The website is one of the most important sources for sales leads.  Leads from the site are the result of a lot of effort and marketing investment in advertising, search engine optimization and content development.  But according to a new study published on eMarketer, this investment may be yielding lower returns than you think.

According to a study done by the social login platform Janrain users are reluctant to register to each new site that they buy from.  According to the research, 88% of online buyers had at some point intentionally left registration information blank or used incorrect information when signing up for a new account at a website in 2011.  More alarmingly, this phenomenon is intensifying, growing by 12% from 2010.

What can marketers do?  First, design shorter forms.  Do you really need all of that data about country, address, phone etc.?  Can you qualify it from other sources?  Research shows that users are more likely to leave their information on shorter forms than on longer ones.  While there is no rule of thumb on how many fields are optimal, fields such as phone number are a major deterrent for users.

Second, inbound marketing should only provide some of your leads.  Smart, data-driven outbound marketing for users who are likely to engage with your marketing message can be an effective way to drive sales and fill your pipeline with the leads you need.

Don’t just spray and pray.  In outbound marketing, strong predictive analytics is key in determining which prospects are going to be receptive to your message, and can generate higher response.

Even if your inbound campaigns are getting a lot of leads, many of them are likely to prove worthless.  Changing your forms and starting a rigorous data-driven active lead generation can help you get quality, not just the quantity.

 or, Letting “Data find Data”..

As Web data grows exponentionally and access to it opens up to users and machines, the posture of both consumers and business users changes.

10 years ago, it was customary to say that while you lay back watching TV, you lean forward surfing the Web in an interactive “search” mode. Few years passed and with such a deluge of content, washing away any user in an endless stream of data, we have all been pushed back to a “lean back” mode.

It started with consumers, creating the phenomenon dubbed UGC just 5 years ago, making content choice and discovery a challenging task. That challenge brought about a new type of solution we all use passively (and quite heavilly) today called “recommendations”. Many sites and services use recommendation engines to lead us through the site on the road to stickiness and increased traffic.

Just 5 years ago, I have founded and developed one of those “recommenders” services with the main insight being “people don’t know what they are looking for on the Web anymore. They just want to be entertained”. The social boom have taken this a step forward – We rely on our friends and the wisdom of the site recommender service to find what we are “looking for”.

 The evolution of that phenomenon now unfolds with the Consumerization of the enterprise world and the use of social cloud data for business purposes. Very similar to consumers “just wanting to be entertained”, it is safe to say that the average sales executive “Just wants to sell….”. Anything, to anybody who is truly interested!

The Web has certainly shifted marketing and a lot has been written about it. The daily effect on marketing and sales is huge – Spending time on Facebook and linkedin suddenly bacame a professional task for many of us (Well, some part of it at least-:). In search of leads and customer data, marketers are sifting through endless data from multiple and growing list of sources. So B2B marketers are still leaning forward agressively!

Consumers’ standard of living and efficiency have undoubteldy improved. dramatically. We lean back and our apps and services go fetch us new songs, notify us when a good deal is offered and even find us new friends. In short, they know our history and help us improve our future (or at least enjoy better today). Can this work for businesses too? Well, it can, but it requires some better apps too.

A company’s history is normally a rich but complex set of events. It involves many constituents with numerous points of view (What should be our strategy? What is our strategy? Who is our best customer?- ask 10 employees and you probably get 10 answers).

So, as much as its hard to find good data outside the organization, its even more challenging to decide what you should look for. The good thing is that most companies have some pretty rich historical datasets internally and almost as rich a footprint in the cloud.

If we follow the success of the consumer Web experience, the next evolution of B2B marketing should be in letting this data work for us. Or as brilliantly written by Jeff Jonas of IBM: “Data finds data”.

With all respect given to marketing’s ability to segment, target and analyze the market “manually”, If we really want to find what we are looking for (new customers!) maybe all we need to do is lean back and let our past (customers) tell us where to look for them.

Now that is an app worth waiting for….

There is often low correlation between what people ‘need’ and what people ‘want’.

As my marketing professor explained to me once, many people ‘want’ to buy the latest gadget, a flat panel TV or a fancy car, but what most people ‘need’, yet few have, is a good mattress. People can go on complaining for months about their mattress without doing anything about it. But when an upgraded tablet comes out to the market, they sure do run to the nearest store to put their hands on it, even though the new gadget wouldn’t help them to get a better sleep at night or be more focused at work.

