7 Best Practices for Building Lead Generation Campaigns that Get Results

The Pressure is Building for CPA, Consulting and Other Professional Services Firm Marketers to Move from Branding to Lead Generation

The pressure is on … can you feel it?

I’m talking about the pressure that comes when a CPA, consulting or other professional services firm realizes that their marketing program needs to shift gears away from spending on branding and more on marketing activities that have a direct and measureable ROI.  General George Patton once said that “pressure creates diamonds”, so the diamonds I’m going to talk about in this post are those that come from lead generation campaigns.

A lead generation campaign is more than just a set of activities to fill the top of a sales funnel with prospects. It’s a set of activities that takes place over a finite period of time, with specific objectives, a budget, and a tactical plan. It’s designed upon recognizing that sales – especially complex accounting or consulting sales - need to be built upon relationships developed and nurtured over time.

Lead generation campaigns require planning and marketing technology in order to drive results. But I’m not going to talk about lead gen campaign mechanics or tactics. Instead, I’d like to offer my observations and insights on best practices for building lead generation campaigns that produce diamonds.  Here are seven key elements for building campaigns that create results: 

1. A great idea built on a critical need or issue

It’s really critical to put yourself into your prospect’s shoes and look at issues from their perspective … not what you think their perspective should be! Lead gen campaigns should be built on offering solutions to what’s keeping your client and prospects up at night and not on what you wish to sell to them.  When’s the last time you canvassed your prospects to see what’s on their mind? If you have a sales or BD staff, what are they bringing to you in the way of intelligence when they’re taking the pulse of the people and firms they’re talking to?

The greater their pain, the stronger your campaign.

2. A partner willing to champion the lead gen effort

If there’s not a partner in charge of the lead gen campaign, then immediately stop.

Lead generation is not and should not be the exclusive provenance of a marketing department, especially in professional services. Without strong buy in and strong participation in every aspect of the lead gen campaign from a partner willing to champion the effort, the likelihood that it will be less than effective is very high.

This doesn’t mean that the partner needs to be deep in the weeds of a lead gen campaign, but they sure do need to be deeply involved in setting goals and objectives, campaign planning and monitoring progress and results. The ultimate accountability for lead generation lies at the feet of a partner, not your marketing department.

3. Someone assigned to the task of doing prospect interface and sales

In order to do a great lead gen campaign, you need to have great people responsible for the sales process. At some point in the campaign, phone calls will need to be either fielded or made. Sales roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined, and it’s a sound policy to get your sales resources involved in the campaign planning and design from the get/go, rather than assigning them a call or lead list at some point after the campaign is underway.

One of the toughest questions you’ll need to address in planning the campaign is when to hand off the lead nurturing process from the marketing department to your sales resource. 

4. Measurable goals and objectives

One of the first orders of business in the very first meeting you have about the campaign is to define the goals and objectives for the campaign. How long is it going to run? What are the sales goals? How do these goals translate into number of engagements needed? How do the number of engagements needed relate to qualified leads? How do qualified leads relate to the number of people responding to the offers we’re making? 

It’s impossible to develop a sound tactical plan for the campaign without asking and answering these questions. In terms of strategies, tactics and costs, a campaign with a goal of $1 million in new business within 6 months is going to look and act a lot different from one that has goals of $50k in one year.

5. Three different types of offers

We all want the quickest and easiest path to making a sale, but all too often what happens is we sacrifice results for speed and ease. That’s why one shot offers for a “free 30 minute consultation” or “contact us now” don’t work very well. You may be more than willing to give away 30 minutes of your time, but your prospects may not be sales ready or willing to share their situation before they know who you are.

Prospects need to be warmed and developed slowly, and a great lead gen campaign is designed to do just that. It may start with a “no risk offer” like a whitepaper or a checklist; progress to a “low risk offer” like a webinar or seminar, then move to a “direct sales” offer like the 30 minute consultation, and finally, move to the appointment and engagement stage..

Sure, it’s a slow build and yes, I know that you’re impatient to make the cash register ring sooner rather than later, but here’s a question for you to ponder since right now, you’re somebody’s prospect: when’s the last time you responded to a free consultation or an offer for a sit down appointment?

Hmmm…. I thought so. The answer is either “never”; or only if your issue or pain was so immediate that it was a matter of the offer appearing at the right time and place .

6. Multi-channel promotional tactics

Great lead gen campaigns need promotion of the offers … lots and lots and lots of promotion over an extended period of time.  Most of your lead gen campaign plan will be focused on the types of tactics and the timing of their execution over the life of the campaign. You’ll want to use a combination of inbound and outbound marketing tactics to promote your offers, ranging from blogging to social media to email and more.

The marketing department’s primary responsibilities in a lead gen campaign will be to design, publish and execute the tactical components of the lead gen campaign, and to monitor results of the different tactics employed. This is where best practices for SEO, SEM, blogging, landing pages, use of social media, your email newsletter, and so many more different tools need to be integrated into the campaign’s infrastructure.

PS – this is not easy, nor does it come at no cost. All of the new marketing channels like blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have not made marketing easier for your firm. In fact, they’ve made it significantly more confusing and complicated.

7. Lead segmentation, nurturing and automation

Now we’re at the Marketing 401 level of what makes for a great lead gen campaign. As a side note, only a very, very few professional services firms are at this level of marketing sophistication, but I think that it’s important to put lead segmentation, nurturing and automation up on the table for discussion.

A part of great lead gen campaigns on the horizon is using automated lead generation technology to reach a segmented subset of prospects with the right message at the right time of the relationship.  Here’s an example: Your lead gen campaign starts off with a no risk offer for a whitepaper that requires a form, and on that form, you ask for job title. That starts the process of enabling a targeted and segmented lead nurturing campaign, where owners get a series of emails over time with a message that’s different from the series of emails that the CFO get.

These emails are set up before the campaign is ever launched, and timed to be delivered after the first form is completed. At the beginning of the relationship, you’ll want to send educational information and materials, and stay away from any advertorial and sales messages. Then, you’ll send out your low risk offer – a set at a webinar or seminar, and you can make an assumption that if someone has taken both your no and low risk offers, they’re probably interested in what you have to say. Finally, you can automate and send out your direct sales offer for a free consultation or evaluation, with the expectation that the prospect has warmed to you by virtue of the fact that they have requested and received your thought leadership.

Technologies like those offered by HubSpot, InfusionSoft, Eloqua and Marketo offer products for automating lead nurturing, and they all have the ability to hook into CRM software for an even more extensive lead management capability.

Automated, segmented lead nurturing is a pretty sophisticated marketing approach, but with the right technology and planning, it’s possible to do.

Pressure Makes Diamonds – George Patton

Over the next several years, Managing Partners, niche practice leader and Marketing Officers are going to go to seminars and workshops, and hear presentations from guys like me about lead generation. You’ll learn that more and more of your completion will be spending more and more of their marketing budget on lead gen, rather than on branding. You’ll hear about the infrastructure you need, how much it costs, and what you should expect in the way of a return on your investment.

In a nutshell, you’ll feel the pressure to move more and more into the world of lead gen and lead gen campaigns. But like Patton said, pressure, creates diamonds. But in order to make a diamond, you need sustained pressure over time.

Perhaps the timing is right to start squeezing your marketing budget for lead generation right now!