Strickland & Company :: B to B Advertising

Effective Leads Management

The top two methods of response to trade journal advertising are (1) toll free telephone numbers and (2) visiting the advertiser's web site. The first step in managing leads is being able to accept them. A professional, informative, easy-to-navigate web site is a prerequisite and a dedicated 800 number is a good investment. Here are some other tips:

If a company is advertising in more than one publication, in addition to a special 800 number, they should have a separate web and e-mail address devoted to each publication. This can be as simple as adding a single numerical digit at the end of the current address. By doing so the client can easily distinguish which web site click-throughs and e-mail inquiries are coming from which publication.
All incoming phone calls to customer service or order entry should be qualified by simply asking the caller:

how they found out about the company?
if they saw a company advertisement do they remember which publication?

Offer some kind of incentive to your personnel rewarding that person whom collects the most complete data for a given time period.
Leads from all sources should be entered into a prospect database. By doing so the company can then use the database to further implement their marketing program in several ways.

the contact information can be use in direct mail campaigns
the contact information can then be distributed to the sales organization for further follow-up (see #5 below for further information).
we can begin to evaluate the effectiveness of each publication and advertisement and adjust our strategies accordingly.

Several companies we have worked with in the past have taken the following steps of qualifying their leads before sending them to the sales force:
1. Since many sales people do not like using unqualified leads, the company assigns a knowledgeable individual to call the person who had responded to the communications program. In some cases this individual was someone whom had retired from the company, was extremely knowledgeable regarding product applications, and worked from their home part time.
2. That person merely calls the inquirer and qualifies them with regards to which application they intend to use the product. The employee then informs the inquirer that they will be contacted by a sales representative shortly.
3. The employee then updates the database. Leads are then categorized as to the nature of the additional follow-up required.
4. Several reports are issued from the database:
  1. Field reports are sent, as needed, to each sales person containing all the inquiries and their priority within his territory.
  2. A monthly Sales Management report for all sales territories is given to sales management personnel to enable them to supervise their representatives efforts.
  3. A monthly Master report is generated for sales and upper management showing the number of leads for the month and the year for each publication.

Many of these ideas may sound like common sense, but our experience tells us many companies fail to implement this phase of their communications program effectively. We have had clients whom have implemented these steps and achieve a 30% leads to sales conversion rate. For more information regarding this topic, please give us a call at 704.537.9008 and ask for Kirby or contact us.

"Why should you advertise?"

Because the companies which do the best job in communicating their products or services to their markets always have the dominant market share. We have seen this time and time again with our clients and it has been proven many times in independent studies. The benefits are clear.

Increased sales:

Effective communications reaches a broader audience than a salesperson making calls ever could. Most publications' audiences of 40,000 - 100,000 readers will see your advertisement every month.
With proper follow-through by the sales force to those inquiring, advertisers see substantial sales increases.

Lower cost of sales: An effective communications program pre-sells the customer on your company and your brand, so that the sales person can close more sales more quickly.
Higher market capitalization: Shareholder's equity (book value) makes up less than a third of total market cap for most companies, including the Fortune 500. The rest is "intangible assets" like patents, customer lists and brands. A strong brand image is the most highly leveragable asset any company has.

Annual Marketing Communications Planning

Up front research and planning is crucial to the marketing success. At Strickland & Company, the typical communications plan includes:

Research - from primary and secondary sources: the market, the competition, product strengths and weaknesses, and sales force strengths and weakness.
Objectives - what the company hopes to achieve in total and what we hope to achieve with our communications.
Creative Positioning - before we launch creative we develop and overall concept of how our communications are going to differentiate our client from their competitors. This initial positioning strengthens (or becomes) the companyÕs brand/identity, and everything we produce for the client builds the brand.
Communications Recommendations - identification of those items which will help the client achieve their objectives: advertising, sales literature, direct mail, CD-ROM, web site, press releases, feature stories, etc.
Media Analysis and Recommendations - using audited information, we analyze every publication or source in which we are considering advertising. Factoring out by job title and SIC, we can identify which media outlets are going to most cost effectively reach our target audience (Cost per Thousand).
Budget - every item recommended to be produced by the agency should get a budget. We have been in business for a long time and we have a pretty good idea how much our creative execution is going to cost. It is up to us, very early on in the process, to tell the client if a budgeted item is going to cost more than originally anticipated.

A final note about budgeting: Two types of budgeting are most common in
marketing communication plans.

Percent of Sales

Pro: Easier to get commitment in advance based on sales projections
Con: Arbitrary, and likely to be too large or too small

Task Method:

Pro: More accurate, based on expected requirements
Con: Changing market conditions can change needs

In either case, we recommend that flexibility be built in to the plan by including a contingency fund and reviewing the plan regularly, making adjustments as necessary.