Webinar: 7 Easy Tips for B2B Lead Generation and Sales Success

Join 4B Marketing Director of Strategy Sam Grise and Colliver Technology Group (CTG) Founder and President Dave Colliver for a webinar to breathe new life into your lead generation and sales strategies.

We’ll help you understand how to transition from qualified leads to tangible business success seamlessly. 

Here’s a snapshot of what you’ll learn:

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing:
My name is Sam Grise. I’m the Director of Strategy with 4B Marketing. We’ll get into some introductions here shortly, but you are attending right now our webinar, the 7 Easy Tips for B2B Lead Generation and Sales Success. We’re very lucky today to have Dave Colliver joining us as well. And so with that, we’ll go on ahead and kick off introductions. And Dave, why don’t you go first for us?

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah. Hey, Sam. So excited to be here. I know we put some effort into making this happen and here we are. It’s super fun to be on a webinar with you and thank you so much for all of the folks that are joining today.

So a little bit about me. So, oh man, I’m too old. So I’ve been in the sales and marketing world for about 20 plus years, mainly in technology based businesses, and actually used to live out in Boulder, CO, my wife and I for around 10 plus years. And now we reside in Traverse City, MI. And so for the past 8 1/2 years, I started and founded a company called Colliver Technology Group.

And what we do is we do B2B sales and marketing services. Primarily to tech based businesses, that’s not always the case, but it’s primarily been tech based businesses ’cause that’s where my background experience lies. And you know, we’ve worked with the companies in Silicon Valley and London, all over the globe really, and so to that, we’ve seen a lot of leads, we’ve seen a lot of quality leads, and a lot of bad leads. And so we know a few things around this topic.

And then 2019, actually, a client encouraged us to start another brand called CTG Insights, and see what CTG Insights is, it’s a third party market research division of Colliver Technology Group that goes out on our sponsor or client’s behalf, and what we deem called survey based lead generation. So we’ll go out to your prospects, ask them a series of questions through surveys and then get some results back. Great for account intelligence, top of funnel leads and also everyone’s looking for that content, as we’ll get into a little later. So that’s been a pretty exciting ,a new services arm of the company, and we’ll talk a little bit about it in this. A little on the personal side, I have an MBA from the University of Colorado, so go Buffs, as well as I have an undergrad degree from University of Michigan, so go Blue.

So again, thanks so much Dan for allowing me to be here and I’m looking forward to the tips.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Awesome, awesome. Thank you. And real quick background on myself, obviously my name is Sam Grise, I am the Director of Strategy here with 4B marketing. We are a financial outcomes driven marketing organization. So really what we do is focus on what are those financial outcomes: driving revenue, reducing cost, reducing risk, cash flow optimization and asset utilization.

And we tailor a marketing strategy to that to help drive those financial outcomes. My background is a career in selling in the technology space. I’ve worked for value added resellers, I’ve worked for emerging technology, I’ve worked all over the marketplace from federal, commercial, enterprise, global, SLED, you name it. And really what we do is focusing that marketing strategy back to the revenue generation side of a business. And a big piece of that is leads.

How do we get quality leads? What are the proper leads? What are the best tips for those? Regardless of the space that you’re working in, whether it’s federal, commercial, SLED, these tips can help. And so really diving into the first tip, it really starts with planning. It comes back to “let’s start planning, what does that plan look like?”

And ultimately that plan needs to start at the finish line, Let’s finish-line this thing first of, what’s the revenue generation that we have from a business perspective? OK. We understand that we need to do 100 million this year. What is that financial objective? Very, very important. Then go back and start to work backwards to what is our average deal size, how many deals do we need to close, what is our close rate, what’s our cost of acquisition?

How do we go about this to really understand scientifically what we need to do to be able to drive revenue. Then it comes back to kind of the baseline and the starting point of defining those number of leads. It can go back and forth to high quality leads, low quality leads. We can go into those different details, but the first piece is getting those leads. So you can start that conversation and I know, Dave, as we were starting to talk about this and what this looks like, we started talking about sales quotas.

You have a sales quota, What does that look like? How do you back in from a sales perspective, and I would love to hear from you with your career in the space of what does that look like from a sales quota perspective?

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah, that’s great Sam. So as we were getting ready for this webinar, you know it doesn’t, I think I assume that some of the folks that are on the webinar today are perhaps quota-carrying sales people, perhaps you’re a marketer that is supporting a sales team or perhaps you’re a business owner and you’re looking at your top line revenue, how are we going to hit it? But the recent stats out there is this, it’s kind of a depressing stat, actually. Around 57% of sales folks are missing their quotas these days. So that’s not good, right?

And so how do we beat the odds, right? And it comes back to, like Sam said, it sounds simple, right? You gotta plan the work and then you gotta work the plan.. So reverse engineer your way into this. So again, there’s so many variables and anyone that says they have a silver bullet on all this, I’m not sure.

