Finally, they woke up! Even Italian companies seem to have understood that lead generation must be among the objectives of B2B Marketing.
The trend has been highlighted by the Observatory on B2B Marketing, promoted by Cribis D&B and the Italian Marketing Association, and presented during the BtoB Marketing Forum recently held in Milan at the Assolombarda Auditorium.
The event was interesting and certainly offered food for thought to anyone involved in marketing and lead generation in business-to-business markets.
But the most emblematic experience for me was that, while on stage the results of the research were presented and the desired lead generation scenarios for the FUTURE were indicated, I continued to receive real-time notifications of all the leads we were generating for our customers NOW.
But first things first.
I summarize schematically some of the data:
- B2B marketing disaffection with traditional advertising, whose budgets will be further reduced (finally…);
- there are 2 focus areas for the “new” manager responsible for B2B marketing:
– business growth/development;
– interactions with customers/prospects;
- the growth objectives are:
– improving lead management: for 46% of respondents;
– growth and market penetration: 41%;
– new products launch: 36%;
- objectives related to the interaction with customers and prospects:
– alignment between sales and marketing: 26% (another sensitive issue we’ll come back to);
– Customer relationship management: 26%;
- This year’s hot topic for B2B marketing is the acquisition and profiling of contacts.
- the main measurers through which B2B Marketing will be increasingly evaluated are:
– acquisition of new customers;
– growth in turnover;
– retention: customer loyalty;
This and much more was presented at the Forum, and a more complete report can be found for example on the EventReport website.
But what I would like to highlight here now are some personal considerations resulting from the contacts between what has been presented and our daily practice as lead generation service providers:
- In terms of B2B lead generation, Italian companies have finally become aware of the strategic importance of the issue and are trying to get out of the dark;
- but they are groping around because the mindset of companies is still conditioned by decades of institutional advertising, which is good for the ego but not measurable;
- it’s therefore difficult to assimilate the logic of measurable ROI of direct response marketing; and lead generation is precisely a form of direct response marketing;
- from what I have seen and heard companies also don’t know how to make lead generation effectively: it isn’t enough to invest a little budget in some campaign to say that you are carrying on a lead generation activity.
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How to convert these declarations of intent into sales-ready commercial leads?
In order to move now from theory to practice, and have a working, effective lead generation model that has already been tested and is light-years ahead of the pioneering activity of trackers, I suggest you click here:
The Lead Generation Farm™ is an innovative marketing automation system that allows marketing to:
- define the profile of your ideal customer;
- select a list of prospects corresponding to that profile;
- generate new fresh leads every month;
- qualify them (woe to anyone giving in to the sales some fake leads: it’s a very serious mistake that unfortunately we often see);
- and then move on to sales to convert them into negotiations.
Here’s the link to access the presentation of the service, click on the image below:
