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

Our posse of B2B marketers has recently been asking for more lead-generation and optimization strategies.

So we called in our lead-gen gunslinger, Brian Carroll, and rustled up a free web clinic on this topic for Wednesday, September 24.

This special clinic is all about getting more leads into your marketing funnel — and growing your sales through more effective lead management.

As you probably know, Brian literally wrote the book on the subject: Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. (In fact, we’ll be giving away 10 free copies of his book to some lucky clinic attendees.)

Teaming up with Flint McGlaughlin, Brian will discuss the strategies that doubled a partner’s sales leads in a matter of months, without increasing the partner’s budget. He’ll also demonstrate his five-step “playbook” for effective lead management, and conduct a live Q&A session to answer participants’ specific questions.

This year has been a tough one for many B2B marketers. And with so many economic questions swirling around, now is the time to optimize your funnel and lay a stronger foundation for 2009.

Join us for this free web clinic and get expert insights and answers to help you do just that.

For those who attended our free webinar on lead generation yesterday, we’d like to thank you for your time and trust. Despite some initial tech glitches, the session got rolling quickly and we covered a lot of ground, including:

• three lead-gen case studies, with some surprising results
• the impact of friction and incentive on the leads process
• a guest appearance by our good friend and partner, lead-generation expert Brian Carroll, and
• a live site review and optimization session.

Regular blog readers already know that we’ll be posting a link to the clinic content here in a few days. In the meantime, here are some of the takeaway points:

• Never use an incentive that requires you to sell it before the main offer is clear. Even good incentives can fail due to presentation errors.
• Friction is typically a negative factor, but not in every case. There are ways to use it to your advantage.
• Friction occurs at the page level as well as throughout the lead-gen process. Look for ways to reduce it in both areas.

We also looked at three key questions you need to ask (and answer) when optimizing your lead-gen strategy:

1. Have you looked at your site pages the way a customer does vs. the way your company does?
2. How does your process demonstrate to your ideal customer that you understand him/her?
3. Have you analyzed your competition’s lead-gen process from start to finish and compared it against your own?

On their own, these quick bulleted lists are great for scanning, but they don’t really do justice to the session. We hope you’ll check back next week, when we’ll post a link to the full presentation along with answers to some of the questions raised at the clinic. (Note: You can also be notified by email via the MarketingExperiments Journal.)