Labcast: The Keys to a Successful Lead Generation Campaign

In this week’s Labcast, Top 25 Sales Influencer Kendra Lee addresses the problems companies often face when starting a lead generation campaign and shares ways you can be a sales magnet.

If you’re looking to expand your reach and get more customers, incorporating outbound lead generation into your sales strategy is a must. As sales advisor Kendra Lee puts it, “Even if you’ve got an outstanding SEO strategy, your website looks beautiful, and if you’re still one of the few doing advertising, you still have to have that outbound region.” Listen to this week’s Labcast to hear Lee’s insights on maintaining synergy between your marketing and sales teams, employing the right communication outlets, determining your next move in the sales cycle, and other tips for running a successful lead generation campaign.

Key Takeaways

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• Marketing and Sales cooperation is a must. Regular meetings, joint campaigns, and a constant flow of communication will help you create a coherent feedback loop between your Marketing and Sales teams. [6:40]
• Email, social media, and phone: You need to employ all three platforms for a successful lead generation campaign. [2:50]
• The two steps you need to put your lead generation campaign in place: Identify your target market and determine how often you want to connect with your audience. [4:10]
• Understand the buying funnel: Can’t decide when to educate prospects versus moving on with the buying process? Take a walk in your buyer’s shoes. [11:35]

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Labcast 114: Outbound Lead Generation According to Kendra Lee

