February 2010 Archives

Just now waking up after a overnight flight home from Las Vegas on Wednesday night after a great LeadsCon. With a bunch of BZers in attendance, we were able to meet with a many current and prospective partners and also learn some valuable trends and tips during the many informative sessions.

If I had to put together a quick list of key takeaways (and I mean quick), it might look something like this:

• Forget what you used to think, brand now matters in lead gen
• The best lead gen companies differentiate themselves with a focus on user experience, quality content, and diversified marketing channels
• Using video for lead generation is now affordable (and effective)
• Help your affiliates succeed by sharing high-converting keywords for your business. It it works for you, it will probably work for your affiliates
• Immediate lead follow-up is critical (surprise, surprise) - but if you can only focus on one area, make sure your lead distribution processes are as efficient as possible
• With everyone seemingly getting into the education lead gen space, now more than ever is the time for transparency, compliance, and lead quality standards.

If you're dying for more takeaways (and frankly, why wouldn't you be?) - check out this solid recap.

We hope you enjoyed our first foray into semi-live-blogging. We plan to do more of this in the future, but if you have comments or other ideas, feel free to drop a line. 

So you know who to look for, here's the BuyerZone and RBI team at LeadsCon.




Steve -- who's leading BuyerZone's international expansion efforts -- tweeted three easy mistakes to make when expanding to new countries, both for lead gen and generally speaking:

1. Not enough testing / dev cycles
   
2. Compliance - email comp, data comp, accounting - huge problems can crop up quickly without proper homework  (Fines? Jail time?)
3. Cultural mistakes - probably THE most critical element - local market knowledge and product adaptation can't be overemphasized.

Jeff reports some good info learned at the End of the Funnel panel:

• Focus on lead distribution process - you get more bang for your buck
• On average, it takes 45 minutes to contact a lead
• BUT: MIT study says 5 mins is ideal.
• Your first call should be in the first 5 minutes - and in the first 1 or 2 minutes is ideal

Leads360 recommended a 6 call follow up strategy for inbound leads:

1. Day one within one minute
   
2. Day one
   
3. Day one
   
4. Day three
   
5. Day four
   
6. Day eleven
   

And it appears to be working: they've seen close rates increase by 44%. Lead buyers who who follow up once or twice and then abandon, or wait days before calling, are missing out on some big opportunities.

• Your sales team should know the whole process so they can understand the situation their lead is in
• Search, landing page, form, lead etc.
• Be transparent with marketing channels so sales team doesn't cherry pick
• Institute training with sales team to de-incentivize cherry picking
• Don't let the sales team jump to conclusions
• You can minimize this with education about marketing channels
• Lead360 data: evening calls have a high chance of converting
• 41% better chance of closing between 3 and 10 pm
• Saturday is the best day to call and convert a lead! [I'm guessing that's for B2C leads]
  
• Staff your sales team accordingly

Mie-Yun tweets a popular nugget from earlier today:

Listing a phone number in an ad can increase search results click through rates by 12%? Wondering how many people here will test it.

More to come.

Our own Mie-Yun Lee participated in a panel titled Consumer Sites vs. Pure Lead Gen Plays - One Scales Easier. Who Survives? at Leadscon today. Here are some initial observations.

• Overflow audience! Seems to be a popular topic.
• MYL "difference between consumer versus pure lead gen is front-end user experience"
• Tree.com: form based leads is a greased pipe - all about efficiency, not about education and browsing
  
•  MYL: Diversify your marketing channels - invest in the user experience to enrich experience for your users.
  
• Content creation is critical for lead gen. If you don't do it, you could lose the ranking you already have.
  
• Tree.com - tons of resources spent on improving experience for Google users, not Tree.com users
  
• Brand is powerful - more efficient to spend on your own business than someone else's.
  
• Billshrink: Goal should be to replicate Kayak/Orbitz experience everywhere (in this case, for finding credit cards, etc.)
  
• Should provide comparative results that matter to the user
  

• MYL: Are people too lazy to remember all the brands?
• Have to get to the top of the results AND become the brand that people remember - not either or
  
• MYL: Thoughts about technology:
• Driven by user experience
  
• BuyerZone doesn't rely on super-charged technology solutions BZ
  
• Deliver what buyers want: deliver relevant information for buyers looking to make a purchase - they don't care about how it happens behind the scenes
• Just make sure you match buyers to sellers
  
• Buyers care about the matching, not about the technology
  
• Tree.com: Need to be ok with destroying technology
  
• MYL: How do you decide what tech to prioritize?
  
• Pre acquisition: all about getting more users
  
• Post acquisition: how do we improve platform and UX
  
• Billshrink: Fail fast!
  
• Repeat usage: - Tree.com: repeat increases with more content
• Realestate.com users average 2 visits a month and 15 pages views

updates below

We'll be posting updates from LeadsCon over the next couple of days. I'd call it live blogging except I'm not actually there. Instead, we sent an intrepid team of BZers: President Mie-Yun Lee, VP of Product Management Steve Gottlieb, and Marketing Manager (and contributor to this blog) Jeff Gordon. Here's what it looks like as they await the opening keynote.

A few of us from the BuyerZone team will be headed to Las Vegas next week for LeadsCon - the preeminent conference for the online lead generation industry. We're excited to spend a few days with other companies who speak our language!

Our Founder and President, Mie-Yun Lee, will be participating on a panel called Consumer Sites vs. Pure Lead Gen Plays - One Scales Easier. Who Survives? on Tuesday, February 24, 2010 at 2 pm.

If you're at the show, I highly recommend checking out what Mie-Yun has to say!

This interview originally appeared on In the Zone, BuyerZone's small business blog.

Sales challenges are nothing new for small businesses. In the jumble of sales tools and services, "business information services" may not stand out at first glance - but perhaps they should.

We recently spoke with Chip Terry, VP of Products at business information provider ZoomInfo, about how better business intelligence can help boost your sales results.

BuyerZone: How does a business information service like ZoomInfo compare to more traditional services, or list rental services?

Chip Terry: The biggest difference is people info. Ultimately, you need to find people within the companies you're selling to, because those people buy on behalf of their corporations. You want to find the VP of marketing or the IT director. Another big difference is our ability to keep track of changes. We use a combination of technology and community to update our database regularly.

No one reads the first post on a blog, right? We haven't started earning an audience yet. But we will.

BuyerZone is the leading B2B lead generation service on the Web. We match tens of thousands of buyers to our network of sellers every month - and we've been doing that for a decade. Through this blog, we're going to help businesses that use leads, whether from us or other sources.

We'll provide case studies from our sellers, comments on sales techniques, lead nurturing, marketing campaigns, and more.