Hot New Ideas For B-to-B Sales Lead Generation
(DIRECT Magazine, February 2006)

The biggest contribution direct marketing can make to business marketing is sales lead generation. Sales people need leads to make them more productive, and we direct marketers have been there over the years, using tried-and-true techniques of targeting, media selection, offer development, message platforms, response management and campaign analysis to help them out.

But what’s new in lead generation for B-to-B? Plenty. Here are some of the hot new techniques that are gaining traction out there, most of them involving the Internet.

De-anonymizing the website visit
The website is essentially a passive medium. Even if you are successful using search engine marketing to motivate someone to click through to your website, you’ve accomplished little more than awareness building. Some studies have shown that as few as 2% of website visitors ever become "actionable" prospects.

As marketers, our challenge is to figure out a way to motivate visitors to leave behind their contact information, so we can keep the communications going. The standard technique to date has been to make an offer — a downloadable white paper or case study, for example — in exchange for registration data.

But now a new way to de-anonymize the B-to-B website visit has emerged, in the form of data matchback to the company domain name of the visitor. Plexis Healthcare Systems, a provider of insurance claim management software, is using a service called VisitorTrack for this purpose.

Here’s how it works. When someone is searching around the Web and stops by the Plexis site, VisitorTrack grabs up information from the visitor’s browser and identifies the visitor’s company and the keywords the person was searching on. This is matched against other data about the company, for example, online data such as other visitors to the site from the same company, or offline data such as company address, industry, individual contacts and so forth. A report is generated and delivered back to Plexis for follow up.

From Plexis’s point of view, knowing that people from a certain firm have been trolling around their website is valuable information. A sales call into that firm will be very productive.

According to J.T. Gillett, marketing manager at Plexis, the service has been a hit: "Our target for VisitorTrack is 10-15 leads per month, as determined by the number of visits, the visitors’ line of business, as well as our ability to provide services for that line of business. VisitorTrack consistently generates 15-20 leads per month and opens many doors for our sales team. VisitorTrack has been instrumental in Plexis’ invitation to submit several RFPs to a variety of prospects, including very large organizations. For us, one sale can account for between $150,000 and $2 million in revenue."

Vertical search engine marketing
We are all abundantly aware of the power and popularity of keyword bidding these days. One of the most interesting new twists in search engine marketing is the migration toward specialized search engines that concentrate on certain industry verticals, such as IT, retailing or industrial categories.

Instead of relying entirely on the big players, like Google’s AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture), business marketers are adding directories like GlobalSpec (engineering), BitPipe (IT), goWholesale (retailing), ThomasNet (industrial) and Business.com (general business) to their marketing mix.

Keyword bidding with vertical search engines often results in a better ROI, because verticals deliver a more qualified prospect, who will better convert to a qualified lead. Keep in mind, however, that there are no free lunches here. Your volume is going to be smaller and price per click is likely to be higher. For example, for the term "database software" a #1 ad position on Business.com is priced at $2.10 today, while it costs $1.25 on Google.

Businesses are likely to use a mixture of horizontal and vertical search engines. "It’s all about measured results," says Patricia Hursh, president and founder of SmartSearch Marketing in Boulder CO. "You might end up with something like 25% general engines and 75% verticals. The objective is to deliver the best quality leads at the lowest price. For example, using a variety of search engines, we were able to generate over 2,500 prospects a month for our client ITW Dynatec, an adhesives machinery manufacturing company, at a cost of only $1.18 per lead."

Keep it personal
Business people buy on behalf of their companies, and they need plenty of facts to make a purchase decision. So business marketers often feel that their communications should be, well, business-like, even clinical, in tone.

But direct marketers know that a personal tone is essential. Recently, some business copy is verging on the extremely personal — with successful results.

Freelance copywriter Scott Calame recently created a relationship-building campaign for a large chemical company designed to seem as if the company's marketing manager sat down to write one letter to just one recipient.

"It's important to remember that people, not companies, write letters," says Calame. "Keep that one thought in mind as you're writing and your letter's tone will instantly become more personal, compelling, and effective."

Sometimes, however, a more clinical tone may be the ideal approach, when marketing to physicians for instance. Another effort by Calame, sent to doctors, was designed to generate leads for a medical testing device company. The outer envelope used urgent medical terminology, like diagnostic codes, and appealed to the office staff to be sure the communication was handed directly to the doctor. That was all important to the piece’s getting noticed and getting past the gatekeeper. But the body of the letter still read as if it had been written by one person to one physician.

Website optimization
Optimization is the web-world’s term for continuous improvement through test and control. Typically applied to banner advertising or search engine marketing, whereby advertisers split test offers, creatives and media placement, and eventually identify the combinations that deliver the most click-throughs. Compared to tests in direct mail, the ideal combination online can be learned very fast — in a matter of days, or hours.

Optimization techniques are now being applied to website pages, using hosted software provided by such companies as Optimost and Offermatica. With these services, marketers can test the productivity of multiple variables at a time, variables like copy, layout, images, and navigation, on home pages, landing pages, and registration forms.

For example, Palo Alto Software asked Optimost for help in improving the landing page conversion for its flagship product, Business Plan Pro. In this situation, conversion meant actual sales of the shrink-wrapped product, priced at $99.95. The team selected 11 different variables that they thought were important in driving sales, such as the layout and images at the top and bottom of the page, the product description copy, and the placement of the submit button.

Then they created alternative versions of each element, to test. The variations were loaded onto Optimost’s server, and as the campaign progressed, various permutations were delivered to prospects clicking through. This many variables results in over 41 million potential permutations, so the variations were tested in a series of 5 waves of about 15,000 page views each, with a control group of 29,000.

Eventually, Palo Alto identified the optimal page version, which raised overall conversion from the baseline of .75% to 1.06%, a lift of 41.3%. They were also able to identify the variables that had the most impact, in this case being the top image (a lift of 16.8%), the bottom layout (+12.3%) and the product description area (+11.9%). With this information, Palo Alto Software can design more powerful campaign landing pages, and know the hot areas where they should focus their attention.

Navigation = Qualification
What do you do when your website naturally attracts a bunch of tire-kickers and otherwise unqualified visitors? You don’t want to waste your sales people’s time on people who will never buy. The standard solution is to give all visitors access to your free downloads, but force them to answer qualifying questions, and screen them carefully before passing them along to sales.

But IBM has come up with another approach, which encourages real business buyers to get the information they are seeking, while at the same time reduces the effort spent serving the needs of unqualified visitors, like students doing research for term papers. The technique involves creating thoughtful navigation paths that recognize the different types of visitors.

For example, someone moving around the IBM Software Group’s events section who skips from events, to references, to news, would not be served up information about pricing or invitations to call IBM. But someone who clicked on events, and then on DBII events, and then on the event’s topics, would be viewed as having a serious interest, and would be presented with information about product details and pricing.

According to Bob Curran, VP of Worldwide Sales Operations for the IBM Software Group, the navigation strategy solves the essential problem facing complex B-to-B websites: the low percentage of visitors whose personal information was being captured. "We have been frustrated by privacy conventions and other problems in data gathering," says Curran. "So we decided to design in some techniques that would improve our results. We conducted some user group meetings to understand the characteristics of our buyers, whether they were programmers, or CEOs looking for an overview, or users seeking tech support. Our registration rates have more than doubled, and the new navigation process deserves at least partial credit for that."