MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

Here’s one of the things I love about working with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CMO, MECLABS – he routinely looks at the most vexing marketing challenges and creates an entirely new paradigm; a new lens through which to approach these challenges.

Take the marketing funnel for example. Flint says that the traditional view of the sales and marketing funnel is, essentially, upside down. Literally.

In fact, you should take the traditional funnel and flip it. Prospects aren’t just falling into this wide net, waiting for someone to sell to them. Rather, you must keep pushing them up through the funnel, against the constant tug of gravity, which slows down and often stops your sales process. The force that pushes them up through that funnel and overcomes all the forces that can easily stop that sales is a powerful value proposition.

Flint spoke extensively about value proposition at MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 in Boston, and I grabbed him just after the Summit ended to ask a few questions about value prop for B2B marketers: Read more…

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. Read more…

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… Read more…

It seemed like everyone had one thing on their mind at this year’s first MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit: metrics. Well, a few people had shopping and cocktails on their mind too, as we were minutes from the shopping Mecca known as Union Square in San Francisco, not to mention a million great restaurants.

My own sidebar conversations and those of my MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS colleagues circled around a basic belief that 20 to 30 percent of the sales pipeline should come from marketing leads.

For the most part, we can all thank SiriusDecisions for this advancement in our collective understanding of funnel metrics. Everyone at budget time has a “Demand Waterfall” funnel model.

That percentage of revenue issue raises two questions for me. The first one is why 20 to 30 percent should be the correct answer. Read more…

Today, someone somewhere probably wrote down your name and/or captured or updated your phone number, email address, mailing address, and so on. You may not have even spoken to the person. Perhaps they heard your name on a conference call or in some meeting that you did not attend. Maybe they Googled you or looked you up on Facebook or LinkedIn or who knows where.

And it’s not just your identity information. People are tracking your behavior. Google has built a multibillion dollar business this way. Read more…

With the continued high unemployment rate, many professionals have been and are considering hanging out their own (often virtual) shingle and starting a business, website, or non-profit. Hey, that’s one way to get a job. Create your own company and hire yourself.

But from my personal experience, the difficulty in having your own business is not in doing what you do well, it’s all those other things that you normally don’t need to handle when working for someone else. In my case, I love writing and have no challenges there. But sales…

I personally think content marketing works great for this. Word of mouse can open more doors for you than a skeleton key. But, occasionally, everyone needs to pick up the phone and make a sales call to sell a product, service, or even just an idea.

So to help the next Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Craig Newmark learn to sell to potential customers, donors, and venture capitalists, I corralled Jason Croyle and asked him about the four biggest sales challenges I’ve seen most startups face.

Jason is a Lead Generation Specialist at InTouch, one of our sister companies. In just over one year he’s created $3.3 million for a data integration tools company (and that’s just for one of his five clients), and he was kind enough to share his sales insights to help you start flooding your own pipeline… Read more…