Today, MarketingSherpa published the results of the following business-to-business survey:

What are the greatest challenges that B2B marketers are facing? From generating high-quality leads and a high volume of leads to generating public relations buzz, see which challenges topped the list.

Here are the results:

This tug-of-war between “more leads” and “better leads” is a familiar story. It’s reflective of the long-standing face-off between marketing and sales departments.

Marketers typically focus on the cost per lead. This means opening the funnel as wide as possible to get as many leads as they can from their marketing efforts.

The wider the funnel, the more “tire kickers” end up in the mix.

As a result, the sales people have to constantly shift gears from high-end consultative selling to entry-level telemarketing to pre-qualify prospects.

This is psychologically challenging.

Wanting to focus on nurturing existing leads and begin new conversations with “ready” prospects that already “get it,” sales people will eventually ignore the majority of new leads that come in from marketing.

If your company regularly participates in trade shows or industry events for lead gathering, just do an audit of your last batch of leads and you’ll find that up to 80% of them were never contacted.

The end results:

• Strife between sales and marketing
• Ignored and lost leads
• Wasted marketing dollars
• Loss of reputation due to lack of follow-up communications with prospects

What are the possible solutions?

Step One: Narrow The Funnel

The most obvious solution.

But, consider this:

• Your cost per lead can double, quadruple, or more because you’re still spending the same amount of marketing money
• You lose the sales opportunities that don’t opt-in to your more stringent qualification process
• There’s no guarantee that the early-stage buyers you filtered out will return to you later

Showing your CEO graphs of rising costs per lead and dropping lead counts will place you in an uncomfortable position as a marketer. If the sales department has a bad quarter, the finger will be pointed at you for generating less leads.

So, ignore this option altogether?

No.

The tendency is to go overboard in the screening process. I’ve seen opt-in forms with 20 or more questions about the prospect’s industry, buying stage, budget, decision making authority, technical requirements, and etceteras.

This is just insane.

A good rule of thumb is to limit yourself to just 2 to 5 pre-qualification questions.

A more thoughtful approach requires some 80/20 analysis.

• What qualification requirements will suppress 80% of prospects that never become customers?
• What qualification requirements will suppress 80% of prospects that become unprofitable customers?

Avoid any questions that could end up filtering out your hyper-response customers that are responsible for 80% of your company’s profits.

Step Two: Place Fresh Prospects In To  An Automated Email-Marketing Process

Since your emails will go out to prospects in different stages of the buying process, try to provide a variety of engagement options.

You can use which options they select as an indicator as to what stage of the buying cycle they’re in.

If your email server system is sophisticated enough, you can place your prospects in different marketing campaigns based on the tracked behaviors.

Step Three: Use Telemarketing

OK, what else did you expect a business-to-business professional to say?

Depending the volume of leads you generate, having telemarketers call all of them for futher screening and/or appointment setting may not be a cost-effective option.

However, if you have a lead-scoring system in place that tracks prospect behavior after they’ve opted in (or maybe even before), then you can limit telemarketing to those that reach a threshold you set.

For instance, you could assign points for the following actions:

• repeat visits to your website
• completing a form or survey
• downloading a white paper
• viewing a webinar
• …and more

Bonus Step: Tell The Sales Department To Suck It Up

OK, maybe not in so many words.

No process is perfect. However, you’re doing everything you can to deliver qualified leads to the sales department.

As long as the sales department understands the new, enhanced value of the leads they’re getting, they’ll do a better job of following up.

Many of my work-at-home telemarketing agents use Skype because of it’s integration with browsers (“click to dial”), affordability ($3/mo), useful add-ons (call recording, screen sharing, and more), and its instant messaging service.

However, they are now finding Skype doesn’t tolerate their entrepreneurial activities as much as they used to. I don’t know if these are new policies, but Skype users on the “unlimited” plan are limited to 50 different numbers dialed per day. Violating this term will result in the user’s account being switched to per-minute billing, or possible account suspension.

Here’s the response one of my agents just got from Skype about being switched to per-minute billing:

We monitor the use of subscriptions to ensure our fair use policy is followed. Also, if we detect any unusual calling patterns or activity, we may temporarily suspend a subscription. Once the 6 hours per day are reached or 50 different numbers dialed per day are exceeded, Skype will charge normal rates and a connection fee for any additional minutes used until 00.00am GMT of the following day.

A productive TSR (telesales rep) will average 15 to 25 calls an hour. This restriction (50 different numbers/day), effectively limits the agent to around 2 hours of calling a day… not a viable situation.

I used to maintain a page with links to VOIP services and software tools. I’ll look to add that page back to my website soon.

In the meantime, a possible alternative for work-at-home agents might be Magic Jack which does not appear to have home-business-unfriendly restrictions.

In the copywriting world there’s a saying that a good researcher will beat a good copywriter any day. No matter how skillfully presented, copy focused on the wrong message loses to bad copy centered on the right message.

Developing an effective telemarketing script depends largely on getting the message right. If you get the message right, prospects will forgive stumbles or awkward phrasing.

This runs counter to the common school of thought in the telemarketing business that considers how something is said more important than what is said. This is just plain silly to me.

I suspect that this line of reasoning is promulgated by telemarketing managers looking to scapegoat their agents for failing projects. The agents, in turn, blame the poor quality of the list. It’s a tragi-comedy of blame shifting.

If you find yourself trying to source out the reason why your project isn’t doing as well as it could be, it’s time to take a hard look at your telemarketing script.

For those of us that that were heavily involved in the high-tech boom of the 90′s, the current economic crisis is insult added to injury. But, with every cloud you can find a silver lining. One of the reasons technology companies have managed to weather the storm so well (so far… everything has a breaking point) is that they (those that survived the dot.bomb) learned business survival strategies such as:

1. Invest in marketing initiatives with fast and measurable ROIs
2. Test market (“vaporware”)
3. Tighten lead management practices
4. Leverage new technologies (“sales 2.0″)
5. Instead of counting on a steady flood of new customers, deepen relationships with existing ones
6. Get paid in advance as much as possible!
7. Reduce unnecessary expenses
8. Incorporate accountability and transparency throughout the organization
9. Treat your employees as partners and customers
10. …and many more…

My point is that, as the economy founders, we should look to those industries that are surviving or even doing well for leadership. We need to find the 20% of industries that could account for 80% of the American recovery. I propose that the tech, and perhaps bio-tech industries will play a major role in re-defining our economic future.

I’ve been busy these past few weeks working on a new business venture with a close associate in the golf industry. You can see our website here.

I also created a new auto-responder that you can see here if you’re interested in marketing strategy.

I’ve also made about 500 prospecting calls over the last couple of weeks and sent out a few broadcast emails with offers and promotions. What I found is that there is a lot of skepticism out there. It’s always been that way, to some degree, but people seem to be more cynical now than ever; try handing out a $5 bill to passing strangers on a busy sidewalk, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

If the talking heads on television are to be believed, 2009 will be the year “main street” (that is us, do not kid yourself) begins to bear the full consequences of the shell game the powerful and politically connected have played with the American and global economies.

Adding insult to injury, Washington continues to reach into our pockets to bailout their buddies “for the greater good.” By the time they are done, there will be nothing left to engineer true social change.

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