How to Generate a Steady Flow of Inbound Sales Leads

Aaron recently wrote a great post comparing the differences between inbound leads and outbound leads and how they should be treated differently during the sales process. In summary, he states that inbound leads:

• close at a higher percentage
• close quicker
• close without as much sales effort

I linked to the post from an article I wrote on the HubSpot blog because I thought it was great. Then, a client of mine, Trish Bertuzzi (Inside Sales Blog), followed the link and plugged HubSpot in Aaron’s comments.

Also, I am not sure I agree with your premise of not being able to predict inbound activity. And, let me say that up until recently, I would have agreed with you. But, we now have proven internet marketing methodologies and technologies available to us that do create repeatable and scalable results. I highly recommend http://www.hubspot.com to anyone interested in learning more and btw, ask for Pete Caputa.

Fortunately, Aaron was familiar with us enough to know the plug was unprompted but accurate. So, he invited me to write a guest post for his blog about how to predictably generate a steady flow of inbound leads.

Although I agree with Aaron’s statement about how inbound leads close at a higher percentage, quicker and with less effort, all inbound leads are not created equally. They don’t all close at the same rate.

I also agree with Trish, that inbound marketing can produce a steady flow of inbound leads.

As a sales person at Hubspot, I have contacted several thousand “inbound leads” since I joined HubSpot. As an experienced internet marketer, blogger and social media junkie, I’ve also contributed to our SEO efforts, blogging and social media marketing activity - helping to generate leads for the company and myself.

At HubSpot, we help companies attract more traffic and convert more site visitors into leads by providing the training and tools that are needed.
We provide tools and training so that in-house marketing professionals and small business owners can leverage SEO, PPC advertising, blogging, the blogosphere and the social mediasphere to attract more traffic.

We’re our best customer and we don’t share clients’ data (unless we have permission). So it’s best if I talk about how we’ve been able
to generate a steady flow of leads for our business. Here’s a screen capture of our traffic and lead stats in the last few months.

Our inbound lead generation correlates closely to our internet marketing efforts. It’s pretty predictable. Mike Volpe, our marketing VP has levers that enable us to control how many leads we generate how quickly, as well as the quality of those leads. We can control quantity much more easily than we can control quality. However, we’re getting much better at doing “targeted” inbound marketing which enables us to attract highly qualified prospects to our sites.

The First Step is Measurement. Measure. Measure. Measure. Measure ROI. ROI. ROI. ROI.
Our marketing analytics enables us to do closed loop marketing, where we can identify exactly what keywords, referrers and marketing campaigns help generate leads and new clients. By analyzing our analytics we can see exactly how customers first arrived at our website. We can also see what marketing activities helped nurture a lead along the process. We build a website interaction profile of leads after their first conversion. We can see what forms a prospect has completed, what pages they’ve visited, how frequently they visit, which blog posts they read and comment on and a few other metrics, which help us determine how engaged a prospect is, as well as their interests and needs. This lead intelligence helps us prioritize who to call first, as well as how to initiate a conversation. For example, If I see that a prospect has read a bunch of posts about SEO, visited the description of our keyword research and link tracking tools, I’d peak at their site to see if they’ve done any SEO and probably start the conversation with a question like, “It looks like you’re trying to refine your SEO strategy?”

Based on all of this data and my anecdotal experience, I can safely say that all inbound leads are not created equal. They don’t all close at a higher rate, quicker and with less effort than outbound leads. I’ve had several inbound leads that closed 3-6 months later, even though the investment required for our services is only $3,500 for the year. On the flip side, I’ve also had some close after a 15 minute conversation, since they already self-diagnosed their problems, knew that we could help them and knew that they wanted our help - all because our marketing team nurtured the lead effectively. No matter what the leads, I still have to do the work required to establish my prospects’ needs, urgency and timing.

Regardless, as someone who has had to [literally] knock on doors to prospect when I started my first business, I know that logging into Salesforce.com and having a bunch of warm leads to call is much more efficient than cold calling and much less expensive than traditional marketing and advertising. Inbound marketing sets any salesperson up for a higher success rate. And sets marketing up to establish a true ROI for their time and dollars spent.

What Inbound Marketing Methods Work?

In order of its ability to generate more easily close-able leads, I’d rank each activity in the following order.

1. Referrals & Brand Searches
2. Free Tools/Free Trials
3. Organic Search Engine Optimization
4. Blogging
5. Email Newsletters
6. Webinars
7. PPC
8. Sponsorships
9. Social Media

However, it’s also hard to separate any of these activities from each other. Collectively, they create a comprehensive inbound internet marketing strategy. Also, pretty much everyone of these methods is responsible for doing two important things in inbound marketing.

1. They attract new prospects.
2. They help nurture existing leads.

Traditional marketing can do the former. But, prospects generated from traditional interruptive marketing do not lend themselves as well to lead nurturing.

