As an advertising and marketing executive, I have difficulty finding time for continuing education. However, the proposed topics of the BtoB’s Leading Edge: Demand Generation in the Digital Age online virtual conference motivated me to make time to attend.

This webinar had five tracks. Below is a summary of the key learnings and my personal review of each track.

Track 1: Social Communities and the Future of B-to-B Marketing

Patrick Crane, Vice President of Marketing, LinkedIn

• There are professional social networks and networks geared toward fun and entertainment. As you think about participating in a social network for professional purposes, consider the intentions of its community members. Both Xing and LinkedIn have a professional intent, whereas websites like MySpace and Facebook are more for socialization purposes.
• If you are an HR director or a job seeker, LinkedIn is tailored to fit your needs.

Review: Although not relevant to B2B or B2C lead generation, this track did open my eyes to how LinkedIn is emerging as the most important professional networking site for those seeking traditional employment or contract/consulting work. LinkedIn is also becoming a go-to resource for HR professionals.

Track 2: B-to-B Offer Strategies That Keep Your Sales Pipeline Filled with Qualified Leads

Russell Kern, President, The Kern Organization

• Your offer is the key driver for e-mail campaigns.
• When it comes to B-to-B demand generation, 13% of leads buy in the first 90 days. The other 87% buy within 91 days to 2 years.
• For B-to-B transactions, approximately 6–21 people are involved in purchasing decisions.
• In today’s economy, buyers do not want to talk to salespeople. Rather, they go to trusted advisors. Therefore, you should focus your time and energy networking with consultants and top advisors.
• Try to position yourself as a trusted advisor. 70% of B-to-B deals go to companies that are positioned as trusted advisors.
• B2B buyers are afraid to make mistakes, so they take a longer time than B-to-C buyers to make a purchase decision and have a longer sales cycle.
• When setting up an offer, the call-to-action needs to spark motivation in customers to engage.
• A compelling offer is
  • Valuable
  • Exclusive
  • Tangible
  • Relevant
  • Easy to deliver
  • Engaging/entertaining to the client
• Make offers simple.
• The title of the offer affects consumer response by 35%. Free information is the most powerful offer, and items like free brochures, whitepapers, DVDs, etc., outperform all other offers.
• The biggest snafu on offers for e-campaigns is not having the right offer for the proper sales cycle stage. If a sales cycle stage is more than 30 days and you have a plan of 20 touches, try to consolidate over six months instead of one year.

Review: I found the last tip to be the most insightful and relevant because it described the psychology of delivering compelling call-to-action offers.

Track 3: Lead Scoring: The Foundation of World-Class Lead-Management Programs

Loren McDonald, Vice President of Industry Relations, Silverpop Engage B2B

• 70% of leads generation during an e-campaign are considered to be long-term sales cycle (3–18 months). The other 30% consist of: 10–12% short-term buyers, 15–20% not qualified, mystery shoppers, or freebie-seekers
• Today, the biggest gap in CRM is failure to provide a lead-scoring mechanism.
• As marketers, we need to be lead-developers who score and route leads.
• Every sales and marketing organization should meet and collaborate to create a lead-scoring mechanism.
• Factors to consider and evaluate a grade to a lead include:
  • Time-frame for buying
  • Ability to make a decision
  • Purchasing power
  • Profile and demographic information
• Without lead scoring, you compromise your sales team’s ability to prioritize follow-ups based on highest probability to buy.

Review: Currently I am assessing the design of a lead-scoring mechanism into our CRM, so I found this information meaningful and right on target. The presentation was objective and insightful.

Track 4: Following the Leads: Identifying and Targeting Small Business Prospects

Denise Hopkins, Vice President of Marketing & Product Development, Experian Marketing Services

• We still require multiple channels to reach small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) as prospects. E-mail and search are the top tools Experian utilizes.
• Experian has developed profile information and provides specific messages and tones for each profile, expecting that some categories will perform better than others.

Review: When considering marketing to SMBs, look up the Experian profile categories, and the deck will suggest the tone and message to use toward your target.

Track 5: Lead Generation, the Cisco Way

Jere King, VP Field Marketing, Cisco

• Jere reiterated that when you start developing a campaign, you must know who you are marketing to. Then, position yourself accordingly.

Review: This specific track was pre-recorded and staged. This was the model for relentless self-promotion. The thirty minutes focused on sharing four video commercials that they thought were well done and represented the concept of understanding and knowing your customer.

Top Ten Takeaways

Thanks go to fellow attendee, Maria Pergolino, who organized a list of the top ten tips from the webinar.

1. Website visitors need clear directions on what to do when they arrive at your website.
2. You can do a lot even with a small budget.
3. Social media is not going away and needs to be embraced by ALL marketers.
4. Direct mail may not be dead.
5. Offers need to be relevant AND appropriate for the prospect’s place in the buying cycle.
6. Testing can allow you to enter a new market with little risk.
7. Incentives can work really well.
8. It’s okay if people who will never buy your product consume your content.
9. An event doesn’t need to have to trend on Twitter to be great.
10. Demand generation is just a piece of the entire Marketing puzzle.

Overall Review

The webinar started with 5,000 registrations and 1,200 participants. By the final track, 650 people were still watching. I walked out with great insights from three of the five tracks, which made it worth my while. From a technology standpoint, the team that organized the event and logistics did an amazing job, with an interactive flash website that enabled you to feel like you were at a virtual trade show. See the Attendee Guide (PDF) for a complete rundown of the website’s features.

Instead of walking away with a bag of koozies, pens and pencils, I was able to download about 20 presentations and whitepapers that I can read at my leisure and share with my team. These supplementary materials will serve as “IV drips” of continuing education.

