Building your channel: How to create a systematic lead generation machine

By Carrie Bedingfield

The marketing channel - and the leads it creates - is the lifeblood of every business. The foundation is an authoritative voice in the market, delivered through engaging content. To deliver this without bringing the business to a standstill requires a flexible, systematic approach for creating a sustainable pipeline.

From The B2B Lead Generation Machine, Carrie Bedingfield shares a methodology which any business can set up and run within 6 weeks.

The first, most crucial and most-challenging-but-crumbs-when-you-get-it-right-everything-falls-into-place job is to define your most profitable space. Specifically how you position and describe yourself.

Over 2-3 strategic workshops as a leadership team, aim to:

• Crystallise and profile the markets you are targeting
• Establish the burning platforms
• Create hooks and levers for you to gain traction rapidly
• Package this into a clear proposition for your audiences
• Establish the themes you will lead on in 2013.

Next up - properly define the market segments you've chosen to play in and design a shop window and marketing communication approach that will access decision makers and generate new opportunities.

Done all this? You're ready to build your marketing machine. It's delivered on a quarterly cycle - one theme per quarter. This makes it repeatable and creates huge focus. It also means you're measuring and reviewing very emphatically every 3 months and ploughing the learnings back into the next quarter.

Build your quarterly process using the following four stages. In brief: create great content, spread it far and wide, rake in the leads, nurture to pipeline.

1. Content: Inspire hope and confidence

Claim ownership of your target market place and the themes you have established you will lead on with great content. You'll need to inspire two things through your content:

1. Hope - show there is a better, simpler, faster, more profitable world just around the corner. Paint a picture of vibrant success
2. Confidence - show there's a high likelihood of getting to this better world by working with/buying from you.

Three reasons to create inspiring content:

• Earn the right to charge a premium price
• Magnetise people to your brand/website/people
• Be the obvious choice in pitches - on and off paper

How?

One way is to create powerful 'thought leadership' in your marketplace - stamping your authority and earning the right to a conversation. The emphasis is on moving way beyond 'we're here, we do this;. Using your in-house capability, tapping into your knowledgeable client base and possibly working in conjunction with one of your partners there is the opportunity to create an opinion piece that generates awareness, access and leads.

The key is to create content framed in such a way that those who click are self-selecting as prospected. For example "The future of data centres" attracts the intellectually curious; "running out of space in your data centre: three choices' attracts those with a problem they'll pay money to solve.

Examples of content that can inspire:

• White papers
• ebooks
• Very sharp knowledge pieces
• Webcasts/podcasts
• Videos
• Research/diagnostics

Idea: 'What if...' series - focused on the issues of your different customers - clients/candidates, challenging the status quo. The content would be highly visual (perhaps a webcast or animation) and would work through a company's recruitment challenge or candidate's decision process; building the balanced and opposing views, acknowledging complexity and pointing out the critical insight made visible at each stage.

Idea: 'The Invisible - Made Visible' series - very sharp set of 2-page articles that give a strong, personality-filled point of view to the market. Highly visual and scannable in print or on the web. The series brings the issues to life and forces readers to question their current approach and ways of working.

Idea: Research paper - a detailed research campaign which allows you to target hard to reach decision makers and build a peer-to-peer relationship with them, whilst leveraging their reputation and knowledge in your content.

2. Create buzz: take your content to the four corners of your market place

If your content (and name) is known across the market place, it provides a soft landing for campaigns, makes your business the 'only choice' - and most importantly drives 'raised hands' over the web (via sign-ups) that you can convert to leads and new clients. 'Sweating' your content is key to getting on the radar of the people you want to reach. Using the high value content to create a noise in your target market segment will put you on the map of a much wider audience albeit invisible at this stage.

How?

Share your opinions with the press, share content via social media, optimise your site for keywords your market is searching on and create a viral effect where trusted partners share your content with their audience.

In practice this includes:

• Setting up and managing relevant LinkedIn groups to magnetise your content
• Contributing to other online groups
• 'Sweating' your high value content in your own communications with clients
• Cultivating social media, e.g. social bookmarking
• Creating and sending online press releases
• Blogging and sending your articles to other bloggers
• Pitching journalists and online publications

3. Generate leads: make invisible eyeballs, tangible relationships

Creating a powerful buzz around your business is a great start - but you'll need to turn the invisible visitors on your website and social media pages into visible names and email addresses that you can proactively build a relationship with, otherwise you'll struggle to get enough new clients over the line.