But let’s just say real high level, you’re a salesperson, you have a quota of 1,000,000 bucks, right? And as Sam said, what is your average deal size? Let’s just take for example, a 250K deal, right? So it’s a B2B complex sale. It’s all about conversions and it’s all about working backwards from what Sam said in regards to the leads needed.

So let’s just say, OK, you have $1,000,000 a hit for your year. You’re actually going to need 160 leads on the top of the funnel to kind of trickle down to get the number of deals that you need to close to kind of hit that quota. So what that looks like just again, if you have, let’s just take for example, a 20% meeting conversion rate on those leads. Now you have 32 meetings, right?

So those 32 meetings, you’re going to have to have a conversion rate perhaps of 50% to get out of those meetings an opportunity. So actually doing a quote, doing a proposal etcetera. So now you have 16 opportunities in your pipeline, in your HubSpot, your sales force, whatever you’re having, and you know, I mean, we could debate this, but let’s just give you an example, 25% close rate. You’re gonna need 4 deals to close right out of those 16 to actually hit that quota.

So again, taking a step back, there’s a lot to discuss here. A lot of assumptions were made. Everyone on the call is gonna have unique situations with respect to your product that you’re selling, your service that you’re selling. But I think it starts with basically what Sam said.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Start at the finish line and work backwards, yeah, and I love the idea of a close rate and so on. And really from a perspective of in the B2B space, the complexity of a sales cycle, you have multiple personas, multiple people, multiple signees, on approved to purchase. And so getting those leads for those different buying cycles as well as during the conversation is paramount to the success of the sales cycle. And that actually leads us into our tip two, which is really knowing your audience. So we’ve started with the plan of, hey, we need to get so many deals in the door, which equates to so many leads to be able to power those deals.

And then it’s understanding what our audience really looks like, how we define what those buyers are, and really understanding the personas that we’re targeting with our solutions. Who are we going after? And it goes deeper than just the demographics. It goes deeper than “Sam Grise is 29 years old, he lives in Denver and he’s a director of strategy.” It goes into the psychographics as well of Sam Grise. He loves to camp, he loves outdoors, he loves fishing, he loves anything outdoors and he loves baseball. So that’s where I need to understand where I can start to target those individuals.

As Sam is the director of strategy, really understanding more about what makes Sam tick is really going to help with that lead generation. And not only from a perspective of getting those leads, but the quality of those leads, the right person that you need to be talking to. And one of the pieces that we’ve talked about from getting to understand that audience is something that you do with CTG Insights which is on the survey-based side of the house. I’d love to hear your perspective of how you have implemented a survey-based approach for clients and what that looks like.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Sure. Yeah, that’s a good tee up, Sam. So just to add on to what you’re stating and then we’ll get into the survey stuff. But there’s an acronym out there that marketers throw around all the time. There’s a million acronyms in the marketing sales space, right, But it’s ICP, “ideal customer profile.” So you definitely need to understand who your ICP is, back to that first slide, and it coincides with this one. IDC reports that between basically 7 to 20 people are going to be involved in a complex B2B sale. So it’s not just one person that you’re talking to.

And then you’re like, “Oh yeah, this person’s going to buy.” I mean, in complex sales, there’s around 7 to 20 people that are involved. So you always have to kind of remember that as you’re kind of building out your ICP that there’s multiple people that are going to be involved. Now the survey stuff, so as I mentioned in the beginning, we have this service called CTG Insights, a third party market research approach, and I mean, there is so much data out there. The data is a commodity. On the next slide, we’re going to talk a little bit about Zoom Info, but there are all sorts of databases out there that have your prospect data that you wouldn’t believe how much information is out there based on your prospects, right?

And LinkedIn. If the folks on the call are primarily selling B2B, LinkedIn has a tremendous amount. It’s the largest database in the world of B2B buyers, right? But it’s a whole nother level to gain responses from those people in a survey to better understand perhaps what type of tools out there they’re using. There’s something called technographics and again, there’s another database for that. I’m like, OK, what? Technology is running in your prospects environment. But it’s a whole nother level of if you can gain your prospect to actually tell you some of that information in a survey.

Also in our surveys we can put intent based questions. So Sam is going to talk a little bit about what intent data is. It’s another big buzzword that people throw around a lot. But what I mean by “intent based question” is as simple as “what projects do you have planned in the next 6 to 12 months?”

