On the MarketingExperiments blog, we often write about landing page optimization and email optimization. And, while optimizing these channels can have an outsized impact on your results, you sometimes need to take a step back and look at your marketing campaign, even your sales-marketing organization, as a whole.

So, with the new fiscal year right around the corner, grab every smart person you work with (yes, even those that work in Sales), throw them in a room for an hour (bring some eggnog, it will help the festive brainstorming), and ask these three questions about your current sales and marketing funnel:

Question #1: Do we have the right “ask” at every stage of the funnel?

The picture we have in our minds of a funnel is so pretty, isn’t it? A big, wide mouth at the top for all those leads to fall into, and then, they nicely fall down the path to closed deal. But is it really so easy?

Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, wants you to question the very way you look at the funnel. “People don’t fall into the funnel; they fall out. Gravity does not work for the marketer. It works against the marketer,” Flint says.

So, what frame of reference can help you as you optimize your funnel? Perhaps a tower.

“The prospect climbs it, and the force which ATTRACTS the prospect upward is the force of the value proposition,” Flint says.

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At every stage of the funnel, the prospect must make a decision, and will only say “yes” (essentially, a “micro yes” leading up to the ultimate “yes” of a purchase) if the perceived value outweighs the perceived cost. And, of course, it only takes one “no” to halt the entire process.

Here are five examples of what can cause that “no”:

1. An “ask” to the wrong person
2. An “ask” without sufficient value force
3. An “ask” with too much cost force
4. An “ask” that is premature (in the thought sequence)
5. An “ask” for too much

Question #2: Do we have the most valuable content at every stage of the funnel?

Relevance. As we all know, that is the magic word for marketing and content. As my old boss used to say, “There may be an ad for a refrigerator on page A2 of the newspaper every day, but the only day you’ll notice it is when your fridge breaks.”

Of course, with digital marketing, we no longer have the luxury of mass media newspaper ads that happen to hit a very small section of a very broad audience at just the right time. Digital marketing has become narrowcasting, sending micro-messages to niche audiences.

Because of this, your potential customers expect a conversation, and will only engage with you when it matters to them – like when your content hits them right between the eyes  becauseit reaches them with helpful information when they are at the exact moment in the buying decision to need that specific help.

Let’s take email as an example. In the MarketingSherpa Special Report  Five Steps to Stronger Email Relationships: Research-based tactics SMBs can apply for more active and engaged subscribers (a free report until Dec. 31, courtesy of AWeber Communications), lead author W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS, found that “Another strategy SMBs find very effective is producing content for each funnel stage, and segmenting email campaigns based on their location in the sales cycle.”

The below research from that report illustrates Jeff’s point:

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As you can see from Jeff’s survey of 2,735 marketers, for both medium and small companies (basically, any company with fewer than 1,000 employees), producing content for each funnel stage was the absolute most effective email engagement and relevancy tactic.

For large companies, the most effective tactic was to “automatically send email based on triggers.” Of course, it should be noted that many triggered emails can be tied to steps in the funnel as well, such as a white paper download or webinar attendance.

Keep in mind, much with the “asks” in the first question, any content that is premature in the thought sequence is more likely to drive prospects out of your funnel tower instead of up it.

Question #3: Do we have the blocking and tackling right?

On the flip side of the above two questions, danger lies in focusing too much on your overall lead nurturing content plan and calls-to-action at each step of the funnel. Doing so could cause you to overlook the basic blocking and tackling, the infrastructure fundamentals that serve as a foundation for all the hard work you’re engaged in powering prospects up your funnel.

As an extreme example, if you have the wrong phone number in your call-to-action, the best content in the world that drives prospects to the most optimized CTA will not do you any good.

One check and balance in your marketing campaign that helps is a good QA process before anything goes live.

Another thing that may be worthwhile before you kickoff FY2012 with a bang is a deep funnel audit. For example:

• For the triggered email you set and forget nine months ago, is the content still relevant?
• Has there been an update to a platform you use (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress) that has hurt some functionality you relied on?
• Are there simply new people in new roles that aren’t familiar with specific steps in your funnel (e.g., could a new sales rep be sending the wrong content at a specific step of the funnel)?