Here’s some experiences from each of these methods. If I were a marketing or sales VP or a small business owner starting inbound marketing, I wouldn’t leave any of these out. But, here’s the areas where I’d focus first. This stuff doesn’t happen overnight. Most of these techniques require a time investment, but little financial investment. Many of these things support each other. So, it’s important to do things in the proper order and to prioritize.

Referrals & Brand Searches - Your best marketing is happy customers. In my previous company, after a few years of working at it, 100% of my business came from referrals. Customers have the ability to sell your services for you because they have little to no selfish interest in you bringing on new clients. So, when they recommend your product or service to a peer, they’re not only establishing that you’re credible, but trustworthy. The trust implicit in their relationship with the prospect they’re referring is transferred to you.

There’s an old saying that says it’s hard to predict referrals. It’s also expensive to build a brand (although fairly easy to measure brand awareness). However, I’d argue that if you’re doing the right things for your clients and you’re truly a stand for their success, it will happen. On the web, you can accelerate the pace by entering the conversation, setting the precedent for receiving referrals by giving them and by generally making yourself available to speak with new people whether there’s an immediate direct connection between their need and your service or not. Practically speaking, I recommend starting a blog and reading these tips on using a blog to improve your sales process and how to use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website.

Free Tools/Trials: Like many other companies, HubSpot has put the Freemium model to effective use. WebsiteGrader.com is a free SEO and website analysis tool that lets anyone analyze the effectiveness of their site and online marketing vs a handful of competitors. Almost 400k people have used it. We don’t call these people directly, but Website Grader refers about 15% of our traffic to HubSpot and is responsible for a disproportionately larger percentage of leads and sales that result from our inbound marketing. HubSpot recently launched Press Release Grader too which analyzes the online marketing effectiveness of press releases. Press Release Grader also helps us target marketing professionals more effectively, helping us target our inbound marketing to the right prospects for us.

Also, I recently learned of Landslide’s sales work management tool that helps organizations design a sales process for free. Constant Contact’s email marketing software free trial is a great example of effectively using a free trial. If there’s a way to take a part of your service that is useful by itself and make it free, this will generate more leads, good will and inbound links than you can imagine.

Organic Search Engine Optimization: This one takes the most patience, but if it is done right, it is simply a byproduct of doing everything else right. SEO requires thorough keyword research and search engine rank monitoring. If you do this well, blogging, PR and social media can support your SEO efforts without an expensive SEO consultant, and without a lot of work dedicated “just” to SEO. The name of the game is to pick keywords, optimize pages with those keywords (could be blog posts) and build links. At HubSpot and many of our other clients that follow the right internet marketing strategy, the effect of SEO on inbound lead generation is cumulative and compounding. In other words, month after month, as long as we keep creating great content and building smart links, the number of leads we generate from SEO goes up and and up and up.

Blogging: You must enter the conversation if you’re going to do inbound marketing. There are so many people who start a blog and think it’s just about saying smart things or about writing. It’s not. It’s about having a 2 way conversation. Any good salesperson knows that an effective prospecting call requires the prospect to be talking more than the salesperson. It’s the same way with a blog. It’s imperative to be a resource for people and to pro-actively network with your blog by reading other blogs, linking to other blogs and leaving comments on other blogs, if you want people to do the same thing for you. It’s not necessarily the law of reciprocity, but it’s the law of participation.

For the 6 or so years I’ve been blogging, I’ve followed “the build it one at a time” model where I try to make acquaintances with a new blogger each week. Now that I help companies start blogs, things are a bit more accelerated for me. I make a lot of new blogger friends each month. But, I counsel my clients to do the same thing. At some point in the lifetime of a blog, after a critical audience is built, things steamroll. Subscribers come out of nowhere, links come from nowhere, random people digg your blog posts and send a flood of traffic. After a while, you can just focus on creating great content and hosting a great conversation on your blog. But, I’d recommend always reaching out. Last week, I reached out to Guy Kawasaki and he launched sales.alltop.com with my blog on it! Just like I wouldn’t stop my consistent telephone prospecting activities, I’ll never stop reaching out to new bloggers.

Email: Permission Based direct email marketing is still a very important marketing technique. It’s critical to use industry standard opt-in methods to build your list. However, notice that I put it fairly low on this list. If this article was written just two years ago, I’d bet that email marketing would be much higher on the list. Of course, it’s one of the oldest forms of online marketing. Successful marketers were using email before the first blog post was written and back when search engine indexes were still built by humans. But, there’s a problem with email. People get too much of it. They are increasingly immune to stuff that doesn’t interest them right now. I’ve had people double opt-in to an email newsletter and then click “this is spam” two weeks later after receiving just two messages from me.

All that said, email is still an important part of the mix. At HubSpot, we send out one email newsletter per month promoting our webinar and a few recent blog posts. It drives significant traffic back to our site and drives attendance for our webinars, which is a great lead nurturing tool.
Solutions like Eloqua, Pardot and other marketing automation tools help with this at a different level. However, most businesses that I speak with don’t generate enough inbound leads to warrant an expensive email-based lead nurturing process. Most don’t have enough leads to nurture yet. I usually recommend Aweber and Constant Contact for most situations. They’re inexpensive, simple to setup and effective if used right. Also, since I’ve seen that blogging, free tools, and webinars can nurture leads just as effectively, all you need your email system to do is get them to come back to your site where you can track engagement.