So depending on the answer to that question, that could definitely be high intent or low intent. There’s another question that we utilized this past summer with one of our financial archiving software-as-a-service clients. And how would you grade your operations A, B, C, D and E, and on our survey we actually saw some D’s and E’s, and you better believe that those are those are some high value. The prospect is actually raising their hand and saying they have a lousy operation. So again with that survey based approach you can really tease out some of that information that you may not get through a database.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
I love it, I love it and it goes back to, you know, you mentioned an acronym already of the ICP or target customer profile, ideal customer profile and so on, and utilizing kind of that intent data which brings us up to our next slide, which is the the adoption of technology as we talked about databases out there. But getting that intent behind your customers or your prospects today utilizing that survey based approach is huge. As a seller in the space in the past, understanding where those prospects are along the journey is detrimental to a sales cycle. It is huge, so important to be able to have a successful conversation on a cold outreach as a sales person and so on. Really what it comes back to is from a sales perspective, there’s tons of methodologies that you can use: MEDDIC, value added selling, BANT, and so on.

But getting some of those pieces up front is so important to be able to have a conversation of understanding if somebody has budget, somebody has the authority to have that conversation. We talked about the buying cycle and the different personas within a buying journey, the need they have for your technology or your solution today, whatever it may be, and then the time, right? Getting that understanding from a perspective of where that lead sits today just makes it more successful of a conversation.

And especially from a sales perspective, you know, everybody’s busy. Salespeople are busy. They need to prioritize because of that plan of their quota. They need to prioritize who they’re targeting and who they’re having conversations with. If they don’t have a time frame or they don’t have a budget with some of these leads, they may not reach out to them because there’s something more pressing at the time. And again, it comes back to a couple different ways. From a marketing perspective of adoption of technology, understanding what we have from a persona perspective, utilizing a Zoom info, then utilizing a HubSpot or a marketing automation tool to be able to put somebody into a funnel that came by as a lead.

Somebody that viewed your website, they may not be ready from a full BANT qualification process, but they should be in a marketing funnel so that we can start to reach out to them and keep them top of mind or keep us top of mind during that sales cycle. There’s tons of tools out there from a marketing technology perspective, I mean hundreds and hundreds. On intent data, there’s 6sense, Demandbase, there’s a ton of them. Ultimately what this comes back to is, as you’re doing your planning cycle, is understanding where your gap is in the technology spaces today and where you can fill those to be the most successful for your business. 

So for example, Zoom Info is a great tool. It may not be the best tool for you today. Understanding where those things fit because again, we have a number to hit and we have a customer acquisition cost. So what do we need to do to be able to fill that? So it’s actually driving the business forward from a financial obligation perspective. That’s how I see the embracing of technology. Dave, was there anything else that you wanted to add here?

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
No, you mostly hit on it. Just the comment that I just wanted to make sure I stated, you know there’s an overused statistic. I just checked Chat GPT with Bing. So it goes out real time to make sure my data was right. But there’s an overused statistic out there that says something like, basically, the average user uses around 5 to 10% of the features that are being offered in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, right? And I’d say I tend to agree with that. And so then I asked it around, you know, what, who, how about from a CRM or marketing automation perspective, and the number was slightly higher, but it was around 20 to 30%. So that I come back to most organizations, probably the folks that are on the call today have some form of a CRM, have some form of marketing automation. Perhaps they’re just using a spreadsheet, but I could be wrong, but they probably have made an investment at some point. But are they leveraging that investment? Are they taking advantage of the features and functionality that their company is already paying for? And so you know, Sam, 4B understands HubSpot very, very well, right? So it’s like, are you taking advantage of all the different ways that HubSpot can basically help you generate leads or cultivate that, was my first point.

Second point that reiterating what Sam said, there is Sam, you said hundreds, I’d say thousands of sales tech, marketing tech out there and to be honest with you, I mean I’ve been to these conferences and it’s almost as like, the technology is moving so fast, there is a ton of overlap with these software ’cause they’re they’re mostly software types of technologies. And so I’d be very careful. There should be an audit. It’s done from the standpoint of making sure that you have the right tools in your tool chest and you’re not duplicating features.

So I would just put that out there in regards to, ’cause I know you guys are all about financial outcomes and things of that nature. So there is a lot of bloat, if you will, in organizations from sales, tech and MarTech. And so just making sure if they have one tool that can do it all, there’s no sense in having three tools that can do the same thing.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Yeah. And that’s a great point of analyzing the technology that you have in your tech stack today. I mean HubSpot just had inbound a couple weeks ago, Salesforce had their Dreamforce a couple weeks ago, new features, new functionalities that they’re coming out with all the time with the licensing that you potentially have today. So understanding that and doing an audit on the technology can be very important for the future of where you’re going with the planning and understanding for getting these leads.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah, ’cause you’re already paying for it, right?

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Exactly, exactly. Going on to the next strategy, really it is adopting a multi channel strategy. We know that buyers are utilizing 10 plus channels today to get education and understand technology in this B2B space. What does that strategy look like? Well, it goes back to the planning phase of getting that foundation from a financial objective and then going backwards. There’s going to be ads, there’s going to be LinkedIn, there’s going to be white papers, blogs, events, emails.