Transcript

Kevin Cain: Hi there, and welcome to this edition of Labcast. I’m Kevin Cain and today, I’m joined by Kendra Lee, to talk about the keys to successful lead generation campaigns. For those of you who don’t know Kendra, she’s a top IT seller and sales advisor as well as the founder of KLA Group, which is a company that helps businesses optimize their sales in the SMB market. Kendra is also the author of a new book, The Sales Magnet. Hey Kendra, thanks for joining me today on Labcast. How’s it going?
Kendra Lee: It’s going great. It’s a pleasure to be back with you again, Kevin.
Kevin Cain: Yeah, it’s great to have you back. And, you know, once again, we’re talking about sales and specifically, outbound lead generation and I wanted to kind of kick off our conversation today with asking you this question about, you know, how does outbound lead generation really fit into a company’s overall strategy?
Kendra Lee: You know, when I look at how you’re going to get new customers, there are lots of different ways that you can do it, but you can’t ignore the outbound lead generation. So, to me, it’s a critical component. Even if you’ve got an outstanding SEO strategy, your website looks beautiful, and if you’re still one of the few doing advertising, you still have to have that outbound region. So, I think it’s very important.
Kevin Cain: And, who do you think should own it then? Is it a sales initiative? Is it a marketing initiative? Is it a combination?
Kendra Lee: It really depends on the size organization. Believe it or not, a number of the clients that we work with, when they are first starting their-, designing their lead generation strategy, it’s the business owner who is very involved. Now he doesn’t necessarily, or she, doesn’t necessarily own it, but the business owner is a critical player. Once it’s been established, then it usually finds ownership either in sales or marketing. And it depends on the size of the organization. But in today’s environment, sales and marketing have to work hand in hand because it’s the sales people of course, who are following up on the leads, and it’s marketing that needs to know, well, what’s going on in the market. And it’s often the sales people that are closest to it. So..
Kevin Cain: So… Go ahead, please.
Kendra Lee: I was just going to say that it really depends on the size of the organization and what their commitment is to their outbound lead generation strategy as to where it ultimately ends up living.
Kevin Cain: So, you know, I imagine in all of your experience, you’ve worked with numerous companies. Can you kind of give our listeners a sense of what the components of a successful lead generation campaign would look like?
Kendra Lee: Absolutely. To me, you have to be using a combination of email, which of course everybody is using today, as well as social media and phone. Interestingly, what we’re seeing is a lot of people think that they can just execute an e-mail campaign or they’ll run social media and the leads will just come to them. So they’re dropping the phone. But the phone is still a critical component. So I see them all coming together. And actually, you know that I wrote my book and launched it this year, “The Sales Magnet.” We actually have 14 different strategies that we recommend for outbound lead generation. So, you don’t want to discount things like the blogging that you’re doing either from a content perspective. So there’s a lot that you could be doing.
Kevin Cain: So, when you have a sort of a multi-tiered approach, as you’ve suggested with e-mail, phone, social, and some other stuff, how do you overlay those so that they work together, so that you’re reaching out to your audience effectively and not just harassing them by, you know, hitting them on all the possible channels that you can?
Kendra Lee: Boy, that’s a great question and it is a challenge today with all the different ways that you can be hitting them. When you’re putting your lead generation strategy in place, I think the two most important things to do so that you are being consistent, ’cause that’s what you’re really talking about, is the consistent message – is to find your focus. So, who is your target market that you’re focusing on, and then get your grabber, your message you want to get out to your target market. And, once you’ve got that message and that target market that you are focusing on, it gets much easier to keep your message consistent. And then it’s a matter of looking at, you know, how frequently are we trying to connect. And interestingly, you know, if you send an e-mail and you’re blogging at the same time and you’re out on social media, that’s not overlap. It’s when you are focused only on, say, sending e-mails or sending letters. Those more personal communications that you have that challenge that you might feel like you’re inundating your market, but when you’re mixing, you don’t have that same issue.
Kevin Cain: Right. You know, you mentioned blogging and, you know, obviously content creation and content distribution is a huge part of outbound lead generation it’s, you know, what’s going to give you some fuel to have those touch points with your target audience. What I wanted to ask you about that is sort of, you know, how do you create a successful feedback loop so that sales is getting the content they need and marketers know what kind of content to create for them?
Kendra Lee: When I think about the feedback loop, there’s the internal feedback loop coming from whoever is doing the content creation and running your lead gen campaign, and then there’s the feedback loop from your prospects. Which one are you asking about?
Kevin Cain: Well, so, I guess it’s sort of a little bit of both where you’ve got a feedback loop where, you know, sales is talking to their prospects and seeing what sort of messages are working and getting some feedback from them, and then also, marketers getting some feedback from the sales teams about what they’ve learned. Does that make sense?
Kendra Lee: Exactly. Yes. So the internal feedback loop on what sales is hearing and what marketing is finding as well.
Kevin Cain: Exactly.
Kendra Lee: Well, that’s where you need a combination of your systems in place. Because if you’re doing things like lead scoring and you’re watching the clicks and you’re watching what kind of results you’re getting from your market, then marketing has that information on their side then to share with sales. Sales, in the same vein, of course, need to be sharing what they’re hearing from their clients. So, in creating that feedback loop, it’s got to be very open communication and a synergy between the two organizations. And some clients do that within their organization by having sales and marketing report up to into the same team and to the same owner, others, the marketing and sales may live together in the same team, so they’re not even separate organizations. I think it becomes more of a challenge the bigger your company gets, but it’s absolutely a combination of maintaining, or monitoring the metrics, and then sharing what your findings are, be it, whether it’s through regular meetings, or through developing campaigns together and having follow-up around how those campaigns are being effective. And it even goes into training your sales team on what the campaigns are that’ll be running because the sales team are your lead catchers. Those are some strategies for the feedback loop. What else are you finding, Kevin?
