment and in particular, lead definitions, we need to be a lot more careful in the way that we throw around a pivotal term like ‘lead’.

Otherwise, it becomes one of those four letter words.

Your thoughts?

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