You’ve got all of these different tactics at your disposal to be successful. But understanding what’s going to be the most successful sometimes is trial and error. You know, understanding your persona is going to be a big piece of this. For example, we’re working with technology clients all the time. And I mentioned that I’ve worked in the federal space, I’ve worked in the SLED space, I’ve worked in the enterprise space, global business, different rules and regulations.

For example, if you’re going to be targeting a CISO, somebody in security, they probably have ad blockers. Is that going to be your best strategy to be successful, to get in front of them, to help generate those leads and get them to come by your website? A big piece of this is trial and error, AB testing that’s going to be part of the team that you have to play. And it’s really, really important that you’re analyzing that strategy, you’re documenting that strategy. You’re starting to understand what the success rate is of that strategy and understanding when you’re first starting out, what does success look like?

Is success getting click through rate? Is success getting a lead to come through your inbound engine? What does that actually look like, and when to start and stop campaigns. You know I think that when we talked about this originally you brought up a great point of resources, limited resources and budget for a multi channel strategy. Would love to get your opinion because you’ve got some great insight on what that kind of looks like.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah. So I mean we’ll touch on that from a standpoint of budget and just being realistic about, I mean, like you said there are a multitude of channels right up to your going out to your prospect. But one thing I did want to touch on is digital. I wanted to touch on digital fatigue and then we’ll come back to it. Digital fatigue in my book is a real thing.

I mean I personally have it. I think our prospects have it. I think there’s two major drivers of digital fatigue. Some of again, I’m telling folks on the call you already know this, COVID. Huge digital fatigue, everyone was just sick of sitting on Zooms, etcetera.

And so I think that’s why there’s been an explosion of live events and budgets are kind of coming back, people are willing to get back out. Obvious statement, but number two, the acceleration and the explosion of AI, right? AI tools, I mean, and just with a really nice prompt, I can basically create some very compelling email copy that can go out pretty quickly, and with the tools that can do cold email.

So our prospects are just getting inundated with different digital signals. So how do we kind of cut through that noise, right? How do we figure that out? And just to share a quick story, this past summer, again, we’ll just use that financial services archiving client. We were doing LinkedIn ads, ee were doing cold email, we were doing the AB testing. We were trying to figure things out. We were failing. We’re trying. We’re tweaking, utilizing Zoom info data.

Going back, it is pretty compelling what data that Zoom Info has and so talking about channels is like, OK, what if not just digital, but let’s go to the physical. So what we did is we kind of did a pivot and we said let’s send a direct mail. We had about 5500 prospects that we’re promoting our survey to. Out of those 5500, we had around 3000 actual personal addresses that we could actually send postcards to. And so that made a huge difference, something coming in the mail, and we’re going to get to compelling content. We made it sort of creative, sort of fun, and that would really help boost our conversion rate. Second is Zoom info allows you to have direct dials, right? And so not 100% but we had a fair amount of direct dials instead of just LinkedIn ads  and cold email. We’re actually utilizing technology to do outbound phone. Now like me, probably most of us on the phone, a lot of people aren’t really answering the phone these days, right? So it’s around, I’d say 98% it was voicemail, but what you’re doing is you’re leaving a voicemail. About what you’re particularly doing and then you’re sending an email multi channel which again drove up our conversion rate. So we are using four channels: LinkedIn ads, cold email, direct mail as well as cold calls to basically meet our objectives.

So I just wanted to make sure I stated that that’s a pretty fun one. And then in regards to, I think you might have stated this, in regards to start and stop campaigns, just want to make sure I touch on that. We usually see our clients again in the B2B space, they like that they can budget for quarters. We can test out a campaign, a lead gen campaign, if it’s working great, let’s continue for another quarter. If it’s not OK, let’s just cut it or let’s make some tweaks, right? So typically it’s a three month cycle we’ve seen has worked best.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Awesome, awesome. Yeah. I was going to say the timing also is going to be dependent on the strategy. So quarterly from a budget perspective usually makes sense in the B2B space. But also, what is this strategy that we’re implementing? Is it email, is it ads? Are we really focused on the SEO side of the house with blogs and content? Those kinds of pieces have different time frames attached because if we’re doing a live event that’s going to be very specific to that time frame of the email in the lead up in the follow up for that lead generation. Whereas posting a blog or posting some content for an educational purpose, sometimes that takes weeks, months to be able to hit that keyword to be able to start ranking to bring in that inbound engine. So it really depends on what tactics you’re utilizing.

But typically analytics or understanding quarterly is really important to go, “hey, do we need to stop this, Let’s move our investment on to this side to make sure that we’re really generating those leads.” Let’s see here, that leads us kind of the next piece or next tip. But really from a generation perspective is taking advantage of your resources. You have so many resources as a marketing team in the B2B space.

