The B2B Refinery^® Methodology: Sales and Marketing Efficiency through Strategic Lead Generation and Lead Management

The B2B Refinery Methodology addresses the universal challenges companies face when implementing lead generation and lead management capabilities:

•	Contact Strategy. What is the most efficient form of contact, both inbound and outbound, for generating demand, converting inquiries into leads, and converting leads into sales? The contact strategy must consider every method of contact in marketing, post-sales, and sales and all the variables in the marketplace (e.g., buying potential, purchase probability, and depth of interest). With new methods of contact emerging and old methods evolving, B2B companies need a conceptual framework that can adapt to the ever-changing possibilities.Click here to learn more.
•	Dialogue Strategy.  Because the information needs of prospects change as they investigate a solution, B2B companies need a strategy to map pre-sales questions and content to the appropriate stage of the Business Buying Cycle.  This strategy must make relevance the center of communications, take full advantage of Digital Dialogue, and deploy respectful but practical privacy policies. Click here to learn more.
•	Management Strategy. The complexity of B2B requires a new approach to address staff specialization, coordination, and consolidation. This same complexity also makes measuring ROI and analyzing cause and effect difficult. As a result, efforts to improve lead generation and lead management processes and to allocate these resources more effectively can create unexpected inefficiencies. The B2B Refinery Methodology offers a proven approach for increasing ROI on these investments. Click here to learn more.
•	Information Strategy. The sophisticated Contact Strategies, Dialogue Strategies, and Management Strategies depend on a comprehensive information strategy. In the B2B Refinery, our vision centers on a centralized set of streamlined processes powered by high-velocity data exchange enabled by data standards. Scalability and agility occur through automated data hygiene, distillation, inquiry evaluation, solicitation, inquiry routing, lead assignment, and lead tracking. Click here to learn more.

These four practice areas, which we cover extensively in our book, The B2B Refinery, affect all the elements of lead generation and lead management, including budgeting, media strategy, messaging, and CRM systems. Most importantly, this proven methodology improves sales and marketing ROI for Fortune 500^® companies.

Contact Strategy: Targeting, Solicitation, and Inquiry Conversion

An effective contact strategy improves the return on sales and marketing investments through more efficient resource allocation. In this regard, the B2B Refinery Methodology answers three key questions:

•	Where should you drill for oil? Some companies are more likely to buy than others. Some companies will spend more than others. The same factors also apply to the individuals within companies. Because the choices on where to drill for oil affect the downstream efficiency of the telemarketing operation and the sales channels, B2B companies need a framework for prioritizing investment.
•	How much should you spend on each oil well? Over-invest in soliciting a market, and you waste money. Under-invest, and you miss revenue. As with targeting, external market considerations like the probability of purchase and the revenue potential should guide the decision. So should internal factors like the cost of a resource, its scalability, and its effectiveness. In fact, B2B companies need to invest enough in demand generation to optimize the capacity of each relevant sales channel. Unfortunately, in many cases, B2B companies rely heavily on a scarce, costly resource like salespeople to generate demand. In the B2B Refinery Methodology, marketing stratifies investment with its media strategy and also aligns investment with channel capacity. In the process, sales channels spend less time looking for opportunities and more time closing deals that matter.
•	What’s the most efficient method for refining the raw crude into gasoline? Not all of the companies who express interest deserve equal treatment. Many will never buy. Some will buy soon. Others will spend a great deal of money. Which inquiry deserves a field sales resource? Which should a lower cost channel follow up on? Which warrant a telemarketing call? Which need further low-cost development via email and the web? Efficient contact strategies require B2B companies to triage inquiries and then allocate sales and marketing resources appropriately.

To learn more about the application of the B2B Refinery Methodology to your Contact Strategy, contact us, read our book, or click here to access additional PipeAlign thinking on this topic.

Dialogue Strategy: Making Relevance the Centerpiece of Messaging

When evaluating a product or service, B2B prospects require a complex and evolving set of information that depends on a variety of factors. Large accounts looking at a new category of products from an unknown vendor generally use a committee with individual information requirements. Loyal small business customers upgrading a familiar product require very little information. In all cases, what informatoin these accounts want changes as they investigate a given product or service.

