Hello everyone and welcome to this webinar. My name is Mas and I am from Implement Consulting Group. I am from the practice called commercial transformation and within that leading our service line on digital customer engagement. Over the past four years, I've held more than 20 different companies with the topic we're talking about today, digital lead generation in B2B and also life science companies. And within that experience, I've worked with a lot of companies that were relatively immature because the industry as a whole has taken some time to adopt some of the approaches that we're familiar with from B2C within digital marketing and connecting marketing and sales. However, as time has progressed over the past year or so, increasingly, I've met more mature B2B and life science companies that have evolved from the starting beginning stages and are now at the point where they've tried working with this approach once or twice. And hence the topic of today's webinar, which is why does it fail and how do we fix it? So that's the topic of today. And just to take that immediately, we're going to share the slides afterwards. So don't worry about that. Furthermore, if you have any questions, we're not going to have time for Q&A in the session itself. But please ask any questions that you might have in the chat and my team will be standing by to answer those in the chat as well. So, all right, let's get into it. The agenda for today is first off, how we see that lead gen fails. Second of all, why it fails. And finally, what to do about it. So if we start at the beginning, some of the symptomatic expressions that I hear coming from sales or marketing could be, for example, we have enough leads, but we don't have enough quality leads. Or it could be we're sending the leads from marketing to sales, but sales don't really follow up on them. Or we tried lead gen, but it doesn't work for us. We've got no orders in the book. So perhaps you can recognize a few of these statements. But failure of such a go-to-market approach can be caused by a lot of different things. So if the expressions before are the tip of the iceberg, I want to dive down a bit and look at what could cause it. But first off, a bit of context on what I mean when I say digital lead generation. Here's a pretty standard flow. So we're talking about the same thing here. So we start off generating some traffic that is then diverted to a landing page or a lead ad on social media, for example, to a piece of gated content. Often it can also be a more high barrier call to action like contact us or talk to a sales rep, or it can be this content marketing approach. The lead is qualified by typically someone in marketing who determines is this lead that is worth calling. And if so, receives a call from a sales rep, is enrolled in a nurturing flow through typically email and or social media, so that it is kept warm. Then a sales meeting goes into the pipeline, and finally some of the leads turn into orders. So that's what I mean when I say digital lead generation. And that has a lot of merit because with the right approach, leads can be relatively cheap. This is an overview from our last webinar, specifically on life science, where we talked about the same topic from a different angle. Here we had around 550 signups at an average cost of 270 DKK per marketing qualified lead. And relative to our average order size as management consultants, that's a pretty reasonable cost. Just to dive a little bit deeper into this example, let's look at the results from the last campaign. And this is the data I can share because it's our own, so that's why I'm sharing this example. Last time we had 550 signups. 379 of them were qualified, so that means that they were in the right type of industry or type of company and right size of company, and that the stakeholder profile had the right job function and right seniority to qualify. Some of them came from the same companies, so 220 qualified accounts. We booked roughly 40 meetings after the event, and we ended up selling four projects. The cost side was around 50,000 DKK plus some mandates, and considering that the total revenue from the projects was more than 1.5 million, as you can imagine, the return on marketing investment is quite attractive. So that's what we're talking about. Now, I want to show you the funnel overview and some definitions, again, just to align. If we start at the top funnel and then quickly move into form submissions, so when a person actually comes to a landing page and submits a form, then they become a form submission. Then they're evaluated based on desk research typically to determine are they qualified or not. And qualified in this context means are they worth calling, are they worth spending sales time on. And then the next part is the sales qualified leads. So that is when they have been called and the level of intent is at a point where we can say at least they're interested, but not right now. And in some cases they want a meeting. But they haven't earned us yet. And after we ask you how poorly they can saveゴMLS is the customer spine. All right. aітr yeah, it's the customer return is it right now Question will be well, Cat Show, a given somewhat outbound but they're also inbound because they already expressed an interest by downloading for example a white paper. Then moving on to opportunities and this is where