The Funnelholic

The webinar is fast becoming an extremely important element to one’s marketing mix.  In my generation, guys grew up watching television.  They hated reading.  From Happy Days to Laverne and Shirley to the Cosby Show to the Simpsons: They did not pick up a book.  P.S. they also were, bar-none, the biggest consumers of Cliff Notes. The moral of the story is: Have a variety of mediums you use to reach prospects.  If you have read my blog, you know I believe in whitepapers but you can’t JUST do whitepapers and you can’t just do emails.

It is my belief the webinar is a nice “quadruple whammy”.  A vehicle where you can get your money’s worth.  Remember: 4 reasons.  When you think of you webinars don’t just think of lead minimums and cpl, think of the entire package.

Note:  I know training is a major factor in the webinar market, but is not of use to me especially as part of the marketing mix.

The 4 main reasons to have webinars be part of your marketing mix:

Brand Awareness

There are many parts to the branding exercise:
1.    From Marketing Sherpa: “Multiple touches are the killer branding app…Every effort to generate the audience is an opportunity to promote the brand.”.  Think of it this way, the promotion of the webinar whether they go to the event or not involves thousands of emails, banners, websites, and newsletter postings.  When you work with a third party credible media site or research organization, you gain even more cachet.”
2.    Webinars for product launches are a great call as well.

Thought Leadership

Doesn’t this go without saying?  You spend a lot of time and money (I hope) on working analysts, ghost writing blogs, and PR trying to create thought leadership and put simply, conveying that you are smart.  What better place than in the webinar.  Education is really a key element to getting people to both sign up and attend webinars…so your topic should be educational in the first place.  Now realize: Your organization and specifically your assigned spokesman has the chance to look really smart.

Lead Generation

Quantifiable results.  “Hi boss, we ran a launch webinar.  We rolled-out the new product to an online audience of XXX.  Thank you for my promotion”

Drip/Nurture

“…the trend we see in the marketplace is clients using webinars more and more for lead nurturing (i.e. as follow-up offer to an existing database)” Howard Sewell, President of Direct Connect.  This we see more and more.  ONE MESSAGE: GET THE MOST BANG FOR YOUR BUCK.  Run the event and market it to your database.  Net-new + another touch is a win-win for your marketing organization.

Warning: If you have been giving the task of generating leads and have been given a limited budget, then you should quit. Depending on how limited it is, you will probably fail. That typically means that the organization you are working for doesn’t understand lead generation. We can talk more about this in depth in future posts, but lead generation takes time and money.

The Pilot’s License: One of the great situations for marketers today is that a number of lead generation vendors will allow you to test their programs. The wave has caught on as the outsourced appointment-setting service organizations and telemarketing firms are on board too. Not long ago, we had to make major commitments to vendors to get going. These were big bets that got people fired. Take advantage of this situation and try everything you can. Some will fail but at least you know. By the way, these pilots are not FREE and should not be either, the lead generation vendor has to do work so you should expect to get anything for. If you are a c Expect to pay for this, but expect to not have to make any long term or higher dollar commitment YET.

Set a reasonable goal: On-Base Percentage: Now, you need to decide what you are going to test for….as I have mentioned before, the best lead generation marketers I have run into have expectation set that they will give sales AT-BATS, its up to sales to hit the home runs and grand slams. Pilots are short-term limited engagements remember so you have to set your expectations correctly. The vendor hits a couple home runs in the pilot should not make them better or worse than the vendors they are up against. Now you are using the pilot to gamble. You know how many “nobodies” hit home runs in their first at-bats in the majors? You have took at this like Billy Beane of Moneyball fame would in evaluating talent. Billy would never judge a prospect on home runs, instead he would look at ON-BASE PERCENTAGE. When you look at lead generation vendors, you are looking for the fundamentals to consistently give the sales team at-bats and thus the ability to hit. If the sales team stats look like the vendor batted 1 for 50 with 1 home run and 49 unsellable prospects, they are not likely better than the vendor that had no home runs but 15 sellable prospects in the 50.

So, set a goal that will set you up for success going forward, I suggest one way: At-bats – how many of these guys fit your qualified lead critieria (Geo, company type, right guy, willing to listen). Its that simple, you want to judge these guys up-front and quickly, live by your unified lead definition. As processes iron themselves out, you can start attributing more ROI metrics.