Good salespeople understand this principle. Too often, however, marketing does not tailor information consistently to an audience, in spite of all the “one-to-one” hubbub. Irrelevant information, however, reduces the effectiveness of demand generation efforts and the conversion of inquiries into qualified leads, no matter how well-conceived the contact strategy might be. The explosion of channels of information via the web is compounding the problem by numbing customers and prospects with information overload. The growing importance of privacy is Exhibit A.

In this environment, B2B companies must make relevance the centerpiece of their messaging strategy. Creating more relevant marketing information requires knowledge of how business buying behavior affects the information needs of customers. In this regard, information capture must influence content delivery, both for generating interest and for cultivating inquiries.

The integration of marketing databases with email and the web are creating new, powerful possibilities for engaging customers and prospects in a relevant, pre-sales Digital Dialogue. To leverage the scalability of Digital Dialogue, B2B companies must make content web-ready and dialogue-ready and aggressively but respectfully identify customers and prospects throughout all customer-facing operations, regardless of the method of contact.

The B2B Refinery Methodology addresses this emerging and rapidly evolving topic and revisits many key assumptions about the content necessary to generate demand and the tactics for capturing useful information.

To learn more about the application of the B2B Refinery Methodology to your Dialogue Strategy, contact us , read our book , or click here to access additional PipeAlign thinking on this topic.

Management Strategy: Lead Generation ROI

For lead generation to matter, the investments need to improve the overall efficiency of sales and marketing. The B2B Refinery Methodology addresses three key areas of Management Strategy:

•	Capacity Optimization. Every B2B company has limits on its capacity to produce revenue. The marcom team can only create so many campaigns, events, and so much content. The telemarketing operation can only qualify so many leads or make so many cold calls. The sales channels can only close so many deals. Because of the dependencies in B2B organizations, optimization generally requires a precise balance of go-to-market resources. At a simple level, the demand generation investments need to maximize the capacity of the telemarketing operation by supplying a sufficient volume and quality of inquiries. Likewise, the telemarketing operation needs to maximize the capacity of the sales channel by supplying a sufficient quantity of qualified leads.
•	Specialization, Collaboration, and Operational Consolidation. B2B complexity requires staff specialization. The specialization often leads to fragmentation. The fragmentation leads to duplication of effort and various forms of misalignment. To increase sales, B2B companies must consolidate and collaborate. For example, sales should help marketing define a standard for lead quality and then run all potential leads through a single evaluation process. The database marketing function should help other parts of marketing capture customer information properly and flow all customer information into a single marketing database.
•	Pipeline Metrics and Continuous Improvement. B2B complexity makes measuring lead generation challenging. Without proper metrics, however, improvements in one area can lead to overall inefficiencies. The B2B Refinery Methodology normalizes the key pipeline milestones so that companies can put dissimilar methods of contact on a common financial yardstick and analyze cause and effect through the pipeline for process improvement.

To learn more about the application of the B2B Refinery Methodology to your Management Strategy, contact us, read our book, or click here to access additional PipeAlign thinking on this topic.

Information Strategy: Leveraging CRM to Scale Lead Generation Investments

The right Information Strategy scales lead generation and lead management functions. Most large organizations face a similar reality: customer and prospect information exists in many different internal and external systems, in multiple departments. For most B2B products and services, B2B companies interact multiple times with the same account before that account makes a purchase decision. The interactions generally involve two or more people within the account who can influence the decision.

This combination of multiple systems and multiple interactions with each account during the purchase process necessitates two guiding principles for efficient lead generation and lead management:

•

Information Velocity. Information velocity enables B2B companies to take rapid, cost-effective action on each inquiry, without the obligation of a single, enterprise-wide system.  The B2B Refinery Methodology uses a spoke and hub model to exchange information, primarily in a twenty-four hour cycle, and then automates the evaluation and assignment of those inquiries.  This approach gives B2B companies an ability to allocate sales and marketing resources with a new level of precision and scale.

•

Information Standards. Information standards for data capture, lead evaluation, lead assignment, and lead tracking make velocity possible through centralized, streamlined automation. Standards also facilitate automation of data hygiene and data distillation processes.

To learn more about the application of the B2B Refinery Methodology to your Information Strategy, contact us, read our book, or click here to access additional PipeAlign thinking on this topic.