they need to have more intent. We need to have conducted or booked a meeting and then finally orders. So that's a funnel overview. All right, so with the taxonomy in place, let's move on to why it fails. So I'm going to run you through a few different scenarios that we encounter quite often and let's see maybe you can recognize some of these and again, I encourage you to ask questions in the chat and then we'll respond to them. Why does it fail? We're going to take point of departure in our six building blocks of digital lead generation. First off strategy and metrics, target audience and lead scoring, traffic generation, so that's predominantly channels and targeting and then content and flows, the tech setup and finally the sales handover. So the processes between marketing and sales. Now if we look into strategy and metrics first, so the first element that you saw in the previous model, one of the issues I encounter a lot is that there are simply unrealistic expectations or misaligned objectives. So for example, if sales expects that the leads that have downloaded that piece of content, that watched the webinar like this one, are similar in nature to inbound leads. That is leads who call the main number of the company and say, I want to talk to a sales rep. Then they are in for a surprise because they are not nearly as warm. And therefore, if that's what you expect, you're going to be disappointed. So there's a longer investment in building up opportunities from the point in the customer journey where they are, when they've just consumed a handful of digital assets. Secondly, there's something about measuring throughout the funnel. A lot of clients give up on measuring throughout the funnel and then they measure impressions and clicks at the top of the funnel and then think we cannot attribute it to digital activities. So we don't really know how much revenue we're deriving from our marketing activities. And finally, there's the tough business case. Some lead gen efforts fail because if it's the only way you're going to market and you have a weak product market fit, then it may seem like it's the go -to-market channel that's not working or the go-to-market strategy that's not working. But really, your product simply doesn't have a very compelling value proposition. It could also be that the average order size is too low or profitability is too low to justify the cost of sales that is involved in lead generation. Because although it is automated and it is scalable, you still have paid media investments and a relatively long sales cycle because it's not inbound. You're still doing push marketing. So that's some examples of how a tough business case can be the point of failure. Moving on into target audience lead scoring. A classic as well is that there's no aligned view on what is an MQL. So marketing may be sending leads either with no qualification at all or with quite limited qualification or asking sales to do it for them. And then sales is going to look at it like a bunch of irrelevant leads. There's also sometimes too high a threshold for qualification. So you want a lead score of 100, which means they need to engage in a lot of different activities like join several webinars, download multiple white papers, open all their emails. And suddenly the lead volume is just so low that it feels a little bit pointless considering the content development effort. And finally, if you're going hardcore for tier one accounts, so you have let's say 10, 20 accounts in the global market that you really want to win, then you need to be super patient because it's normally extra long sales cycles when you're going for very consolidated markets and very large order sizes. So it's not that it's impossible, but you just need more patience. Other points of failure when it comes to traffic generation is simply poor targeting or poor channel mix. So this is, for example, I see lots of examples of clients using LinkedIn. And then in the absence of very granular targeting that hits the small niche that they're looking for, because, for example, industry segmentation is very rough, not that granular, then they just find out that the impressions are wasted on a lot of irrelevant people. They see low click-through rates and few people who click the call to action. And there are much smarter ways to use platforms like LinkedIn, where you can get much more out of it. It could also basically be insufficient paid media budget. So I encourage all of you to consider which percentage of your revenue are you investing in paid media. If you compare, for example, software as a service, B2B companies relative to large industrial players, this is a factor 100 in difference probably. So B2B SaaS companies are investing a lot of money in paid media, even with relatively small revenues compared to big industrial companies. So this is something to look into as well. However, if you don't have solid processes for following up on leads, it does make sense to be cautious with your paid media investments. But if you have the right infrastructure in place, then be careful with under-investing in paid media. Otherwise, the volumes are going to be so low that it seems insignificant. Next up, content and flows. And the classic is poor creatives in the top of the funnel and throughout the funnel, really. So this is the case when it's super product-centric, for