The objectives at this stage are to generate new name contacts, open up conversations with existing content and cross-sell to existing clients.

And there are two core ways to do this:

Create 'hand raising' opportunities on your destination site. This means engineering a pathway, whereby people who are reading your content are motivated to exchange their details for something of value. This could be: an extra powerful piece of content, a diagnostic tool, a webinar, or event... or something particularly engaging in your market. Your aim should be to generate the highest quality, highest volume of hand raisers possible - set a target and manage your way to it.

Secondly, reach out directly to prospects. Make this outcome focused - i.e. specifying the need/problem and the destination you can take the prospect to and bringing this to life in the prospect's mind, rather than describing 'what you do'.

Consider:

• A personal email campaign that opens up very broad strategic conversations and leverages right place/right time. Be honest and compelling. Approach prospects with a peer-to-peer approach of 'can we create value together?'
• Offering your content through a powerful email series that highlights exactly who the content is for and the issues it can solve/provide clarity on
• Sending a hard copy letter as a 'market update' with the tone of keeping each prospect informed with key issues/new solutions, rather than overtly selling your solution

4. Nurture leads: turn clicks into pipeline

Most prospects won't be ready to buy right now, even if they have engaged with your content. Automate the process of following up and continually engaging them - they are your goldmine and next year's revenue.

Providing regular, relevant, sustainable communication with your pipeline re-awakens dormant prospects, shortens the sales cycle and sweats the most out of your pipeline.

How?

• Newsletter - regular, fresh, valuable content which keeps you front of mind, cross-sells, encourages referrals and builds your brand. You will need to take a different approach from most other newsletters - it's a well used format, but great information curators are still welcome in inboxes
• "Saw this and thought of you" emails. Design to drip feed high impact small news items (like award nominations) to your database, these emails should feel like a personal update. They are the equivalent of watering your seedlings gently.
• Event - run an event specifically aimed at your target audience to turn email addresses and clicks into real relationships.

And an example in practice: Vybrant Organisation

Vybrant wanted to bring their marketing efforts together with a clear strategy that would truly generate leads end-to-end. They created a machine with efficiency and creativity at its heart.

An example of a quarter with a theme of High Performing Sales Teams

Content

• Created a white paper specifically for sales directors called "White Space for Pioneers: develop the new high performance sales team'. Interviewed 20 sales directors - all new contacts/relationships for Vybrant
• Created a powerful case study about Vybrant's work in a major public sector body

Buzz

Sweated via eshots, a webinar, social media and 'saw this and thought of you'. In addition, a generic social media and web campaign was delivered including a series of press releases which achieved coverage on over 1000 websites, including many industry leading sites and publications.

Lead generation

Released the white paper to a cold audience, plus ran the 'generic' Vybrant lead gen campaign. The results?

• 8 meetings
• 3 proposals
• 1 piece of closed business; 2 more pending

Nurturing

• Quarterly newsletter created, generating more clicks and incoming enquiries
• Each interviewee was nurtured over a 3-month period to open up new opportunities

The outcome

ROI was 12:1 (from project closes so far).

For the complete B2B lead generation how-to guide, read The B2B Lead Generation Machine.

Extend your channel via export: a ripe opportunity for SMEs

By Dan Davis, Shirlaws Coach

Exporting represents a prime channel extension opportunity for many UK businesses. Jaguar Land Rover now export 80% of their output; Cambridge-based ARM Holdings are selling their semi-conductor technology into 95% of the world's mobile phones. We hear these headline grabbing stories - in the SME sector there are also very notable successes.

From within our own community, a company who started exporting in 2010 now comments that "exports are critical; very, very important to our business. We have developed and had great success with our product in the UK, but the true volume potential will come from exports, and we're definitely starting to see that".

Themis Analytics won the Queen's Award for Enterprise in International Trade in 2010, with 80% of their revenue coming from a nimble approach to global relationships.

The rewards can be considerable - channel extension can transform your business.

