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Business-to-business lead generation is one of the
few times in life when you should start at the end
and work backwards.

Before you write a single line of copy or design a
single element of your direct mail package, sit down
with the sales people who close the sales. Find out
when and how they get prospects to sign on the line
that is dotted, and work backwards from there to
discover what you need to do to capture the
attention of these prospects in the first place and
get them into your sales funnel.

Here are some questions to ask the sales team:

1. What makes a prospect buy? (Is it price? terms?
   guarantee? after-sales service? quality?)
2. What customer objections will endanger a sale?

How do salespeople overcome these objections?

3. Do prospects need a lot of information before
   making a decision?

I am assuming that your clients’ B2B buying process
(and your sales process) consists of more than a few
steps. Usually, it looks something like this:

• Identify need
• Gather information on solutions
• Establish specifications
• Request proposals or quotations
• Interview top suppliers
• Make short list of suppliers
• Check references
• Test sample or demo product
• Select supplier
• Negotiate terms and price
• Sign contract
• Make first purchase
• Evaluate performance
• Make repeat purchases
• Remain loyal to valued, long-term supplier
• Drop supplier and start over again

Your goal with every direct mail lead generation
mailing is to figure out where prospects are in their
buying cycle and to target them there. The thing to
remember in all of this is that your goal in a multi-
step, complex buying process is not to close the sale
but to move the prospect to the next stage. Here
are some ideas:

If prospects are at the needs-identification stage,
offer them a white paper or similar document that
describes the customer problem that your product or
service solves.

If prospects are gathering information on solutions,
offer them a series of case studies or success stories
that demonstrate why your solution is superior.

If your sale involves many stakeholders, consider
mailing a different direct mail package to each person
who influences the buying decision. In complex high-
tech sales, for example, you can target the CIO
(offer ROI benefits), the CFO (offer cost-cutting
benefits) and the IT manager (offer scalability and
ease of integration benefits).

In many B2B lead generation efforts, you will need to
mail or contact leads more than once before you
generate a response and have a chance to qualify
them. That’s why starting at the end makes such
good sense. You’ll know how many steps you need to
take to reach the sale, and how many times you
need to mail each prospect (and what to mail) to
turn them into a customer.

About the author

Alan Sharpe is a business-to-business direct mail copywriter and lead generation specialist who helps business owners and marketing managers generate leads, close sales and retain customers using business-to-business direct mail marketing. Learn more about his creative direct mail writing services and sign up for free weekly tips like this at http://www.sharpecopy.com.

© 2005 Sharpe Copy Inc. You may reprint this article online and in print provided the links remain live and the content remains unaltered (including the “About the author” message).

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1. Personal
Unlike an advertisement in a trade publication, which can be read by anyone, your sales letter arrives at your prospect’s place of business as a piece of personal communication from your mind to his. Also, unlike any other medium, direct mail can be personalized (Dear Mr. Smith) and customized to each reader (”As an IT manager, you know that . . .”), showing your prospect that you know about him by name and understand his business in particular.

2. Cost effective
Advertising by its very nature is expensive. To reach a lot of people, you need to spend a lot of money. Direct mail, on the other hand, only targets the prospects you want to reach. Instead of pitching your product to a huge audience of potential buyers, you aim your sales message only at prospects most likely to buy.

3. Breaks through the clutter
Your ad can easily get lost among dozens of competing ads in a trade newspaper. Your sales message is also easily forgotten on radio or television unless you repeat it many times, which is expensive. But a simple letter, addressed to your prospect by name and arriving on her desk in the morning mail (which she must open), cuts through the media clutter and gets her attention.

4. Measurable ROI
Direct mail is one of the best mediums for measuring the return on your marketing dollar (or pound or yen). Simply code your business reply cards, and count how many return to you in the mail. Then calculate how many of those replies generate a sales meeting or a sale. Now you know immediatelyand exactlyhow effective your mailing has been. Direct mail numbers never lie.

5. Predictable
One advantage of knowing the success rates of your past mailings is that you can predict the success of future mailing. If you mail the same package with the same offer to a similar group of prospects at the same time of year, you can predict how many responses you will receive, and how many of those will translate into sales.

6. Can be improved through testing
Because you can measure your direct mail results, you can also test your mailings. Test one package against another, one list against another, one offer against another, and you’ll discover what works and what fails. That way you’ll spend your marketing dollars where they are most effective (without relying on guess work or hunches).

7. Immediate
General advertising builds brand awareness. Sales brochures inform. But a direct mail letter asks for action now. So if you need to generate sales leads, and don’t have time to wait for your ad to appear in “IT Buyers Quarterly,” send a direct mail letter and wait a week or so for a response.

Alan is a business-to-business direct mail copywriter and lead generation consultant. As President of Sharpe Copy, Inc. (http://www.sharpecopy.com), Alan specializes in helping businesses generate leads, close sales and retain customers, using cost-effective, compelling direct mail and email marketing. Alan also uses his direct mail advertising services to help charities raise funds and raise awareness of their causes, using fundraising letters.

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Who wouldn’t like to reach 96% of their target market with one business to business marketing plan? According to a survey published in the September 1, 2005 issue of “Electronic Design” magazine, it can be done. When asked, “Where do you find the most useful information about new products and technology?” the respondents ranked print magazines (54%), Web searches (23%, Google primarily), and E-mail newsletters (19%, which includes RSS feeds) as the top three sources. This covers 96% of the bases, relegating trade shows (2%) and word of mouth (2%) to being almost inconsequential. This comes as good news for anyone using business to business marketing for lead generation.

These numbers show that print is roughly equal to the Internet in value; you can’t neglect either without significantly hindering your marketing campaign. Of the electronic half of the marketing publicity equation, Internet searches on Google account for a slightly larger percentage. However, unless done correctly, simply posting optimized” press releases on the Web will not necessarily land a company on the first page of a search.

Most companies have done some search engine optimization (SEO) for their site, so the playing field is level. Taking optimization to the next level, a marketing or public relations firm must generate optimized releases and articles that go out on major wire services with embedded links to the relevant pages on a client’s website. And they should be syndicated with RSS content feeds to increase visibility with new audiences.

Rounding out a close third are Internet newsletters. In particular, RSS newsletters are quickly becoming an excellent marketing tool as this medium makes it easy to display high-quality, relevant news on a company’s Website, and to syndicate its news and content elsewhere.

Just as for news releases, though, anything written for RSS must employ all available SEO techniques so critical for visibility when a prospective customer is searching your keywords. Once correctly optimized, major search engines seek out RSS feeds and view them as legitimate news sources.
Here lies one of the greatest strengths of any marketing publicity effort: that customers readily recognize the editorial copy of electronic or print media outlets as fairly objective arbiters of the “real” story. For this reason, editorial copy is read six times more than advertising, according to some studies.

Without print, optimized press releases and RSS feeds, there will be gaping holes in your business to business marketing strategy and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get to the 96% saturation level. But with the right online marketing plan, lead generation should more than take care of itself.

By John Elliott. Founder of Power PR, a business to business marketing firm based in Torrance, CA. http://www.powerpr.com/why_business_to_business_marketing.html
Power PR specializes in marketing publicity using both offline and online news media. Contact John at 3711 Lomita Blvd., Suite 200, Torrance, CA 90505; (310) 787-1940; fax (310) 787-1970; on the Web at http://www.powerpr.com

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