example. For example, you're talking about, you're doing LinkedIn posts about how all the benefits of your product or the features. And in comparison to competitors, maybe it seems undifferentiated or like a commodity, or perhaps it's just plain boring for people to read. So the click-through rates are low. So that's one example. Another example can be that I often see is that the call to action is vague, poorly defined. It just has some kind of marketing statement. And then it says, click here. And you don't really know what you get on the other side. So that's one of the points of failure in the funnel where there can be significant drop-offs. Also, nurturing flow. A few companies actually employ proper nurturing flows. For form submissions, sometimes there's just three or four emails as sort of a post-webinar email flow. But then it stops. But if the sales cycle or the customer journey is 12 to 18 months, then ideally the automated email nurturing flow supports the customer journey for that duration. So it's not just sales calling the leads and saying, how's it going? Have you thought about, are you interested in our product now, etc.? So there's something about the duration. Then there's the tech setup. Sometimes we run into that companies simply have too high expectations for the level of automation that they can actually achieve. So I encourage you to be a little bit cautious on this front. Even if you've tried it before, don't try too fast to go for a high degree of automation. Make sure you find out where value is created, which leads are valuable, what messages work. And then you can transition from Excel sheets and a few batch uploads of CSV files and some integrations are missing. Then you can go into full scaling. Also, I often meet corporate infrastructure that is rigid. And that is when you have a corporate IT in headquarter with a huge backlog. And you have to adhere to a bunch of standards to launch marketing automation, for example. And that really makes these digital lead gen initiatives take six to nine months to get through. And they can be accomplished in a couple of months if you have some agility. The final element here is sales handover. So the process between marketing and sales. And a classic here is that there's simply no sales follow-up, just waiting for inbound. So for a webinar like this, the equivalent would be that I conduct the webinar. And then I sit afterwards and stare very intently at my phone and wait for it to ring. And the conversion rate here, I can be honest here, is very, very low. It's only a few of you guys who are going to call me directly, unfortunately. So that means you need to do something more proactive. And I also encourage phone calls because it's not enough to send an email and then expect a lead to be created. Of course, the phone calls are not going to have a high conversion rate to meetings booked or actual sales. But it's going to fill the top part of your pipeline. Next is the lack of incentive. So sales reps should be incentivized to follow up. A lot of account managers are incentivized based on closed sales. And that means if there's a long sales cycle ahead of them, it's just too far in the future. And it doesn't make sense to spend time on. Which also relates to the last one, which is lack of sales leadership support. But if sales managers are pushing their reps to go for high numbers in the next quarter, the short-term pipeline, then for sure they're not going to prioritize a lead who just downloaded the white paper, even if they are a big potential client for the future. So there's also some balance here in terms of short and long-term and balancing those. Okay. So this was a speedy run-through of a lot of issues we encounter. And perhaps you can recognize some of these. And again, please feel free to ask questions in the chat. I'm not going to go through this tool completely because it's pretty detailed. But we're going to share the slides. And this is an opportunity for you to go through what are you doing today. And then in the third column, you can see the symptoms. If you can recognize some of these statements, then you can move on to the fourth and fifth column to determine if you're in the more immature. If that characterizes your current approach, then consider doing some of the things or try to be more like what it says in mature. So that's the idea. We're also going to share with you a little bit later in this webinar some concrete approaches or tips you can do to address the issues we just discussed. Now, before we move into how to actually fix it, I would like to advertise a little prize here that we have a little competition. You can win four hours of free consulting. And you can do that by answering the question that is in the top right corner of your window just above the chat where you can either say yes or no to whether you would be interested in winning four hours of free consulting. And what that means is, for example, tailored sparring on your specific company. So this is generic about B2B companies. We can talk to you about your company and what you're doing. And then the focal point of these four hours can be how do we get started, for example, if you're pretty much at zero and not sure where to begin. It can also be on the topic of this webinar right now. How do we take it to the next level? So if you're doing, you've tried a couple of