FUNNEL is a great idea (well, we did help develop it). It’s a B2B marketing event that covers the entire sales/marketing pipeline.

It happens on 1 November at the Lancaster Hotel in London.

As a friend of Velocity, you get a 20% discount to the event just by using this code: FLD508.

Four tracks: Attract, Engage, Nurture and Convert. It’s organised by Econsultancy, so you know the content (and lunch) will be top-notch.

Here’s a list of delegates already registered (you’re in good company).

This will be worth a day out of the office for anyone serious about B2B marketing. Pretty much guaranteed.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B Events, B2B marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, marketing automation, Revenue Performance Management

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The sales team owns the sales funnel.
But as a B2B marketer, you feed the top of their funnel.
So you own your company’s revenue pipe.
The success or failure of your company depends entirely on the quality and quantity of opportunities you generate.

This isn’t about how many business cards your team collected from the latest trade show. It’s about how many sales-ready leads you can generate. That’s where Lead Nurturing comes in.

We’re huge fans of Lead Nurturing because it:

• Closes the gap between marketing and sales – connecting us directly to revenue
• Never wastes a lead – moving the cold ones forward while acting on the hot ones
• Creates opportunities that the sales team really values – stopping them from cold calling (or ignoring undifferentiated leads)
• Makes it easy to treat people differently – based on their demographics (job title, industry) and their behaviours (web visits, downloads, email opens…)
• Automates a lot of boring tasks – like creating landing pages and linking them to emails and analytics

Brian Carrol, CEO of InTouch has a great 5-step way of thinking about lead nurturing:

1. Refine – work with the sales team to hone a definition of what  a ‘sales-ready’ lead really means. This entails lead scoring and prioritization (50 points if they download White Paper X; 100 points if they visit us at an event…).
2. Qualify – centralise all data about leads, offline and online.  Then decide who’s worth the effort. (Authority, Time Frame, Need, Budget). There’s often a non-automated, human aspect here (remember the phone?). But do it right and sales conversion rates double.
3. Nuture –work the early stage leads until they’re sales-ready; drip feed them emails, content & contacts and score their behaviours; It’s about a relevant ongoing dialog with potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.
4. Define – create a defined hand-off process for moving leads from marketing to sales; CRM integration of your lead nurturing system will help.
5. Close the loop – via monthly sales/marketing meetings; get their feedback on the leads you’ve delivered; discuss what’s working and what’s not…

The upshot of all this: more effective selling time for your sales people, focused on people with a real business need – and more revenue for the business.

With lead nurturing process like this, you can track Cost per Opportunity (the ones the sales force is actively working on) instead of the clunkier, less enlightening metric, Cost per Lead.

There are an increasing number of Lead Nurturing systems that support this kind of process and automate a lot of the activities that go into it.  We’re getting up to speed on Marketo (pioneered in Europe by John Watton, CMO of ShipServ) and think you should be too.  This is where B2B marketing is going: actually generating business instead of undifferentiated names and email addresses.

(photo credit: Bram Reinders, Creative Commons)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring

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Once again, ShipServ has ‘scooped’ a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) — this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine.  ShipServ, piloted by CMO John Watton, won a CRM Elite Award given to customer implementations that push new boundaries.

The judges recognised ShipServ “for its holistic use of Marketo, Salesforce.com, and social media” — including viral video, eBooks, Twitter and a LinkedIn group (we’re kind of proud of our work on all these).

We don’t know of any other B2B marketer who uses the Marketo/Salesforce integration so effectively. Add in the content marketing and social media aspect and ShipServ does pretty amazing things on very little budget.  This is how B2B marketing should work. It maximises the power of digital marketing to create a real marketing funnel that nurtures and scores leads before turning them over to the sales team.

The result is a completely different relationship between marketing and sales. Instead of mutual recrimination, the two teams at ShipServ work closely together to drive revenues.  And it’s working.  Well scooped, John.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content Marketing, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, LinkedIn, technology marketing agency, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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We go into it in more depth here, but if you’re in a bit of a rush, here’s the Digital Velocity offer in 8 tweets of no more than 140 characters:

Tweet 1
B2B Web Lead Generation Insight
Where we map your place in the web universe. Your keyword footprint, SEO power & social media presence.

Tweet 2
B2B Web Start
Fast track web design and build, from personas and wireframes through design, content & CMS implementation.

Tweet 3
B2B Content Factory
Core content to drive traffic and incite response; papers, eBooks, videos, webinars – content that moves markets.

Tweet 4
Digital Engagement and B2B Demand Generation
Campaigns to drive downloads, visits and sign-ups – PPC, search arbitrage, outbound, social…

Tweet 5
B2B Lead Nurturing and Scoring
Automated campaigns that score leads by behaviour and demographics; feed hungry sales beast

Tweet 6
B2B Online PR
Buzz campaigns that harness the power of social media, engage key bloggers and create backlink storms.

Tweet 7
Analytics & Reporting
A powerful toolset to show how you’re doing, campaign-by-campaign, hour-by-hour.

Tweet 8
B2B Web Training
Bring the expertise in-house. We’ll show you how to work the web, create campaigns and nurture leads.