A Final Word on Webinars as Continuing Ed for Marketing Professionals

Webinars can be a truly great avenue for continuing education, but my advice is to always read the subject and curriculum a couple of times before attending. Make sure the information is relevant to the knowledge you are seeking. Furthermore, if your time is especially valuable, consider searching for reviews and ratings on the speakers and the companies speaking.

Robert Cowes is Sr. VP of Real Estate & Interactive Marketing at IF Marketing & Advertising. Robert leads IF’s interactive product development as it relates to web technologies, e-marketing, CRM and Search Engine Marketing. He has a BBA in Finance & Marketing from St. Edward’s University and an MBA from Texas State University. Contact him at rcowes@yourifteam.com.

On June 18th, 2009, the AMA hosted speaker Jill Griffin, author of Taming The Search-And-Switch Customer, at the Cool River Cafe in Austin. With her North Carolina accent in full effect, Jill shared “oodles” of knowledge and research aimed at helping companies with customer retention.

Jill Griffin is known all over the world as an expert in the three customer-keeping competencies: customer loyalty, winning customers back, and managing the search and switch customer. Customer retention has become a trending topic at a time when buyers are more price sensitive and budgets are being drastically cut. In addition to the current economic conditions, the popularity of Google and Social Media have muddied the waters even more. Customers seem only as loyal as the lowest price they find online. Fortunately, those of us in attendance last Thursday have the benefit of Jill’s strategy for defending our customers from online competition.

For those AMA’ers who couldn’t make it, and the millions of Austin AMA blog readers around the world, here’s what all businesses need know about keeping their customers:

1. Make defending your brand, and your customers, online a priority. This one seems obvious, but I’m sure Jill mentioned it for a reason. Defending your brand is kind of like exercising. It’s good for us, we need to do it, we might even enjoy it, but we always put it off until tomorrow. Actively making this part of our strategy is half the battle.

2. You need to ace the “Worth It” test. The longer we’ve been in business, the less we know about what’s going on in the mind of our customer. We may not know what the next best buying alternative is, or maybe our front liners don’t know what sets the brand apart. Jill’s “Worth It” test shows us exactly where we need improvement in the search and switch customer department.

The “Worth it” Test:

1. Versus your next best buying alternative, my brand provides real, substantive differences that you consider important.

2. My brand provides you tangible, convincing proof of these differences.

3. You can easily articulate my brand’s differences.

4. You are served by employees who exemplify my brand’s differences through word and deed.

5. Relative to the price difference, you perceive my brand as delivering substantially more value than your next best buying alternative.

3. You have to think beyond the tactics to win. It wouldn’t have been a gathering of professionals without the mention of social media. Jill pointed out something we might miss as our excitement for Twitter grows. If we don’t have a point of difference to communicate to our customers, it doesn’t matter how big our reach is, how many mentions we have, or if Oprah is following us.

I know I might have been too busy with my steak and asparagus to catch all the best points of Jill’s presentation, so please add anything I missed in the comments below. Also, any feedback or experiences implementing the “Worth It” test would be immensely helpful to everyone.

-@joshdward

Josh Ward is the Relationship Strategist at Volacci, an Austin based SEO company. He specializes in applying essential human relations and communication techniques in the online world of conversations. His services are available for your corporate event, birthday partys, and weddings. Read Josh’s blog about life, the universe, and everything at partner.Volacci.com. Josh lives in the Austin area with his beautiful wife and their 4 kids.

Recent studies have again shown that inbound marketing is a cheaper lead generation tool than outbound marketing.

While inbound marketing (which includes: blogging, social media, search engine optimization [SEO], and search engine pay-per-click advertising [SEM]), may reach smaller audiences than outbound marketing (direct mail, telemarketing, trade show, and trade and consumer advertising), the cost per lead and cost per sale are typically significantly lower for inbound. While it may be impossible to generate all of your sales leads requirements through these inbound efforts you should certainly maximize and allocate your dollars and efforts to attain the lowest cost per lead and/or cost per sale.

I am often asked by clients and prospective clients, “How much should I spend on Search Engine Marketing aka pay-per-click?” The answer is as much as your budget per lead allows until you can convert the leads to sales and validate the lead source via a cost per sale. Typically, I am accused of double talk after the response. The simple fact is that most companies know how much it costs to produce a product or provide a service, but many do not know what their customer or sales acquisition costs are.

Without knowing your costs of acquisition you have to focus on your cost per lead until you can track leads to sales. You’ll need to know your typical “time to close,” “closing ratio,” “percentage of closure rate per sales process step,” and more. All should be tied back to your lead acquisition source to make an educated judgment on how to spend your resources by source.

As the internet has evolved and the economy has gotten worse, prospective buyers research more than ever before making their list of products and vendors of consideration for purchase. The most prevalent research medium is the internet and articles, white papers and media coverage are all reference points for prospect research. A solid internet strategy is more than SEM and SEO, it’s also getting the references, back links, chatter on blogs, reviews, etc. Public and Media relations are critical to a successful internet presence. While many trade publications are “controlled circulation and access”, which is not indexed, or at least the articles are not readily available via an internet search, many trade, consumer, and news sites, blogs and archives are widely indexed.

Like any investor with your lead generation and marketing you need to “spread the risk, invest in the highest probability returns to the lowest, and monitor them constantly.”

If your PR firm is focused on paper - you better augment them with online efforts or replace them with a firm that can integrate the online and offline editorial opportunities. 

Share your thoughts or questions by leaving me a comment.

About the Author

Michael Romanies has more than twenty-three years’ experience in P&L management, marketing, sales, business development, product management, and operations. Michael has held executive positions in technology and publishing companies and has extensive experience in business-to-business (B to B), business-to-consumer (B to C), and business-to-government (B to G) product development, marketing, and sales.