times, you've done some campaigns, but you haven't seen the results you were hoping for, or we can help you in these four hours, diagnose what caused it, and give you a handful of tips on what to tweak to get the results you're looking for. It can also be how do we measure business impact? We did it, and it seemed to work, but we can't really prove it to senior management, or we cannot see what is the return on investment here, or how much did it contribute to pipeline. And then finally, another example could be, we're doing it, but there's still a huge gap between sales and marketing. How do we address that in the right way? So that's a few examples. So respond in the chat if that could be interesting for you. All right, let's get into what to do about it. We're going to divide this section into two, the short-term initiatives and the long-term, more structural initiatives that you can do. For the short-term, it is involving sales and campaign planning, but it's also how do you stay close to sales during execution. So when a campaign is live, how do you continue to collaborate? For the long-term, it is about aligning the expectations, and it's also about how do you organize. How is sales organized into hunters and farmers? Because we encounter a lot of clients in B2B, where the majority of reps are in fact farmers, and this is something you can address through a different way to organize. All right, so let's start at the beginning, the short-term initiatives involving sales and campaign planning. So just taking the highlights here. So if you take a typical process in a campaign, we start out with defining objectives, then messaging and content, moving on to channels and tactics, launching, executing, and then developing a roadmap for how can we scale this approach, if it is a pilot, for example. So some of the steps you go through are these. I'm just going to go through them. In the top, you see what are the activities being done. And then in the bottom, you have how do you involve sales. So, for example, for the first activity here, sales can provide direction on how to measure. So what type of leads do we want more of? So it's also the objective. Where do we see growth coming from, for example? It could also be what characterizes a good lead. And finally, how do we measure success throughout the funnel? In the second step about messaging, since sales are typically closer to the customer in terms of having actual dialogues, sales has valuable input on insights from the front line, what works in the sales pitch, and they can give feedback on whether the content probably resonates with the target audience. In the third channels and tactics, we're moving into what do you do when the leads come in. So marketing will probably be more on channels and targeting in digital media. But when it comes to the actual outreach, this is where sales has a lot of valuable input. What is the right pitch? What is the right outcome that we are looking for in a sales call? Is it to book a meeting? Is that meeting an inspirational educational meeting? Or is it more a product presentation? Or is it to close a deal if it's more transactional, smaller products? So different variations on what you're trying to achieve with the discovery call, with the first call. Also an alignment between sales and marketing. How do we ensure prompt action when leads come in? Because as soon as you wait, let's say three or four days or a week or two perhaps, then there's a point where the lead will have half forgotten what the digital engagement actually was, the white paper they downloaded because they consume so much digital content. So there's something about urgency here, which leads me back, by the way, a little bit to the lead scoring issue that sometimes people have too high expectations for lead scoring and think, let's set a high threshold, you know, 100 points before we reach out to leads. But by the time they reach 100 points, you know, the seven or eight content assets that they consumed over the past eight or nine months, they will have forgotten about a lot of them. So sometimes urgency or recency in outreach beats how much engagement they've shown over a long period. So alignment between sales and marketing on outreach. In execution, obviously sales will start calling the leads, updating the status, which is important, which is often forgotten, then CRM is not updated and marketing has no idea where the lead has progressed and providing feedback to marketing on which sales are sales qualified, which are not and what are the patterns? What are the ones that are irrelevant have in common? For example, sales might say we have way too many small companies or the stakeholders we're talking to are too junior. It's too long a road from entry level guys with five years of experience and then we have to do the ones that are up to the VP level that we usually sell to. That can influence how as marketing we target our campaigns, the thresholds we set for seniority on LinkedIn, for example. So that's a really valuable discussion. And then finally for scaling, it is to help put the business case together. What do we do to really take this beyond the pilot mode, if that's what we're doing, and broaden it to the whole organization. So that's how we can involve sales in campaign planning. If we then move on to execution, this is what a typical execution flow or