If you are comfortable with you’re current lead generation process and have an idea what the cost per opportunity rate is for your lead sources, this can work as well. That is the total spend versus the number opportunities created in the SFA.

Test multiple vendors: This is a big deal, don’t test one…test a bunch. That is why I mentioned the budgetary issues. If you can’t test multiple vendors at the same time, you can’t test, it’s not a test. Bottom line. Get a number of vendors in the door.

Beware of the Direct Sales feedback: I am a broken record, but if you pass these lead to the direct sales reps for feedback…they will all lose. You have to have infrastructure set up to handle, qualify, and pass leads to your direct reps. This is especially true with field sales reps, they are not good sources of feedback. Time is their enemy and they don’t like to spend their day war-dialing and trying to turn leads into prospects. They just don’t. You will not win in this regard. Now, there is a caveat…if you are using appointment setting services, this is not true. These services are built for direct-to-direct sales and should be passed accordingly.

CAVEAT: I know equating the most popular piece of news to your blog topic is pretty corny. Nonetheless, I think there is something we can learn from the Giants victory over the Patriots Sunday. (for those of you who don’t know, the New York “football” Giants beat the undefeated and seemingly unconquerable New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

The point is that anybody can beat anybody on any given day. I am a big fan of unified lead definitions, but I am not a fan of ultra-tight lead definitions that leave no room for “upset”. Ill give you an example, I once did an lead generation implementation where the client wanted only Tier 1 manufacturers with X number of revenue, and x number of products, etc. One day, Yahoo came in. No one would take the call. Finally the Sales Development Rep got a Product Manager on the phone with them and came back with the realization this is a great target. 6 years later the company’s number one vertical is online media.

ESPECIALLY if you are an early company, don’t restrict yourself to too many “psychographic” traits. Your job is to bring in as many people who would be the Patriots (perfect targets) and could be the Giants (not entirely perfect on paper, but worth the Sales team’s time). Dont limit yourself to only Patriots, and find away to get the Giants in there because they may become your biggest customer yet. The one exception could be if the sales team’s pipelines are already and always full with near-term deals (dig deeper, this isn’t likely to be true but could happen at a mature company in a mature market).

The other caveat is that is you are still letting sales limit your lead definition to only deals that they can close tomorrow, you are screwed so I can’t help you. Sales has to be willing to sell and if not, you don’t have a true partnership.

If you can create leeway to find the next big “upset”, victory can be yours.

I just wrote a post on InsideCRM on facebook and linkedin to a certain degree. The key here is that there still isn’t a really easy way to gather a large mass of contacts out of either application but there will be. Linkedin is opening their API and I guarantee the first thing people will make is the ability to aggregate a large number of contacts. Facebook already is open and will have something built soon if there isn’t already. I haven’t see one, but the reality is there are more and more adults using this application. Net-net, in the next four months, expect linkedin and then facebook to over-take the Jigsaws, Spokes, Hoovers, Demandbase and all the other online contact aggregators.

Today, I hear more and more stories of linkedin being THE place that sales people are using to find the “right” guy:

• I personally use it all the time. By the way, quick tip: I tell people “I found you on linkedin”…then they know it was their fault. For fun at work, I will still just generate leads in companies sales guys cant get into
• My buddy is at a big tech company that buys every web password like hoovers, etc. He has a guy in India building a database for him from his linkedin…Every time he meets a new IT client, he gets them immediately to be linked to him
• Questions and answers has become a good place to find leads…either asking questions that draw out your type of client or finding your type of contact asking exactly the question you want to hear. In my case, I typed in a question about appointment setting call centers and everyone came out of the woodwork
• For god’s sake, how can you not like a contact database that is updated by the very people you are trying to find!

Facebook will take linkedin out because of the “fun-factor”. More adults are coming on by the minute to do everything from work to sharing pictures to sharing experiences with friends. This will probably be the site people update more often. I mean, if you just play with facebook for a minute and go back to linkedin you feel like you are looking at a 1996 Geocities website. Net-net: I guarantee you both are major contact generation factors in 3-6 months with facebook winning the marathon.