You’ve got your internal teams, your salespeople, your sales engineers that are having conversations daily with their customers or prospects to understand what challenges they’re facing. So you can start to tailor your content. You can start to tailor your strategy to be meeting those needs. Another piece that I would talk about is obviously your internal team customer service, but your customers are one of your best resources as well. You’ve got great relationships with some of them. Leverage them, ask them, hey, what are we doing well, how did you come through our lead journey cycle? What can we do better? Are we meeting those needs? So then you can start to tailor your content or your strategy around that.

And a big piece of this is really exposing those trends in the marketplace. Where’s the pain? Where are you if you’re a CISO? We hear about it all the time in the security space. They’ve got so much on their mind, so much on their mind every day about security. Waking up at 2 AM, I wake up at 2:00 AM and something hits me in the head, and I’m not even in security, so I can only imagine what they’re doing. But how can you tailor that content or that strategy to help relieve that pain? And I think that you know, leveraging your resources is something that we do at 4B Marketing with partnerships with CTG. How can we be more successful about what you’re doing with clients and hearing how you’re working with clients and teams as well?

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah. And I’d say this is a great one because it’s so often overlooked, right, it’s like it might be the person sitting right next to you or it might be the, it might be an adjacent team member depending on the size of your organization. But I would say that. I might find myself too, sometimes we make the same mistake but sales and marketing leaders, they’re always looking externally for the next idea nd they can’t necessarily see the forest of the trees or, hey log in to LinkedIn for maybe 10 minutes and you’ll see probably five or six different strategies of people saying that they have cracked the code. so but if you kind of decipher through that, right, the answers may lie within your own internal teams. The recommendation that I have on this and what I’ve seen successful is to ensure that there’s a feedback loop, ensure that there is some sort of communication loop that’s occurring. And that might be a weekly meeting, a monthly meeting that you are getting your customer service or your CSR sales that are kind of floating back to marketing or sales. And to exactly what Sam said from the standpoint of making sure you’re staying on top of the pain points within the market, if your CSR’s are talking to your customers, there could be very well be cross selling opportunities happening in those conversations and that needs to bubble up to marketing, that needs to bubble back up to sales and they can’t live in silos. All of what I’m saying, all of what Sam saying is kind of the obvious, but as organizations grow, we just become in our own little worlds and really need to make sure that there is some communication loop happening on some recurring basis. 

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Definitely, definitely. And it leads us into the next tip, which is compelling marketing content. We know that over the past couple years with COVID and I see a question in the chat about you know, what’s the best route from a phone or an email or a LinkedIn. Really what that comes down to is the business, where are your audience living? And from a statistics perspective really we know that the buyer journey is taking more buying cycles or more signees.

That’s the first piece. We heard Chuck Robbins talk about it in his quarterly review for Cisco, how deals are taking longer because of more signees, which is a big aspect of it. The other aspect is that buyers are having an increase of touch points. So it used to be, you know, kind of right after COVID around 17 different touch points from a sales perspective. Now that’s already increased all the way up to 27 touch points. So one, from a sales perspective of creating compelling marketing content so that they have something valuable to reach out to clients on of saying, hey, I heard your pain and you heard your pain because you’re leveraging your resources of the teams, talking to those individual clients, if you will, or talking to your clients specifically and you’re providing a solution for them.

That kind of content is valuable and it’s going to be searched for on the web. These buyers are looking for this information because they say now buyers want to be touched once they understand what problem they have and where the solution is that they want to go, then they want to evaluate. They want to do a lot of their education on their own to understand where the marketplace is and what’s going to be a proper solution. And so understanding how to create compelling marketing content that’s going to be valuable for those personas is going to be very important to be able to generate leads.

And Dave, I would love to hear your perspective on this because you already mentioned some of that compelling marketing content of changing strategies to on-prem, if you will, with some of the print material that you’ve done. What does that look like?

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah. So thanks. You know one comment I wanted to make sure and just to touch on then I’ll answer your question is, there’s a terminology out there called the consumerization of B2B buying. So it’s a heavy, heavy term, but all that means is basically it’s Forrester, right? Forrester quoted a stat, around 68% of people would prefer to do business online than talk to a salesperson. That’s a pretty large number, right? And so you kind of think about it, you’re like, OK, well. How do I buy things from a consumer perspective these days?

Well, if I want to buy something on Amazon, I go to Amazon, I check the reviews, I see what other people are saying, I might watch a little video about how the product’s used, and then I just want to put it in my cart and then just walk away, right? So some of those types of features have spilled into the B2B space, and so you better believe that your prospect has been all over your website, has watched your videos, has checked out your content and your prospects have probably watched your competitors videos, have read the reviews. They’re doing a ton of research before they even reach out to you, right? So you just have to understand that that’s just what we’re dealing with these days.