A nifty, free tool to help your funnel audit is HubSpot’s new Marketing Grader, which can give you a good, basic analysis.

Of course, unless you’re George Jetson, there’s much more to your job than simply pushing a button. True funnel optimization requires a dedicated mix of strategic thinking and execution. But the above tool, and hopefully this entire blog post, can hopefully begin you down to the path to an optimized 2012.

Related Resources:

Marketing Funnel: How to optimize your Sales and Marketing funnel in 5 steps

B2B Marketing: Top “Aha moments” of 2011 from your peers

B2B Funnel Optimization: What happens after you capture the lead?

Landing Page Optimization: Test ideas for a B2B lead capture page

Everyone wants to improve cost-per-lead, right? And so, it would be logical to assume that the cheaper the lead is to obtain, the lower the cost-per-acquisition, the greater the margin, and the bigger the bonus in your paycheck at the end of the quarter.

Well, at MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in Boston, Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research, and Nicolette Dease, Program Manager (both at MECLABS) showed, essentially, that cheap leads can be downright expensive.

I grabbed Brian at the networking event after he spoke and asked him to explain …

The video our A/V Specialist, Luke Thorpe, put together is quite clear, but I wanted to take it one step further and provide an analogy you could use if you have to convince anyone on your team about this paradox …

Of gefilte fish and leads

So stay with me on this one. I was flying up to the B2B Summit in Boston on JetBlue (a giant TV room with wings) and watching a local news show in New York where they brought on Jack Lebewohl of the 2^nd Ave Deli to make a recipe. I’m sure you’ve all seen this type of segment on your local news station. He happened to be making gefilte fish, and he made an excellent point.

In case you don’t know, gefilte fish originated among the desperately poor Eastern European Jewish population who wanted to eat fish on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. They basically took a little bit of fish (which was expensive) and threw in a lot of filler (which was cheap).

Jack Lebewohl provided a real “aha” moment for me. This approach has actually now made gefilte fish more expensive. You see, back then, labor was cheaper than the raw materials, so they could spend all day trying to stretch that very valuable fish ingredient (there was no Twitter back then, they had nothing better to do anyway). However, now labor is more expensive than raw materials, raising the overall price of the labor-intensive gefilte fish. Now back to your leads …

A complex sale involves the human touch. The human touch is expensive. So if you take a bunch of cheap, poor-quality leads and waste the valuable time of your sales force, the actual outcome will likely be more expensive. Do the heavy lifting on the front end. Test and optimize to determine where your most valuable leads come from to determine the inflection point where cheap, essentially, becomes quite pricey.

Brian and Nicolette will join us again for the West Coast swing of B2B Summit 2011, in San Francisco, October 24-25. And they will once again be presenting their case study, along with their methodology to optimize your leads and make sure you truly are getting the best return on your investment. Sorry, no gefilte fish recipes, though.

Related Resources:

Optimize your marketing funnel by mapping what works at B2B Summit – San Francisco, October 24-25

Optimize your gefilte fish recipe – Rosh Hashanah cooking on NBC New York

B2B Summit 2011: 5 takeaways on social media, lead generation, building a customer-centric approach, and more

Marketing Funnel: How to optimize your Sales and Marketing funnel in 5 steps

Upon the completion of the recent MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, we learned that because of an ever more challenging environment, B2B marketers are beginning to embrace sales conversion as a Sales and Marketing responsibility, and not just Sales alone.

We are on the right track. The challenge is that marketers are having trouble gaining funnel optimization maturity.

Chart: B2B marketers show high levels of maturity at top of the funnel, not at the bottom

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B2B marketers are the most likely to have formal processes established for lead generation, and the least likely to have them for overall funnel optimization. Now is the time for marketers to capitalize on this trend, and really get ahead of the curve to establish their companies and themselves as industry leaders and champion over the competition.

So how can marketers gain maturity in funnel optimization? As a highly complex process, it is likely the reason for marketer’s struggle. Starting with some funnel optimization is going to be more effective than paying no regard to it. In this interest, we have identified a simplified, five-step process to getting started with funnel optimization.