conversely a funnel, what that looks like. We start by generating traffic. Some of that traffic becomes leads that are then qualified. We move to the discovery call by the sales development rep. We pursue the opportunities and close deals. In parallel with all of this, we have the nurturing flow, where the leads are in addition to being called by reps, also kept warm with email automation and with social media. All right. So what we do to stay close throughout this process, three meetings or two meetings that we recommend and reporting. So if we start with the first one, it is the weekly sales and marketing call. So 30 minutes a week, you sit together, you go through with the marketing, SDRs and the sales manager, what's the status on the leads. Typically when we do this, for the first three, four or five weeks, sales are going to say, yeah, I know I was supposed to call them. I didn't get around to it. I had a lot of other stuff to do. Or yes, I called them, but I didn't. I forgot to update the status in CRM. So those three or four weeks is really kind of the period where you start creating that discipline around that this is something you need to prioritize and people are actually following up on it. There are other people expecting you to do so because we invested content development, we invested campaign setup, paid media, etc. So these leads are actually pretty valuable and it's important that they are treated as such. Then a biweekly call between the agency and marketing. So this is more looking at the top funnel when we're generating traffic, how the different channels are performing, how the content assets are performing, adjusting the channel mix. So using some of the input that was gotten through the previous call and saying to the agency or if you have in-house resource setting up the channels, we need to adjust. Facebook is providing cheap leads, but a lot of garbage. We're spending too long time qualifying them or the seniority needs to be increased or whatever else. Or perhaps we need to broaden because the volume of leads is too low or we need to increase the media spend, etc. So those are the two typical calls. And to support that, reporting ongoing. So both top and bottom funnel, that integrates both CRM, marketing automation, and third-party channels and spend data from agency or in-house resources. And by the way, reporting, it's pretty complicated to get the perfect report that integrates all of these data points straight away. So if you're getting started, either you are just doing the very first pilot or even if you've done a couple, don't, I would advise against striving to automate reporting 100% because it can be pretty complicated. But embrace that it is manual for a while before you land on the right KPIs and then you can do the perfect Power BI setup after that. All right. So then if we look a little closer at reporting what that might be, for example, top funnel, we might be looking at channel mix, targeting, creatives, landing pages. For mid funnel, we might be looking at how's it going with qualification? Are the leads qualified? How much time does it take from a form submission comes in to it actually is qualified to see is marketing kind of processing the leads fast enough so they land with sales quickly? And also the time from a lead is qualified until it receives the discovery call. So that's to review the process and the lead quality. And then finally, the bottom funnel. So that's sales efficiency. How many opportunities are we creating? What's the value per opportunity? And what's the return on marketing investment? And so forth. So hopefully this inspires you a bit on reporting. And this reporting, as mentioned before, is used in those weekly and bi-weekly meetings to make sure that we have a data-driven and informed dialogue around what's going on. Good. So that is reporting. Now we've talked about some of the short-term initiatives. Let's look at some of the more structural things you can do to address the issues we discussed in the beginning. Now, first off, in aligning expectations, a little bit of a theoretical view on what do we expect to get when doing lead gen. So of companies that could benefit from the offering that you have in your company, only a small percentage of them at any given time are actively looking for a solution or a partner that can help them. So if you expose 100 people on LinkedIn to a message, then probably 5 or 10 of them will be in active buy mode. And the rest of them are either satisfied or not really thinking that they have a problem they need to solve. And that's why very product-centric communication around the features or benefits of your product will be a little bit uninteresting if you're not in buy mode anyways. But here lies a very big pool of relevant companies that might still be worth reaching out to. And that means we need to find the people who are not yet looking for us and wake up their latent pain to create pull. Okay? So that is just an important expectations alignment because that means that the majority of leads will have relatively low intent. And the problem is that if sales are used to talk to the people in the yellow section of this pie chart that are inbound, they will have much higher intent. So there will be a huge discrepancy between what sales reps are expecting or used to and what they get. And we'll get to a little bit