And so that’s why compelling marketing content is so valuable, so key here. Just an example I wanted to bring up, it kind of fits in…We did a survey project and our client was a VC backed cloud security company out of the Bay Area. And so they’re going after a very technical audience. It was actually, in the kind of throwing around technical terms, they’re in the Kubernetes and container space, right? And so their audience, and again going back to your first slide, know your audience, right? And so we didn’t quite realize this as we crafted out our project. It’s a very open source community. They’re very giving.

The folks that are in that Kubernetes space, they’re giving, they’re very giving. It’s an open source type project and so when we started building our content, we weren’t necessarily utilizing some terms that really resonated with them. However, we did some AB testing and we started to kind of utilize some terms that are more giving. We use the term participate, we use the term contribute and in regards to our surveys that really moved the needle for us.

Again, just these subtle changes, but we had to understand the audience to basically get to the point where we’re creating some content that basically talks to the actual buyer.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
So awesome, awesome. Moving on to the 7th tip here is really defining what these leads look like. There’s two different types of leads, the inbound or the outbound lead, and what is this specifically? And really when we think about an inbound perspective, it’s really getting people to come by our website. And all of those steps that you lead up to that we’ve talked about, or all those tips, start to develop that it’s the brand awareness, it’s the educational content, it’s the solving of the pain, it’s speaking in the customer’s voice, understanding the two different type of buyers potentially or that buying committee that’s on there.

Are they technical, are they business focused? What is that? So that when they’re coming by your website, they’re converting as leads that go into a contact us form, so on and so forth. But then there’s also the outbound side, which really is the outbound effort. And I know, Dave, I would love to hear your perspective on this from an outbound side of the house with some of the lead generation, survey based lead generation as well.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah. So that’s good Sam. So basically just to reiterate what you stated, but I just want to make sure I add a little bit more color commentary to it. You know, the advent of inbound marketing basically came around with two gentlemen.

So 4B is very, very strong with HubSpot, I’m holding a book up called Inbound Marketing written by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. Those two were the founders of HubSpot. If you ever want to get a chuckle, Google them or YouTube them and watch some of their keynotes on inbound. Fantastic. But essentially they just got sick and tired of getting cold calls, right? And so they said OK. People just want you want to be a lead magnet. Your website needs to be a lead magnet and that’s how people want to interact with you. Here’s the problem, here’s the problem. This is where outbound comes in.

This is where a survey based lead gen comes in. Inbound works, but sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it takes a while to get your inbound lead generation system working, or optimized if you will. And so going back to our first slide, right, Sam, like, like. I have a quote of 1,000,000 bucks, right? So I gotta figure out how to get there, right?

So that’s great. This inbound marketing engine works, but it’s not working fast enough for me and that’s where outbound can help generate leads as well. We, you know from the standpoint we’ve seen companies use a combination of inbound marketing tactics and strategies as well as outbound marketing and tactics and strategies and can combine the two so you can get your lead count high enough. To get those meetings, to get those opportunities, to get that revenue coming in the door. So we’re not saying one or the other. Sometimes it’s a combination just based on the realities of the business and the realities of the quota that you’re carrying.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Totally, totally. And it goes back to a couple different aspects too. And we talk about the planning and using a multi channel strategy, using an inbound strategy in conjunction with an outbound strategy and some of that comes back to budget time and resources. You know what we can do today to be successful. And I love that you mentioned the lead magnet side of it and the inbound side sometimes takes a little bit of time to get going, right?

You can hit right away, but sometimes it takes a little bit to get going to create that compelling content in all of those different aspects. So the outbound side comes in to be successful too. It could be a new product release.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah. And let me just touch more on the outbound. I mean again, back to you know, that slide you shared around Zoom info, right. I mean the data that is out there, the data that exists, it’s not like it was 10 to 15 years ago, right. So you can become so surgical with respect to your outbound, if you have done your homework right, if you’ve done your homework on your ICP, you understand who your audience is and now you really understand who your buyer is or who your buyer committee is, you can get pretty surgical from the standpoint of your outbound route outreach, either cold email, perhaps LinkedIn. There’s some ways of outreach through LinkedIn. All I’m saying is, it doesn’t just have to be, there’s a buzzword spray and pray, OK, I’ll just spray and pray. Well, spray and pray is very cost inefficient, you know. So there’s a lot of waste in that. So the databases that exist these days to be very surgical with your outbound.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Definitely love it, love it. And I know that we said we had 7 tips, but I think there’s two bonus tips that we want to share because there is a little bit to bring this thing home from a perspective of what you need. And really this first bonus tip, it really hits home because it’s what conversion points do you have on your website. It goes beyond just a contact us form. It’s when you have a blog or you have a webinar or you have some content on there giving the individual an opportunity to come through your lead generation, be able to fill out a form, be able to say yes, contact me, I would love more information or sign up for a newsletter.

