The most important metric, from the company’s perspective of course, is ultimately the profitability of a marketing program. This holds whether it’s an in-house telemarketing program, a direct mail program, trade shows, SEO, a drip campaign, or an outsourced telemarketing campaign. Getting a positive return on their investment – a net positive cash flow – is what determines whether it was worth doing. And it also determines whether they can keep funding it. Because of this, the quality of the leads matters as much as, if not more than, the quantity. We talked a bit about this in other articles,... ...

When talking about money, it’s important to keep in mind what ultimately makes a business run. From a sales and marketing perspective, the economics of generating revenue in the B2B market are quite simple: You must spend money to make money, although some business owners evidently don’t quite understand it. For example, many companies allocate a fixed percentage of current or past revenues to fund their marketing efforts. However, this makes little sense because revenue is a consequence of promotion, rather than a cause of it. Expenditures for lead generation should always be viewed as an investment, even if it... ...

the first in a series of white papers discussing the forgotten steps to successful marketing. Background Having spent my life in the field of marketing and having had success, it’s probably not surprising that I know many marketing professionals that I worked with and many more that were competitors. We have managed to stay in touch over the years have watched with great interest the new developments new approaches new techniques developed and used to market their products and services.  There is so much more information available today.  It is no wonder that marketing can be far more powerful and... ...

Setting aside the details of how to do the job, I’d like to talk briefly about telemarketer abuse. This is the mistreatment, low pay, and job insecurity that are rained down on all telemarketers, both the good and the bad. Telemarketer abuse occurs because fewer than 5% of the candidates who present themselves as professional B2B telemarketers know how to do the job. As a result, business owners (and call center managers) have no choice but to ride herd on their employees. They need to record their calls so they can correct their technique (which is funny, since most call... ...

Although much of what we publish on this forum is for anyone who needs to generate sales leads, such as a telemarketer, a salesperson, a sales manager, a business owner, or marketing executive, let’s focus for a moment on one person for whom that is their sole responsibility, the B2B telemarketer. To be clear, there are only two types of telemarketers operating in the B2B space: good ones and bad ones. That’s it. And while a bad one can become a good one (for example, through proper training,) there is a bright line dividing the two. Allow me to tell... ...

While most salespeople cannot find their own leads effectively, even if a sales team does its own prospecting successfully and consistently, they’ll still suffer from what’s known as the “breakage” problem. The breakage problem is, generally speaking, the loss of concentration, focus or aptitude that occurs when you change from doing one kind of job to doing another kind of job. Sometimes breakage is good, and sometimes it’s bad. With salespeople, though, it’s catastrophic. Let’s say you’re a computer programmer, and your job is to write computer code. It’s possible to sit for hours in front of a computer screen... ...

Genuine lead generation takes time and costs money simply because a qualified lead often requires that the prospect express a desire to take action (e.g. talk to you). Going from a list of names (which may have cost something to acquire in the first place,) to a list of qualified sales leads, can be expensive and time consuming. At the very least, in order to find out if each person on the list has a need you have to call each of them and ask them, even if it only takes a few minutes apiece (although it could take hours.)... ...

Because there is so much confusion in the market about this, we need to talk about the definition of a sales lead. We will go into this in greater depth later, but it is important to define a lead in the context of the B2B sales job, as there is much misinformation in the market about the term. But if we’re going to get anywhere at all, we need to define a sales lead in the context of the job of the salesperson who has to follow it up and clean up the confusion. Perhaps the best way to understand... ...

In its simplest form, lead generation in the B2B market is the process of identifying suspects, getting their attention and initial interest, qualifying them as potential buyers, and then getting them to want to engage in a serious conversation about doing business together. This is what we mean by “getting in the door,” or lead generation if you will. Note that the point of the process is not what you send out, what you say about your product, or how many email addresses you gather. That part is easy. Anyone can send out letters, make calls, run ads, distribute white... ...

In the face of these increasing demands on salespeople, most companies are simply giving up. Many companies don’t even bother trying to train their salespeople to know or do anything more than the minimum, usually product training, that they need a salesperson to know and do. This is particularly evident with the front-end of the sales process (i.e. lead generation,) where marketing is assigned the job of getting the buyer’s attention, educating prospects, creating interest and urgency, and even uncovering needs. And while clever advertising was originally designed to help make salespeople more efficient, it now attempts to replace them... ...