about the Hunter, Pharma, distinction to address this gap as well. But first off, there's an expectations alignment. What is it that we're getting in here? Another perspective on this is the buying journey. So if we look at a typical buying journey, we go from an unrealized pain where you think, you know, all is great, I don't need to fix anything. And then it progresses into a realized pain and then into need identification. And increasingly, you're actually looking for a product or for a supplier and benchmarking alternatives. So conceptually, if we look at what is the sales cycle, the earlier we approach people, obviously, the longer the sales cycle is going to be. We need to wait for them to come into buy mode. Part of that is a product of time, but it's also a product of are they being nudged, not just by your value proposition in general, but also by educating them that they have a problem that's bigger than they think. If sales reps are used to the ones in the far right here, they're used to, when I ask a lot of clients, what's the average sales cycle? I often get this, three to six months. And I think, you know, it's pretty complex products. Average order size might be hundreds of thousands of dollars or euros, and it just sounds pretty short. But that's because the sales cycle is measured from the first inbound call saying, I want to speak to a sales rep to closure. If we look at companies that are in the former stages, then it could take 12 to 24 months. And from a sales rep perspective, that can seem like a waste of time because they're so far in the future. So that's the expectations alignment. And if you want to go for more early stage leads, the sales rep need to embrace that that's the name of the game. And also, sales managers need to reinforce the behavior to prioritize leads even though they're early stage or assign people to handle them. And that's what we're going to look into next. And just a final note on this. If as a sales manager, you're saying to your reps, by the next quarter, I need to make sure that you reach your quota, then they're never going to prioritize a lead that's 12 or 18 months down the line. So it's striking the balance here. But sometimes it can be hard to alter an existing structure. In particular, if you have a sales organization with a lot of farmers, you have a lot of inbound, maybe your top line as a company is growing 1% to 2%. So you're not doing terribly, but you're also struggling finding growth. You recognize that this farmer culture is inhibiting you a bit, but it's also hard. How do you move out of that because the farmers don't suddenly turn into hunters? So hence, the restructuring into two different parts of the organization. Some people who specialize in hunting, and if you don't have them, maybe you need to hire them, and another part of the sales organization focusing on account management. And sometimes, this exists to an extent, or it is, you just have a few that in their personality profile, they are just more hunter-like, so maybe you already have this. But if you go at it in a bit more structured fashion, you can also align their KPIs and what they do. So for example, activities for these sales development reps for the hunters might be in the early funnel stages to do outbound prospecting, and also to call leads that have shown digital engagement. And whether you want to call that inbound or outbound, it's kind of in the middle because it is inbound, because digital leads have expressed interest in your content, and they downloaded something, but they're not inbound like a contact, contact a sales rep, or I want a quote type of inbound, so it's kind of in the middle. They would conduct the discovery calls, and would probably also nurture some of the SQLs. So the people who say that sounds interesting, but not right now, might receive a call from an SDR every three months to both nudge them closer to a buying decision, but also to monitor if they have progressed in their buying journey. However, as activities, they're typically less value-adding or less relatable to revenue. So SDRs are typically younger profiles, less senior, but also cheaper resources. Now let's look at account managers. They would look at the later funnel stages, nurturing opportunities, developing existing accounts, where the SDRs would be measured on the conversion rate from MQL to SQL, from SQL to opportunity, and number of opportunities delivered to the account managers. Then the account managers would be measured on conversion rate from opportunity to order, so where they take over the later parts of the sales funnel, weighted pipeline, and closed deals. So that's the two scenarios. The profile of the hunter or the SDR, again, is more the hunter mindset, you know, wanting to pursue deals and pursue new biz to a higher extent, and typically inexperienced. And the typical profile of account managers is more of a farmer mindset and more experienced. So I hope this food for thought gave you some inspiration with you, both to diagnose what's going on, why is it not working, but also to give you some concrete tips for how to approach it. And we finish a bit ahead of time, so hopefully that also gives you some time for the bio break or coffee that we all miss with the back-to-back meetings. So I just want to wrap up by saying thank you so much for your attention and thank you for tuning in.