All of those pieces are opportunities to be able to convert on the website. And I think that there’s a big piece that we’ve talked about really is data today. We’ve talked about data and Zoom info, we’ve talked about data on websites, what that looks like and a big piece is when it’s on your website that’s owned land, that’s your data now from somebody converting on your website. And I know that there’s a lot of talk around Google and what they’re doing and really what it is, is you know you want to have owned land versus rented land. And I know that you have some thoughts on this, Would love to hear your perspective.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Well, yeah, yeah, the only comment that I’ll make here is that, you know, I mean and it just, I’ll raise my hand, I forget it myself, but just remember that the social media platforms, you know in the B2B space, it’s primarily LinkedIn, right? But let’s always remember, LinkedIn is owned by LinkedIn, right. So that data is not really yours. It’s Linkedin’s at the end of the day.

So I mean, it could be very effective, but it still isn’t yours, right? So that’s why I mean, going back to this tip, I mean that’s why your website is still one of your most valuable assets as far as your marketing and sales, because of that very point. It’s owned land. It’s not rented land, so.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Yeah. And it brings me back to a story with a client that we had recently of they had some great website conversion points. But also understanding the automation behind that, What is your tool set to be able to have that automation to either alert your sales team that hey, we had somebody come by, this is a lead, this could be somebody to reach out to. What does that look like? We had a client set up that we had just started working with and we’re going through this understanding what this website conversion looks like, what are the call to actions, how can we get some of this data if you will?

And one of their form fills was not alerting sales people. So these people were coming through logging into the website, if you will, providing contact information and they were missing leads because that automation wasn’t set up properly. So doing that audit to understand, that can help with that process as well. And it goes into our last tip here, which really is, leads are not all created equal. Understanding where they’re at in the cycle from a buyer’s perspective is extremely important.

And I’ll give you a good example that I’ve had in my past. So I was selling a very specific type of technology for one pillar of the industry, if you will. We’ll say it was security for example. Security obviously being very important. It can kind of touch a little bit of everything.

But this product was very specific in security. And one of the things that was happening is we would have leads come by the website, but they were a data center architect and our tool set did not fit a data center architect. And what was happening is I was getting marketing qualified leads that would come through and say, hey, data center architect looked at the website, this is a good lead. And I’d go, I can’t have a conversation with this person because what they’re concerned about is AWS spend and we aren’t in AWS. So I can’t have a conversation with them. And so we’d love to hear your perspective on that as well from lead scoring and really what that looks like from your perspective.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah, it’s you know, you said it best, not every lead is created equal. And that it comes back to the very beginning of our whole discussion in regards to basically knowing your audience, understanding who the buyer is, the buying committee. But let’s be honest, right? You know a director, like going with your security example, a director of information security from perhaps one of your target accounts. Coming to your website is much, much different than perhaps an intern from that particular company. Or perhaps someone filled out the form, but he’s a college student. He or she’s a college student or something of that nature, so it’s so true. Not every lead is created equal.

So the technology exists, right? Especially, I mean, Sam, you know more about this than I do. The technology exists within HubSpot to actually do lead scoring. And you know, you can set it up any which way that you want, but you can make it very strategic from the standpoint of qualifying your leads and scoring them. You know, back in the day, it was as simple as hot, warm and cold, you know, And there’s a different, you know, very, very basic level. But now you can get much more sophisticated. OK, This person has attended a webinar. This person has downloaded two pieces of content. This person has had a conversation with sales. So there’s ways you can kind of create a score that can help your team become more effective and efficient with when they’re following up.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
And that’s a great point. I I love that hot, cold, warm, if you will, as well, because if somebody comes by our website once, it’s a big difference between somebody that’s been by our website three or four times, that there’s when we go back to qualifying the lead and the BANT kind of methodology, if you will, somebody that’s visiting your website 3, 4, 5 times in a week compared to somebody that came across your website once. If I’m a salesperson, I want to go after the person that’s visited my website four or five times that week, the person that’s come by once. I would rather marketing take a nurturing program to try to get them to come by the website more. Again, resources are limited. You only have so much time in the day. So how am I going to prioritize that from leads that are coming in from a sales perspective? Yeah, awesome last piece. Biggest bonus, Biggest bonus here. If you want a free hour consultation to talk about leads, feel free to email me “Tips” at Sam@4BMarketing.com. We’ll be able to have a quick conversation, help you out, talk about leads, talk about really anything from a marketing perspective if there’s something you’re looking to explore. I think that we did have one question come up in the chat. I don’t have a particular answer for this, but Dave, I’ll read it out to you and see if you maybe have some data on this. And really, it’s you know, do we have any data on channel performance pre and post COVID.