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1.    Identify your Sales and Marketing funnel

Before you can optimize a lead’s progression through the funnel, you must first map out what that funnel looks like. Identify the stages buyers go through from lead generation to sales conversion. Your funnel will need to be measurable, encourage accountability between Marketing and Sales, and remain as simplified as possible.

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2.    Establish qualification and scoring

You will need to collaborate with Sales to determine the criteria of a qualified lead for your organization. Once the criterion is determined, develop automated scoring methodologies considering demographics and behaviors to measure a lead’s quality against your definition. You will set a lead score threshold that identifies a lead as qualified. Your qualification and scoring will need to be monitored and tested over time.

Now, you’re ready to start screening leads from Sales. If a lead score indicates the lead is qualified, send the lead to Sales. All other leads remain in Marketing’s ownership for step 3.

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3.    Nurture non-qualified leads until they are ready to engage

You will need to nurture non-qualified leads until they are ready to engage by sending them ongoing, relevant communications. Get started by repurposing content you currently have to reach new audiences. Nurture leads until they reach your target lead score threshold, then send them off to Sales. Add new content to your nurturing campaigns over time.

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4.    Continue to nurture throughout the funnel

You don’t have to stop nurturing leads once they are handed off to Sales – nurturing can support sales conversion. Just be sure to have intricate tracking in place so as to not inundate your audience with too many messages coming from Sales and Marketing.

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5.    Adapt and optimize

This is where the long-term work comes in to play. Your initial funnel optimization plan will need to be tested and optimized over time. Even if you get it right the first time, internal and external changes will happen that will affect your practices.

Industry events, competitor pricing strategies, your own new product launches are just a few examples of changes that will require adaption. As always, be sure to continually test and optimize all of your funnel optimization strategies.

Jen Doyle will next be speaking at B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco, October 24-25, in a tactical training session about lead scoring.

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Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

Marketing Down the Sales Funnel: How Nortel’s Q4 Push Touched 30% of Pipeline and Helped Close Deals

Converting Leads to Sales – Web clinic replay

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After driving potential customers to your website through PPC ads, organic search results, or a targeted campaign to create online traffic, the most logical way to turn those visitors into leads is by getting them to register via an online form.

For this blog post, let’s assume you’ve already presented an offer with a strong enough value proposition to get your visitor to actually be interested in filling out your registration form. Let’s just focus on optimizing the form itself.

A form can have any number of fields, of course, and it would seem if you have more required fields on the form, you will generate more lead information for the database.

Can we all agree to that point? Great, let’s take a look at a recent lead generation test then.

Background

Marketo, the marketing automation company, has a content-fueled top-of-the-funnel marketing strategy that drives traffic to its website in order to access that content. Some of the content is ungated, but what the company calls “middle stage” content (buyer’s guides, ROI calculator, RFP template, independent analyst research, etc.) and some of its “late stage” content (such as a comprehensive product demo) all require registration.

Because Marketo requires what it considers high-quality website visitors to register so it can track their behavior and contact those visitors, it conducted A/B testing on its forms to find the best-performing version.

Treatments

The company tested forms with five, seven and nine field forms.

The five-field form asked for:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Work Email
• Job Function (with dropdown menu)
• Company

All five fields are required.

The seven-field form added “# Employees” and “Industry,” both with dropdown menus.

The nine-field form added “Work Phone” and “CRM System.”

Results

The short form with only five fields — first and last name, work email, job function and company — produced an average conversion of 13.4 percent, with a cost-per-lead of $31.24.

Adding additional company information fields — number of employees and industry — to the form dropped conversion to 12 percent and raised the cost-per-lead to $34.94.

Adding CRM system and work phone fields further lowered conversion to 10% and cost-per-lead jumped to $41.90.

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Clearly, shorter forms are more effective in getting Web visitors to actually complete the registration and in terms of lowering the cost-per-lead. The trade-off is that with a shorter form is you are collecting less information for your database.

Jon Miller, VP Marketing, Marketo, doesn’t see using the more effective shorter forms as a problem.

