In Social Media, Top of the Funnel is About Lead Introduction – Not Creation
Yesterday I gave a presentation to a field sales team at Pitney Bowes Software about how we can work collaboratively on our Engage Today social media marketing program to support their tactical success.
I focused the discussion on the four high value sales outcomes we have been able to consistently deliver:
-Lead introduction
-Lead nurturing
-Deal capture
-Competitive intelligence
This was the first time I swapped out lead generation for lead introductionin a presentation.
Why the change?
As Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) has matured its business-to-business and public sector focused “social media for sales” programs on behalf of clients like Pitney Bowes, Polycom, British Telecom (BT), Intelsat, Blue Coat Systems, Mandiant and others, we have recognized that a lead generation expectation simply isn’t realistic.
Companies place considerable weight on quantity when evaluating the effectiveness of a tactical approach for lead creation. It’s understandable because corporate marketers can model top of the funnel leads to an anticipated revenue output.
While our programs have demonstrated the ability to produce new leads through premium content offers, they are not at a level that survives a cost per lead analysis. It’s because of this that my recent pitch to two exceptionally qualified and interesting prospects fell short.
Lead introduction though is achievable and, in my opinion, of equal (if not greater) value in a business-to-business and public sector context. That’s because the majority of vendors sell multimillion dollar, enterprise solutions to executive level decision-makers.
Whether a company is pushing product, service or a combination of the two, it is a consultative sell. Executive buyers have to be educated and, equally critical, a relationship defined by trust must be established.
Education via thought leadership content and customer or prospect intimacy – those are the core tenets of an effective social media initiative.
DemandGen Report's Gaffney: Execs are socially engaged.
A wonderfully composed guest post on Marketo’s blog by Andrew Gaffney of DemandGen Report validates my view on lead introduction as a realistic social media for sales outcome. Gaffney presents three key points:
1. Executives play a prominent role in the buying process;
2. These executive rely heavily upon peer reviews, feedback and content-sharing to inform their buying decisions; and
3. Social media even more popular among executives than it is among their subordinates.
Marc Hausman
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Hi Marc
My experience trends in a similar way
Its a subtle distinction, but a valuable one when put against sales expectations
The lead introduction introduces your product or services. Their private ongoing research, coupled with your ongoing social activity (lead nurturing), hopefully brings them back to you for a detailed discussion specific to your business reason to them buy your products and or services.
When executed properly and consistently, social media can provide great insights to potential clients of who you are and why they should pay attention to your product/services. It can portray your level of expertise to a certain degree but more importantly, the culture of your organization can shine through the ongoing dialogue. As we all want to do business with like minded people, this can be a true value of social media.
Ongoing dialogue with potential clients through SM could rest in lead generation but the payoff compared to efforts would be marginal. The conversations (it is social after all) could drop off or become a long drawn out process. Lead introductions is a more realistic expectation.
As trust, peer reviews and feedback are so crucial to the relationship building between BtoBs and potential sales, the popularity and credibility of a company’s social media site is key. Become the ‘go to’ social media site for content and solutions and you have established a ready foundation for a relationship. Having the credentials of a solid, popular social media site gives the brand an advantage and a nice leverage for lead introduction.
Whilst one fully understands the arguments for the change to lead “introduction” from “generation”, the reality is that the lead gained has been generated so I, as a business owner, am enabled to further solidify client’s expectations and needs turning their interest into a sale.
The rewording from lead generation to lead introduction pacifies the desirable impact of the potential of this lead i.e. to generate sales. It also allows us to set our expectations (of the competency in delivering sales for us by this media ) to a lesser level.
Fact is, without that lead – those sales generated could have probably not been known to my company. As such, let us rather work on identifying strategies on how we can sharpen the tactics used via social media to churn these leads speedily and succefully into sales.
Let us not pursue the intent to pacify our expectations on this possibility. After all, it is often the implementation of our strategies that that let us down.”
Seth aptly said “The complement to the brilliant #strategy is the thankless work of lower-leverage detail.” Lets fix the detail makeinig that lead work for us!
It seems like the term “social media” may need to expand to the format itself. Now, people use it to describe Facebook and Twitter and the way it is used. With a little bit more creativity, and a better fit of the message to the format, Social Media will sell just fine. Blogs suffered from the same fate until they became the most popular format. Now blogs not only sell Viagra and schemes to train people how to sell, but large IT systems and medical devices.
In sales you need to sell. It’s that simple and that vague. If you are not telling a story, offering a product, calling to action, showing benefits and uses, you are not selling. It does not matter if it’s a slick white shoe wearing used car salesman, or a slick technology spewing large database for the top air booking agency… you got to know sales, do sales and get better as the “format” moves along. Today, the “format” changes. If you want to see examples, see how Dell and HP “sell” spare parts to IT service agents. Warehouses full of batteries and old hard disks are “flying off the shelf as we say