For businesses that have an exportable product (and many may not realise they do) and the vision to become "export-fit", the opportunity exists to participate in a market with a population one hundred times larger than the UK, and generally achieving stronger year-on-year growth. It takes a great deal of effort to develop and launch a product successfully in local markets, so with all that hard work done, it surely makes sense to consider extending the reach of your business to the very greatest extent through growing your channels internationally.

In part, exporting is about growing sales and ensuring the necessary infrastructure is in place to support that growth. As we are highlighting through this series on building the asset wealth in your business, happily such channel extension opportunities not only boost the profit side of the equation, they also drive the multiple. Demonstrating demand for your product globally is hugely attractive to the right investor, thereby commanding a higher valuation for your business.

The pursuit of channel extension through exporting, represents a transformational growth opportunity that can greatly enhance the value of your business?

What next?

Download the next article: Do you have an exportable product? Could your product make you millions in new markets?

Do you have an exportable product? Could your product make you millions in new markets?

By Dan Davis, Shirlaws Coach

High profile businesses, such as Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls Royce and Cambridge-based ARM Holdings are selling over 75% of their product into overseas markets. A number of SMEs have also built up considerable export businesses.  The following quotes are from SMEs based in the North-West of England:

• "We could no longer exist without exports. If we had not made moves a few years back, given the increasing globalisation of our industry, I don't believe we would be around today." IT sector.
• "Exports have been fundamental to our growth. We are now exporting 60-65% of our output and expect this to climb to 80% within the next five years as we continue to grow." Light Engineering sector.

At the same time we hear that "the value of UK exports to Ireland is greater than the combined value of our exports to China, India, Brazil and Russia" (The Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 2011).

Taken together, the above clearly suggests there is a huge untapped opportunity for UK businesses seeking to internationalise... but many have yet to seize the opportunity. For businesses that have an exportable product (and many may not realise they do), the opportunity exists to participate in a market with a population one hundred times larger than the UK, and generally showing stronger year-on-year growth. It takes a great deal of effort to develop and launch a product successfully in local markets, so with all that hard work done, it surely makes sense to consider extending the reach of your business to the very greatest extent through growing your channels into export markets.

Shirlaws helps businesses seeking to export. At its most obvious level, exporting is about growing sales in new markets and ensuring the necessary supportive infrastructure is in place; Shirlaws has been helping businesses from the outset with these challenges, boosting clients' profitability as a consequence. Companies that now consider exporting a way of life are also likely to have significantly boosted the valuation of their businesses as a consequence of demonstrating there is international demand for their products. Shirlaws can assist businesses to further build their valuation by also working with them to positively impact their multiple.

If exporting may be of interest to your business, what's the next step? Let's first of all recognise what exporting isn't; it's not an opportunist venture or something that can be successfully pursued half-heartedly or driven by short-term objectives. Success is realised when an exportable product is complemented by a supportive unified long-term vision for the business, enthusiastically endorsed at all levels of the organisation. A refreshing of the current positioning of the business and the acquisition of new skills may also form part of what's required to make a business truly "export-fit". Many of you will recognise how these themes dovetail with Shirlaws' frameworks and areas of expertise - both culturally and commercially.

Which products typically perform well in overseas markets? Some products very obviously lend themselves to exporting - it's inconceivable that Samsung or Apple would offer their products to one country only - their market is wherever there is humankind; national borders are a mere detail. For a manufacturer of fresh foods with a 3 day shelf-life, options may be more limited; although if there is demand for the product, solutions may still exist to internationalise. Every product deserves to be considered on its own merits. In that context, the following attributes, often present in a successful exported product, should be seen as merely representing a guide:-

• a truly differentiated product / niche offering
• a system offering or the prospect of repeating sales - one-off projects need to be high value to warrant the upfront marketing cost
• secure technology / intellectual property
• high product value relative to shipping cost
• minimal need for overseas infrastructure (at least initially) - e.g. local office, engineering support, etc.

Many smaller businesses are wary of export, dissauded by the apparent complexity, uncertainty and risk. Much of this is around mind-set - a natural aversion to the unfamiliar. If such psychological barriers can be overcome then there is a potentially transformational growth opportunity that can greatly enhance the value of the business.

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