“People lie on the forms all the time,” he says. MarketingSherpa research backs up Jon’s sentiment, showing the accuracy rate of self-submitted data.

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Jon’s solution is to use the basic information collected on the short form and buy the data to fill out the database record on the new lead.

He explains, for Marketo it is actually less expensive to use a short registration form with a higher conversion and lower cost-per-lead to capture basic lead information that can then be used in conjunction with an outside vendor to complete the record, than it is to ask for more information on the registration form. Information that might not be correct, anyway.

Jon sums up the results of Marketo’s form field testing, “Why should I ask for data, hurt my conversion rate and get bad data when I can buy it cheaper?”

Related Resources

Jigsaw (Marketo’s database vendor)

Members library — Marketing Strategy: Revenue-oriented approach leads to 700% two-year growth

Internet Marketing: Optimizing form fields to maximize conversions

Marketing Strategies: Is performance-based vendor pricing the best value?

Lead Marketing: Cost-per-lead and lead nurturing ROI

Interview: 4 Tactics to Lift Product Registration Forms 20% or More

I’m hoping that one thing you have learned from reading the MarketingExperiments blog is that there isn’t much in the marketing world that can’t, or shouldn’t be, tested and optimized. We are used to looking at the top of the funnel – optimizing landing pages, website headline copy, email campaigns, etc., but what happens after you capture that lead? Can’t the buying process be tested and optimized as well?

The short answer is, yes, the funnel can be optimized – and it should be! Before you can optimize lead progression through the funnel, you must first identify what that process looks like.

At MarketingSherpa, we have just launched our annual B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey to identify key tactics B2B marketers can use for funnel optimization, and to ensure success in an increasingly challenging environment.

As we embark on this new study, I’d like to look at a key chart that was included in MarketingSherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. We asked 935 B2B marketers what funnel stages they have identified for their organization. The results are presented in the following chart:

Marketing-Sales funnels will vary in complexity from one organization to the next, and the above stages were provided to study participants as a sample guideline. What’s surprising is that nearly a quarter of participants indicated that they have not yet defined a funnel. Of the remaining participants, nearly all of them indicated that they tracked the first stage of a registered lead, but that’s really a gimme. Everyone tracks that.

After registered lead, participation levels drop to fewer than 50% for all remaining funnel stages. We’re looking forward to seeing how these levels of participation may change in this year’s survey.

Once you have identified your Marketing-Sales funnel, you can start to develop lead nurturing strategies that will optimize lead progression from one stage to the next, ultimately accelerating sales pipeline performance.

You’ll want to deliver content to your audience that they want or need to receive, when they want or need to receive it. Once you develop your lead nurturing campaigns, think of all the opportunities you have to optimize them. Here are some ideas of tests you can run:

• Subject matter
• Headlines
• Subject lines
• Value proposition
• Design
• Timing / frequency of delivery
• Content format (whitepapers, videos, articles, etc.)
• Length of content
• Style of content
• Point of contact (online or offline communications)

Hopefully this brief list will get your creativity going.

At the end of the day, we must define our buying processes, and then use any tools at our disposal to optimize a lead’s progression through the funnel in order to protect our marketing investments, accelerate sales pipeline performance and fuel overall success.

Related Resources:

Marketing Sherpa’sB2B Marketing Benchmark Survey
The B2B Summit: MarketingSherpa’s only summit exclusively for B2B marketers
Lead Generation: How your peers optimize the lead
B2B Marketing: Marketing automation helps with lead nurturing and management

A complex buying process is, well, complex. And as H.L. Mencken said, “Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.”

So, if you have a buying process that requires more than grabbing a candy bar of the shelf, today’s Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST is for you – Converting Leads to Sales: How one company generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in only 8 months. Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director (CEO) of MECLABS, and special guest Brian Carroll (author of “Lead Nurturing for the Complex Sale”) will help you find the right answer for your company based on our lab’s discoveries.

But first, we turned to your marketing peers for tips you can use. Here are some of our favorite insights…

It’s all about sales enablement.

