By Mike Schultz, Publisher
RainToday Note: The following is an excerpt from Wellesley Hills Group's complimentary white paper, "Making Lead Generation Work For Professional Services". Download the entire white paper for free here.
You've planned ahead for the ROI you hope to achieve with lead generation. You've determined how to offer value in your marketing and selling, and you've created offers and experiences that will deliver that value to your target prospects. You've crafted your target list and decided upon an integrated campaign of multiple touches to your prospects, and you've committed to do this for the long-term because you know that you may have to wait for your prospects' elusive times of need.
Now, you just pull the trigger, let things happen as you've planned, and a year or so from now you'll have X% new work in your firm. Right?
We wish we could say you're done now. You're not. Planning for lead generation is not the kind of thing that happens one time, with mailings and callings etched in stone for a year ahead. As with any strategic project in a business, you must be able to calibrate, adjust, and refresh your position based on what is working.
When it comes to direct marketing and business development, some tactics work for some companies better than others… and you never know what they are until you test them.
What You Should Measure And Test
From a micro perspective, you should always measure the level of response you receive from mail, email, calling, and other campaigns. That's the only way you will know if one method or another is working.
One caveat: keep in mind that, in an integrated campaign, these methods of communication actually work together as a team. Be careful in your analysis, and don't impulsively scrap one touch-point that may be quietly setting up good conditions for another method to work. But if it's clear that something you try gains no response and does nothing to help other parts of your campaign succeed, you'll need to revisit that part of the plan.
Beyond measuring the response to a campaign, you should set up tests to see how what you're doing might be improved in the next iteration. Good marketers are always testing a control group with a test group.
What do good marketers test?
- Tactics
- Headlines
- Copy
- Offers
- Lists
- Timing
- Mail (or email) package
- Tactic integration (e.g. the effect of calling with mail vs. mail alone)
- Price (for entry services such as seminars and research)
In one Wellesley Hills Group lead generation test to attract seminar participants, sending invitations in an envelope outperformed regular letter campaigns by just over 300%. In a telephone campaign, sharing “best practices for website marketing” in a specific industry outperformed a campaign focused on “analysis of your website” by 2 to 1.
With information like this, we are able to move forward knowing more about how to spend our clients' resources, and how to craft our clients' campaign strategy. If you're not testing and measuring the results of your lead generation campaigns, you won't know how to increase response for the value-based offers you use.
From a macro perspective, the best companies measure items such as:
Lead Metrics
- Responses to offers
- Leads added to the pipeline
- Prospects-in-Progress (long-term leads)
- Stages of deals in pipeline
- Deals closed
- Expected value of deals
Brand Metrics
With pre-and-post tests in the target market every 6 months:
- Brand recognition
- Brand articulation (Do they know what you do?)
- Brand memory (Will they remember you at the elusive time of need?)
- Brand preference (Would they prefer to engage you, should the need arise?)
- Brand competition (Who else do they think of?)
- Verbatim comments from prospects in the market
With testing and measurement, leaders of professional services businesses can know where to focus their actions and resources, and those of their teams, to make the most difference.
By using both micro-level, campaign-specific measures and tests, and by tracking macro level, big-picture metrics, you will know what's working, what's not, and how to focus your energy on constantly improving your lead generation and marketing ROI.
TAKEAWAY: Measuring, testing, and improving your lead generation activities produce better ROI. It's worth the effort.
To read the rest of the complimentary white paper, "Making Lead Generation Work For Professional Services," click here.
Mike Schultz is the Publisher of RainToday.com and an advisor to service businesses worldwide. He can be reached at mschultz@raintoday.com.
Inspired to agree, disagree, or otherwise comment? We hope you will! Write a letter to RainToday.com here. Selected letters may be posted on the site.