Kevin Cain: Well, you know, I think it’s, what’s interesting is I think it all sounds pretty straight forward and simple in theory, but in practice, you know, it doesn’t always work that way and that there can be a divide between sales and marketing teams and they don’t always have the alignment that they need. And so..
Kendra Lee: There absolutely can.
Kevin Cain: I think oftentimes, you’ll see marketers sort of anticipating what they think customers want to hear without going directly to sales to get the information from the source and I think sales folks, perhaps, often, you know, assume that the content that the marketers are creating isn’t really relevant, isn’t really on target, so there’s a bit of a disconnect there.
Kendra Lee: You know, quick short story for you. We have one client that’s a larger bar. They are 35 million and they have a surprisingly small sales team, only five people, and they have a very dedicated marketing team. However, there is no communication between the teams. Marketing will feed sales on all the events that they’re running, the e-mails that they’re sending out, but sales, of course, discounts it, and I say of course because we see this all too frequently, to reinforce what you’re saying. Well, in their situation, it’s gotten to the point where marketing will generate, no joke, 15 leads out of every event that they do with just, say, 35 people attending, and sales doesn’t follow up. And, what we learned as we got in and diagnosed it, was that there was no executive push for this initiative between marketing and sales. Yet, ironically, what’s happening, what the executive comes back and says, the business owner, that they don’t have enough leads, they’re not selling enough managed services, which are the events that marketing is all focused on. So, marketing is doing what’s right, but sales isn’t buying in and the business owner isn’t taking the stand to say, “You guys have to work and play well together,” So, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Kevin Cain: Sounds like a bit of a recipe for disaster, I mean, at least not for optimization.
Kendra Lee: It is absolutely a recipe for disaster and, you know, they’re losing people and missing their numbers. So, you really have to have that synergy among the team and it starts with the business owner.
Kevin Cain: Absolutely. You know, I think another challenge that companies face in outbound lead generation and the marketers face is figuring out what’s the right balance of, sort of, educating prospects versus moving them forward in the buying process. And, you know, I would think at the beginning, at the top of the sales funnel, you need a lot of that sort of thought leadership that’s not talking about you and how great your solution is, but rather about, you know, what the problem is if someone has is that they might not even that they have and what solutions to those might be. But how do you view it, sort of, striking that balance between getting people through the funnel and actually just educating them?
Kendra Lee: It begins with understanding what the buying funnel is. So, we all would look at it from the sales perspective, you know when we’re doing outbound lead generation as companies, but what we teach our clients is to take the perspective of your buyer and where would you expect them to be in their buying process as you start your campaigns and your nurturing. You know, are they aware of your organization? Are they aware of the issues that you are focused on in your campaign or not? If they’re aware, you can start further along with the amount of education that you’re doing and then incorporate more heavier content that blends itself towards sales person getting engaged. If your message is one about an issue that is new to them and they’re just starting to figure it out, then you’ve gotta have a lot more education. Take HIPAA, for example. We have a lot of clients that we are working with bars who are very focused on selling to doctors now, because, you know, HIPAA is now becoming so critical. But what they’re finding is that these doctors aren’t receptive. And the reason is, is that the doctors started thinking about HIPAA more than two years ago. And so, those that were going to make their move to EMR systems have already done it. Those who haven’t have either decided that they’re going to take the penalty or they’re lagging so far behind that they’re not interested in doing anything. And so, the messaging now for bars, specific to medical offices, if it’s a HIPAA message, it’s so far along on their buying cycle that you can’t do a lot of education, they’ve already…
Kevin Cain: Yeah, absolutely.
Kendra Lee: So, they’ve already made their decision around what they want to do. So it really comes down to knowing where do you expect them to be in their buying cycle and then balancing giving them education if they’re earlier, as well as making that offer to talk with you along the way.
Kevin Cain: Right. Yep, couldn’t agree more. Well, this has been really interesting and I appreciate your insights today, Kendra, on outbound lead generation and the strategies and the techniques and tips that you’ve offered. Before I let you go, can you give our listeners a sense of where they can go find you to get more information?
Kendra Lee: Absolutely. Come visit our website at KLAGroup.com and check out my book, “The Sales Magnet,” which is at TheSalesMagnet.com, and of course, e-mail me at [email protected] or give a call 303-741-6636. And of course, I’m all out there on social media, so you can follow and check us out and check out my blog, where I’ve got a lot more information around lead generation. So, Kevin, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you. And, you know, if this is a topic that’s really of interest to our listeners, I have a free e-book if you want me to tell them where they could go get that.
Kevin Cain: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Kendra Lee: So, on our blog, when you go to KLAGroup.com/blog, on the right-hand side, you’ll see a box that says “get more leads,” if you go there, we have a free e-book around lead generation campaigns, how you write that content, and we’ve got one around prospecting if you need to get your sales people doing better follow up. So, it’s free. Feel free to go use those resources.
Kevin Cain: Yeah, they sound like they would be very valuable. I really appreciate you letting us know about them.
Kendra Lee: Thank you.
Kevin Cain: Well, thanks again, Kendra. Look forward to talking with you again soon.
Kendra Lee: I look forward to it too, Kevin. Take care and stay cool!
Kevin Cain: You too. Bye-bye.
Kendra Lee: Bye.

What is your biggest tip for running a successful lead generation campaign?

Photo by: Bob Mical