Joan Ritter has three “B” tips for anyone trying to generate business-to-business leads:
* Be open to any tactic that can reach a prospect;
* Be “madly accommodating” of any offer that might work;
* And be deeply determined and “innovate the heck out of the situation.”
As senior vice president of direct and relationship marketing at B-to-B marketing communications firm Slack Barshinger, Ritter knows more than most about generating business leads, and she used cases to illustrate her three tenets in a presentation at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing’s annual DM Days gathering.
In the matter of staying open to tactics, for example, she suggested that sometimes an oblique approach to lead generation may work best, and pointed to a recent campaign for Underwriters Laboratories, a non-profit standards-testing organization. UL saw a lead-generation opportunity in international legislation passed about two years ago to regulate certain metals such as cadmium and mercury in electronic components and equipment. Most North American manufacturers and vendors were not aware of the laws and their effects.
UL has strong relationships with 71,000 manufacturing clients around the world, but these are mostly at the engineer level. Slack Barshinger creative director Marc Blumer pointed out that to gain access to those vendors’ supply chains, UL was going to have to reach higher into the C-level of its clients. “We had to raise awareness of the issue from the top to the bottom of these organizations, and we had to change their behavior, to get them to think of UL in an entirely different way,” he said.
The answer was a concerted campaign to get UL noticed primarily not as a testing provider but as a subject matter expert and consultant on the new restrictions: “lead generation through thought leadership,” Blumer said, educating clients about the laws, laying out UL’s proposed solutions for compliance, and then driving those leads to the group’s internal sales force.
Key to the effort was a white paper with high perceived value and very little hard-sell; UL’s solution was proposed in the paper, but only as one of many options for manufacturers. Slack Barshinger built an integrated campaign around the white paper that included a PR initiative against 100 media outlets and the analyst community; search engine marketing that included 45 keywords related to the new laws, and online banner ads that clicked right to lead qualification without taking visitors off the Web site with the white paper content they wanted.
After about 13 months, the UL white paper campaign has generated more than 3800 leads at an average cost per lead (CPL) of $27, said Ritter. Given that a consulting engagement from one of these leads could earn UL tens of thousands of dollars, that’s a very favorable cost model. Even though it’s a year old now, the campaign is still delivering about 300 leads a month, she said. And it has allowed UL to reach 17 companies on a “hit list” of 30 manufacturers it wanted to access for its solution.
As for being “madly accommodating”, Ritter said, you can’t get much more accommodating than offering to give away an $80,000 truck. That’s what International Truck and Engine did in spring 2005 to launch a new line of cab-forward commercial vehicles for the small-business market.
The challenges in promoting the launch revolved mainly around segmenting the small business market properly, since the new truck would not be appropriate for some businesses within categories. Conventional list segmentation would not yield useful leads. For example, Blumer said, a 20-person landscaping business that planted lots of trees could benefit from the new model, but a 100-person one that mostly mowed lawns would probably do better with a fleet of pickup trucks.
The solution was to draw business owners to enter a giant sweepstakes for one of the new trucks and in the process to get them to self-qualify. Slack Barshinger used that information to build a database of qualified prospects and forwarded those leads to International’s dealer network for follow-up. Prospects were notified of both the truck launch and the contest with a direct mailing, and could either fill out the registration/ qualification form on paper or online.
To go beyond simply handing the leads off to dealers, Slack Barshinger used direct mail to offer prospects a $300 fuel card for taking a test drive—a particularly valuable premium last year when rising gas prices were in the news, Blumer noted. Other integrated elements of the dealer experience included messaging on International’s Web site and a microsite dedicated to the new truck, a free maintenance package offer in direct mail, point of sale signage and even themed screensavers on PCs at the dealerships.
The result so far has been about 1400 leads and a 3.5% response rate, Blumer said, at a CPL of $68. More then 260 of those leads have gone to the dealerships for their test drives, and International ranks the campaign among the top 10% of any lead-generation programs they’ve ever done—all the more impressive because it’s their first approach to the small business market.
Finally, Ritter and Blumer laid out a lead-generation campaign for PayPal Merchant Services. This e-commerce solution would let online merchants add PayPal payments to their existing array of credit-card transactions; small Web sellers could use it as a platform to start taking electronic payments of any kind.
But while PayPal has high brand awareness, most people associate it with eBay transactions, not merchant solutions. In addition, the solution is complex, with a value proposition that can be hard to explain, and takes a lot of consideration from the marketing, financial and IT angles.
One challenge in generating B-to-B leads for PayPal Merchant Services was to identify offers that would appeal to the e-commerce community without being so rich that they triggered a lot of unqualified leads, due to PayPal’s consumer brand awareness.
Another hurdle, specific to Slack Barshinger as the agency in charge of the offline campaign for the new PayPal solution, was segmenting the market to identify qualified companies and gauge their readiness for an offer. E-commerce cuts across all business categories, and e-merchants are a highly volatile group, going in and out of business more rapidly than their offline brethren. That makes calculating the lifetime value of e-commerce leads a complex proposition. “Companies that look the same at face value can turn out to be very, very different,” Ritter said.
The PayPal case drove Slack Barshinger to align with the handful of Web solutions that will crawl the Internet looking for specific data targets. In this case, the agency worked with Netvention and other crawlers to find the telltale signs that a company sells over the Web—among them, the presence of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) transaction security.
That search process also allowed Ritter and her team to get company names, addresses and contacts off the Web sites searched, in effect building a customized database of prospects for PayPal Merchant Services.
The technique has not proven to be a total solution for the PayPal campaign, Ritter said, and Slack Barshinger has supplemented lead output from the new Web-crawling technology with more conventional list rentals to keep CPL in line.
The PayPal campaign in particular has called for determination in finding and then reaching a qualified B-to-B market, Ritter said. “I don’t believe that there is right now an easy way to access these merchants selling online,” she said. “It is taking us a little bit of a lot, but in some cases there is no silver bullet. You just have to acknowledge that it will be hard and get started innovating.”