I think it’s changed so much over the past three years from a a perspective of the buyer journey as we’ve talked about changing with more people being on there. You know, really I think the question is, you know, what’s the best channel? Is it email, is it phone, Is it LinkedIn? And that opens a wild can of worms that we can kind of get down to.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
No, that’s a great question and so I wish I knew the exact answer on that. So let me take a stab at it. So first of all again, if you follow me, if you log into LinkedIn for 10 minutes. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this. A lot of folks say email is dead. Cold email is dead. And for folks on the call that may not have gotten too deep into this, there is definitely, email has changed drastically over the past three years. When I say email marketing, that is when you have an opted in list. And you’re kind of, and you’re emailing folks primarily your customers or your prospects that have opted in and then there’s something called cold email. And then that’s when you’re going out without opted in folks. And the world of cold email has gotten harder and harder and harder as time has gone on. And that has to do with spam engines and this and that, and Microsoft and Google really cutting down. But there are some people that are still seeing success with cold email. We’ve seen some challenges, but sometimes we can get it right.

But it’s not an easy thing. That could be a whole nother session, to be honest with you from a phone standpoint, at least from our experience we’ve seen. We’ve seen some conversions occur when we’re leaving a voicemail and then we’re doing the multi channel approach, leaving a voicemail and then sending an email and then perhaps a LinkedIn touch. So combining the channels if we’re just fully focusing on one channel, we just haven’t seen this success. But as far as performance data, we could kind of maybe talk offline on that, but that’s that’s my quick quick assessment on the question.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Yeah, I love it, I love it. And I I think it goes back to that multi channel strategy. It absolutely does. Really when you think about lead generation or trying to obtain leads, you need to have that multi channel strategy because we touched on the amount of touch points that it takes for a buyer now right, 17 to 27. Now well those touch points need to be from multiple different places whether it’s email, whether it’s phone, whether it’s LinkedIn, is it advertising, is it blogs, is it doing an event.

You know all of those different pieces are going to come into play. And so adopting that multi channel strategy, analyzing it, evaluating where you’re sitting and then readjusting is really what’s going to be the most successful.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah, and then one thing I just thought of, it’s not necessarily tailored exactly to his question, but it’s just something that we learned and it kind of smacked us right side of the face. So LinkedIn changes their algorithms and it makes us still at front and center. So I think during COVID, we would do some survey, prospecting, survey promotion through LinkedIn and we had success using using Sponsored Inmail and we could do Sponsored Inmail at volume and we could get highly targeted because as you know, you can get highly targeted with LinkedIn advertising and we saw success with that. However, in, let’s think of the date, I think in January 2022, we logged into our LinkedIn advertising console, set up a new project, and then quickly realized that LinkedIn had changed their algorithm with respect to LinkedIn Sponsored Inmail.

They severely cut down on how many Inmails that a recipient or a member can receive on a monthly basis on a 30 day window basis. Which to be honest, really threw us for a loop And so we had to think fast and then that’s when we started to utilize Single Image Ads and Custom Audiences of basically garnering people’s attention through LinkedIn. So we had to change our strategy and I think LinkedIn changed our algorithm on that. So it’s something that you always have to be aware of. What may have worked in the past may not work in the future.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Totally, totally. We’ve got about 5 minutes left here. I want to make sure that there’s no other questions in the chat. So if you have any other questions, please feel free to ask them so that we can get those answered in the next 5 minutes. 

And I love that it’s constantly evolving. That’s the best part about our jobs and being in this B2B space is it’s constantly evolving. We talked about the technology changes just with Zoom info and being able to analyze that and understand are you getting the most bang for your buck that you’re already paying for. Make sure you’re utilizing the full tool set and you made a great point talking about how we own some of the data with our website, but we don’t own all the platforms. So the social media side of the house with a LinkedIn, they can change their algorithm tomorrow. They can do that if they want to. Google does it. Google changed their side of the house, right? They did that with coming out with GA4 away from Universal Analytics. So then how you’re analyzing people on the website and so on and so forth and from an SEO perspective, they’ve changed that from an SEO perspective to EEAT now, right? Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, that is a platform that is constantly evolving and changing. And so understanding you know the multi channel strategy, analyzing what’s being successful and then analyzing the marketplaces that you’re utilizing to be successful is going to be paramount for success moving forward.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah, well said. Yeah, I agree.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Well, perfect. I don’t see any other questions coming in the chat. If you do have questions, of course email me at Sam@4Bmarketing.com, or Dave, feel free to email us both. If you email me “tips” in the subject line, we’ll set up an hour long conversation to jump in and talk about your business. Well, Dave, I just want to thank you so much for spending the time with us. Your insight is invaluable. Really getting an understanding from that lead generation side from a different perspective is truly awesome. So thank you so much.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Yeah, I appreciate it, Sam. This is fun.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Well, thank you so much everybody. We will call it there.

Dave Colliver, President & Founder, CTG Colliver
Alright.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing
Have a great day.