Not too long ago, I saw some research that shows marketing organizations are increasingly throwing time and money at better sales enablement, and I’m not at all surprised.

When we talk about “Sales and Marketing Alignment,” this is what we’re talking about! Making the handoff from marketing to sales as seamless as possible. When sales understands what marketing is doing, is bought into it, is empowered by the materials and reporting they need to make the most of it, that is when you start to see conversions.

And by the way, organizations that realize this put a revenue number on marketing, making marketing responsible for revenue, not just leads in the top of the funnel. Nothing like having a looming bogey to make sure marketing is going to enable sales to engage.

When this is done well, the benefits are substantial: companies that adhere to best practices close something like 5 to 7 times the deals as their peers. Those are compelling numbers.

For us and for our clients, sales enablement plays out in a bunch of ways. Among them:

1.       Early sales involvement and buy-in for marketing-driven programs.

2.       Easy-to-use sales briefings and playbooks so the sales team understands exactly what happens next and why.

3.       Tools from real-time notification of website visits to “cheat sheets” for social media that help sales easily make better connections.

– Amy Bills, VP of Marketing, Bulldog Solutions

Lead scoring is essential

From past experience as a lead generation specialist, I can tell you that immediate and priority follow up to inbound inquiries is a critical success factor to optimizing the flow of the lead through the funnel. There is so much you can do and so little time for me to describe this in the detail I would like to. At a high level…

You need to establish criteria to define which funnels the leads fall into. Many of these leads will be very early nurtures while a few will be sales ready. Having a short list of direct qualifying questions pertaining to interest level, readiness to buy, decision making authority, etc… will guide the person following up in determining which funnel to drop the lead into.

Once qualified as sales ready (initiative, budget, and need), send them to Sales for prompt follow up. If they’re interested but not ready to buy, put them into the nurture funnel for attentive follow up with timely phone calls and e-mails with relevant content.

Also ensure that you’re matching these leads to existing records in the database so that you can better score the company and prioritize follow up with colleagues.

– Jason Croyle, Business Development Representative, MECLABS

Converting traffic into leads

Let’s assume you are using the organic/natural approach to drive traffic to your site, then I would follow these steps:

1.       Ensure keywords and key-terms (long tail) selection is optimal, having in mind that you might need to make changes depending on season, time, and whatever other variable affects your business year-round.

2.       Develop landing page(s) content based on the target keywords.

3.       Enhance the value proposition in the landing page (first step of the conversion funnel).

4.       The fewer the numbers of steps the faster the conversion, so make sure you have a simplified conversion process.

• A) Create a registration process, which can be formalized through a “sign up” form which may or may not require users to confirm an email account. You could also have an informal “sign up” process, where you would rely on the user’s information to make use of email remarketing processes to increase your conversion. Studies have shown that you are more likely to increase conversion on dropped users through email remarketing by about 47%, but not only that, these recovered users are more likely to spend more compared with users that went through your original conversion funnel.

• B) The formal or informal registration would allow for no-intrusive customers tracking aimed not only at conversion, but also email remarketing. That requires back-end custom programming through cookies, which would watch and match a customer with a desired action, and if the expected action doesn’t take place and automated email (remarketing) is sent to customers with additional incentives – such as discounts, free shipping, partner coupons, etc… – to get customers back into the conversion process.

5.       Use additional incentives throughout the conversion funnel.

6.       Use email remarketing with additional incentives, for only a percentage of dropped offs user, to increase conversion.

If you are using some sort of paid search (such as Adwords), you can apply the same principle. You may create a new conversion page for your Adwords campaign and insert the Adwords landing page into the conversion funnel already in place.

Most importantly, once these implementations are in place you MUST – and I can’t emphasize this enough – test them.

– Marcelo Martins, Search Engine Specialist

Related Resources

Free Web clinic, today, March 30th, 4-5 PM — Converting Leads to Sales: How one company generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in only 8 months

The Essential Sales Playbook: Helping sales close the deal

Lead Generation: Shouldn’t B2B companies have a sales and marketing research and development lab?

The difference between lead nurturing and lead generation explained in two minutes

What else can I test … to improve my lead generation rate?