LeadJen’s, Jenny Vance appeared in DemandGen’s Report, State of Demand Generation Report gathered from leading experts. Vance talks about assessing success over 2011 and applying the success to 2012 in lead generation efforts such as; finding trends and honing messaging that worked and fixing what lacked. Read Vance’s article in it’s entirety below.

Jenny Vance
President
LeadJen
Management of 2010, Jenny
Vance is president of LeadJen, a
B2B lead generation company that
uses unparalleled data and insight
to drive prospect interactions
that convert to sales. She can be
reached at jenny@leadjen.com or
on Twitter @jennyvanceindy

 

As marketing and sales executives assess their success over the past year and look for ways to improve, one question should rise to the top: what have we learned through our lead generation efforts in 2011 that will help us succeed in 2012? If you’re struggling to come up with actionable information and market intelligence, it’s time to start looking at your lead generation efforts differently. Lead generation is the greatest live dialog you have with prospects, and can be a powerful tool in spotting trends, honing messaging and identifying areas of market opportunity.
In other words, if done correctly, lead generation should be uncovering boardroom-ready knowledge that can help your company boost its bottom line. Standard call center metrics, such as number of call attempts, time spent on the phone and number of appointments set, only demonstrate that work was done and show the ultimate results. But conversation level metrics will deliver actionable
insight into what it took to achieve those results and how strategic changes can exponentially improve the outcome. Identifying Opportunities most companies focus their sales and marketing strategies based on where they have had sales wins. While this makes sense, basing future sales efforts on past sales is using a lagging indicator and may cause sales managers to overlook other
While digital marketing can be a source of early indicator outbound prospecting can provide the control needed to analyze where opportunities exist. With the right process and technology, prospecting can provide information that can be assessed any number of ways: by industry, revenue, employee size, title path and lead source. to bubble up around what segments respond more quickly, which appointments convert at a higher rate, and which sales For example, by looking at call center metrics, you may determine that a certain segment is too costly to target because it takes an average of six calls to secure an appointment. However, by diving into the metrics, you may to closed business at a higher rate and have a larger deal size because those executives have decision making power and budgetary discretion. A software company recently embarked on a new business for sales. After looking at lead generation results by industry, it was clear that three other industries had double the success Having access to this level of knowledge is especially potential investments based on data captured in outbound potential of an investment, the information gathered through outbound prospecting enables us to establish a benchmark for the company and compare this to other companies in similar industries. Gathering Actionable Insight your prospects have a treasure trove of information that they are willing to give you, if you only ask. When a prospect says “no,” many sales rep will end the call and consider the prospect dead. However, by asking just one or two quick questions, you can build information that will allow you to go back and re-market to this segment later. know about your target. This information, a natural by-product
of a calling campaign, can be leveraged so you become more relevant every time you go back to that prospect. Here’s an example. A software company we had been working with learned that its main competitor had a botched product launch. Immediately they called and asked if we could look through our data to develop a list of prospects who told us they used the competitor’s product. Within 15 minutes we were able to pull that data because we had been capturing it for a year. That same day we began a calling campaign to those prospects with a targeted message that
was well-received and helped our client win market share from a key competitor because it’s hard to measure if a message is on-target various messages in a controlled environment. We worked with a healthcare company that manufactured a solution that is complementary to any electronic medical record (EMR) technology. We found that the response rate EMR the targeted facility was using. As the new year approaches, make one resolution: leverage outbound prospecting to improve the knowledge you have of your prospects, your market and your message. The rest of your
year then will likely achieve or exceed expectations.

 

You can also read read the whole DemandGen Report here