Again, you can drill down into each of these right here, but that’s not a bad start: eight tweets worth of Digital Velocity.  To put it to work, all you have to do is click.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: analytics, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing campaigns, B2B technology marketing, CMS, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, metrics, Online PR, reporting, Social Media, web training

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In our bumper edition Xmas newsletter, you’ll find:

A super-shiny new White Paper, ‘The Hierarchy of Benefits‘, which identifies one of the most important phenomena in B2B marketing: the inverse relationship between credibility and perceived value.

A recap of an old favourite, ‘Marketing Through the Hype Cycle‘, which explains how to work within the ‘Hype Cycle’ framework described by those clever boffins at Gartner.

A ‘best of the best’ roundup of Velocity blog posts from the past couple of months, including:  a discussion about Microsoft’s (strangely odd) ‘I’m a PC’ ad campaign; a hitchiker’s guide to essential web marketing tools; help on naming things properly; and some good excuses to create a social networking platform in a B2B environment.

In addition, we introduce you to all the new faces here at Velocity HQ – including nice guys Neil and Lee; plus a quick roundup of all the client love we’ve been generating lately (hint: great things happening at dotMobi, Psion Teklogix, and Secerno.

Excited!?  hell, we are!  Go grab it now…

Meantime, happy holidays one and all.  Have fun.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, Online PR, Web Marketing

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And since clients never fail to throw flowers at our feet when we’re done explaining it, we thought we’d turn it into a new Velocity Paper free to the first thousand people to download it (and the next thousand too).

The paper identifies one of the most important phenomena in B2B marketing: the inverse relationship between credibility and perceived value… but we’ll let you discover that for yourself.

If you read nothing else today, read this new paper and put its ideas into practice by lunchtime.

Other things that might change your life…

Our Marketing Through the Hype Cycle paper

We mentioned this in the last newsletter, but Gartner has since picked up on it and, instead of suing our asses, they’ve recommended it in their blog. So now you really should download and read it.

The only B2B Marketing Blog you’ll ever need

Well, ‘need’ may be a bit strong, but more and more B2B marketers are finding it a useful challenge to conventional wisdom. Recent posts include:

B2B Web Marketing Tools Around Town
Roger’s excellent blog post that brings together all the online apps and widgets we use to pimp our clients’ SEO, pay-per-click campaigns and content marketing.

The importance of naming things
A quick post on why we like words with TM after them, like Boswelox^TM, Pentapeptides^TM or Nutrillium^TM.

Microsoft’s baffling “I’m a PC” campaign
And why we think it’s a really, really embarrassing mistake.

Good Reasons to do Social Networking in B2B
Are you using social networks yet? If you’re in doubt, think ‘micro-facilitation’ and ‘macro-facilitation’.

The Power of Mobile Marketing
Marketing to mobile phones is taking off in a big way. We think it’ll be bigger than the desktop web. We’re also doing our bit to make that prediction come true by creating our blog to stay on top of it.

Meantime…

The Velocity family grows

B2B marketing heavyweight Neil Stoneman has joined us from his role as thought leadership supremo at BT Global Services. Need to lead some thoughts? Drop Neil a line.

We’ve also lured in a recent design graduate named Lee Hosford who’s working directly with Stuart Rothwell, our Senior Designer. Lee has oodles of talent and scads of enthusiasm. We like oodles and scads.

The Velocity client list grows

We couldn’t hire all these talented people if clients didn’t keep coming back for more. We’re excited about new projects for dotMobi, ipaccess, Econsultancy and ShipServ and thrilled to welcome some great new clients including:

Psion Teklogix – makers of rugged PDAs and mobile computers that make mobile workers more productive (and happy).

Secerno – the gurus of Active Database Control – an intelligent security perimeter around any database (very cool technology).

Plus a sexy annual report for Portrait Software, done together with RMA.

Thanks for reading. Until next time…

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, Online PR, Web Marketing

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How will you defend your marketing plan? “That one won an award,” and “The sales guys really loved this,” might have cut it in a normal recession (probably not) but this time it’s Biblical. This is the Credit Crunch and there’s only one way marketers like you can defend your budgets, justify your existence and make yourself indispensable: you’ve got to deliver sales. And you’ve got to prove it.

At Velocity, we’re deeply into two powerful new weapons that are not only incredibly effective, they’re virtually Crunch-Proof™:

Demand Generation (ie, a spot of Lead Nurturing)

…an automated platform based on lead nurturing and scoring; it marches prospects towards your sales force one step at a time, treating each one differently according to his or her demographics (job title, industry, etc) and behaviour (web pages visited, emails opened, webinars attended…).  Better still: the system generates alerts to the relevant salesperson and killer reports that make it impossible to deny the power of marketing.

Online PR (ie, win friends and influence Google)

…Roger Warner, our intrepid ‘content optimizer’ is orchestrating a set of incredibly powerful tools that take a piece of content (like a white paper), drive it up the Google rankings, generate traffic and downloads from the new searches and document the entire process.  New, relevant traffic without paying-per-click or spending on banner campaigns.

What do these two emerging disciplines have in common?  They’re quantitative and measurable. They expose poorly-performing efforts and glorify successes.  They’re fairly instant, with no lag between campaign and result. And, because of all the above, they’re almost impossible to cut when the cutting gets tough.

Increasingly, B2B technology marketing is digital marketing (go on – click… that’s us!).  And these two weapons are perfect examples of where digital marketing has been headed since the first banner befouled the first browser.

Before the CEO storms in… talk to us about online pr, demand generation, lead nurturing and lead scoring.  And let the axe fall on the bastards in finance or HR.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, Online PR, Web Marketing

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