Our sales team also uses one on one email to nurture leads inside Salesforce.com. Based on a prospect’s interaction with the site and the information they share when downloading white papers and registering for webinars, we can provide the information they need to decide whether they want a custom product demonstration or to decide whether they want us to help them diagnose their challenges and recommend a solution.

I’d also recommend reading Brian Carrol’s Start with a Lead Blog. His company, Intouch is an expert at using email and presales touches to qualify leads for Budget, Authority, Need and Timing (B.A.N.T) before moving a prospect along to a sales team.

Webinars: As I mentioned above when talking about our email marketing process, webinars are a great lead nurturing tool. People that have opted in to our email list are engaged at different levels. Webinars get them coming back and interacting with us. It also helps us establish credibility and communicate what we do in an educational and neutral setting. Mike Volpe has discovered that a series of webinars is much more effective. Normally, many people tell their contacts internally and externally about a webinar in a series, assuming they’ve attended one they got value out of previously. I recently had 50 influencers from one company attend a webinar. We usually also have a bunch of bloggers post the link to our marketing webinars page; Webinars create a great word of mouth opportunity.

PPC - In a good inbound marketing mix, you can’t ignore Pay Per Click Advertising. Many b2b companies of any size seem to be doing exclusively PPC as their sole online marketing activity. In my experience, leads that come from PPC are a bit less likely to convert. They aren’t engaged with your brand as they usually arrive at a landing page and leave right afterwards, and they rarely seem to come back. Of course, I haven’t done a scientific analysis. But, there have been studies conducted that show that less educated people click on ppc ads, while more educated people click on organic search results. Unless your selling to dummies, you’ll be better served with SEO and blogging. However, we have used PPC ads in certain cases successfully, when other methods will not work in the time frame that we want. We’ve used it to test new landing pages to ensure that they convert. We’ve also used it when we needed a larger amount of leads for our salespoeple to work; Every other month, we hire a few new sales people. We spend a bit more on PPC ads in those months.

PPC is an easily controlled lever. You want 25 leads today, give me $1,000 bucks and I’ll make it happen.

Sponsorships - If you’re at a phase of maturity in your marketing where you know what the ideal profile of a prospect is, it’s usually pretty easy to identify publications (ie forums, blogs, trade magazines, email lists, vertical search engines) that can target your prospect. I wouldn’t recommend buying lists. However, if you can place an offer on a targeted site or an email newsletter, the results can be very effective. Most inbound marketing activities don’t make it easy for you to target a demographic profile. Sponsorship does. Of course, these people aren’t going to be as engaged with your brand. But, sponsorship is certainly a good part of a solid inbound marketing mix. Sponsorships can be expensive, so be careful committing to a long term engagement with an unproven media outlet.

Social Media - Ironically, I give seminars all the time about sales lead generation via online networking and social media. Yet, I put this one last. I haven’t really figured out how to “scale” my online networking activities by itself. Online networking, social media and social bookmarking sites are great tools to support blog readership growth and to support search engine rankings. But, I’ve found that the ROI from social media isn’t cumulative or compounding used in isolation - unless you’re already pretty famous like Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki. I do think it’s a very important part of an inbound marketing mix as it adds a human face to your company. However, it does not drive a lot of direct traffic that converts into leads.

It can also be extremely powerful if a sales and marketing team coordinates some social media marketing activities and leverages the distributed team’s personal networks to launch a product, get feedback and raise awareness about a campaign. Sites like LinkedIn and Twitter also make it a bit easier to initially connect with a prospect or lead who seems immune to voicemails and emails. But, I’d never recommend skipping right to social media without a comprehensive SEO and blogging strategy first.

Summary: In conclusion, I’d refute Aaron’s original assumption that inbound marketing is unpredictable. With the right internet marketing tools in place, and the right internet marketing training, we’ve demonstrated over and over again that it can be predictable. I’m hopeful that the experiences and lessons I’ve shared above can help you start implementing an inbound marketing strategy for your business that produces a steady flow of inbound sales leads. I think the world would be a lot better place if we were all interrupted less often by poorly timed marketing messages and sales pitches - and if we could find what we were looking for more easily when we want it.

And I wouldn’t be practicing what I preach if I didn’t say… I’m here to help if you need me. If there’s anything I can help you with, please connect with me on LinkedIn.

About the Guest Author: Peter Caputa IV is an Internet Marketing Advisor (ie sales) at HubSpot, an inbound internet marketing platform. HubSpot provides the tools and training which enables businesses to take control of their website and online marketing - making their website a lead generation and profit producing asset for the business. Peter also operates several projects of his own, including his own blog and website about sales lead generation where he advises and supports his clients online marketing efforts, and an online business rating and networking website, Hive411. He also contributes to the HubSpot group internet marketing blog.