Since companies are run by people, they do not act any differently. The market has endless amount of services and products that can enhance (or at times revolutionize) the productivity of businesses.  If you are selling one of those products or services, there are many businesses out there that may either ‘need’ or ‘want’ your product, or both. Placing your product in front of those who ‘want’ it is easy. But what about finding those who ‘need’ your product? That is a bit more complicated.

Some may also call the ‘need’ state the “window of dissatisfaction” – the crucial time between the phase where a consumer is satisfied with what he has, and the phase where he both realized he needs something new and decided to search for it. The time window between the two phases is the window of dissatisfaction and whoever will be first to approach the potential buyer during this time window, is high likely to close the deal.

So now you must be asking, “so how can we find customers in the ‘need’ phase?”.

Demand Generation Economics

The 1^st generation of demand-generation was mostly around buying lists or directories. Enough was said about why general lists are not working anymore. A spam email campaign, no matter how intelligently you will optimize it, will usually generate poor click rate, not to mention the final conversion rate which will most likely end up well below 1%. Cold calling is not much better. General lists, even when narrowed down or segmented, still require a lot of manual work of email spamming, cold calling, follow ups, filtering and so on. This creates overhead that costs business a lot of money and consumes valuable time and resources. Then, aside from lists there is also the option of spending millions on running a campaign on national TV. That may be good if you are Nike or McDonalds, but not if you are a software vendor selling software for workforce management for businesses with a specific profile.

The 2^nd generation of demand-gen, online marketing tools such as google ads and others, is definitely more accurate, cost effective and fun. Simply place ads in front of people who are searching for your product or something related to it, and direct this audience to your website. You can also invest in search engine optimization to generate ‘organic’ traffic to your website for ‘free’. The 2^nd generation of demand-gen can indeed be very efficient and even cost effective yet it still has one major flaw – it works only for products that people search for. But as said above, people usually search for things they ‘want’ rather than ‘need’. People still don’t search for most of the things they consume. Look at IT managers who constantly look at various technologies and solutions. An IT manager that needs a new and larger server wouldn’t go to google to look for one. Additionally, many managers (not only IT) are not even aware that there is a solution out there that can dramatically improve the efficiency of their organization. This group of people who are in the ‘need’ phase, is way larger than the group of people in the ‘want’ phase. And the 2^nd generation of demand-gen tools wouldn’t help businesses to find these consumers.

Where the future is headed

This calls out for a new generation of demand-gen engines that would be able to find consumers who are in the ‘need’ phase. Intuitively this seems like an extremely challenging task and we indeed haven’t seen any development in this area. But with the right expertise and resources, developing such an engine may actually be very possible. At first, the engine must assemble an accurate profile of the ideal consumer for the given product. This profile should be a breakdown of all the parameters and triggers that characterize a consumer who is highly-receptive to the given product. Once these triggers are well identified and verified, the second step is to scout the entire market for businesses that possess a similar digital profile. This step requires a sophisticated engine that can run a comprehensive web-crawl, digest great amount of data taken from a large range of web sources, to finally pinpoint those businesses who match the desired profile. The end product is a truly targeted list of businesses that are in a need for the given product, whether they are aware of it or not. Consequently, this list will guarantee a much improved conversion rate that will enable businesses to acquire more of their ideal customers, while spending less time, money and resources in doing so.

What makes your sales succeed? You may know some facts related to success in selling your products – age, gender, demographics, geography come to mind first. But these are the simple, above the surface facts. There is a huge hidden iceberg of decision drivers that are much more powerful and direct than these simple rough segmentations. These can be divided into three major groups of drivers:

1. Personal drivers – your customers, whether you are in B2B or B2C business, are first of all people. They have families, careers, assets, wishes and opinions. These shape the decisions they make both in their professional and personal life. As a few examples, a small business owner is much more likely to switch to another mobile operator if his wife and children are already in that operator ; A person is much more likely to buy new insurance after buying a new car, switching a job, etc. ; A company is much more likely to switch an IT vendor after changes in the IT department.
2. Competitive drivers – your competitive positioning is very different with different micro-segments. These are not very apparent to the naked eye, and require thorough analysis to understand and forecast which sales will be made, and which will be lost to a stronger competitor. These insights can also serve to direct your marketing efforts to improve your positioning in places where you are weaker.
3. Situation related drivers – changes in the marketplace occur quite frequently. The first runner to understand these changes and react gains a significant advantage in the marketplace. For instance, a new device in the mobile arena may change the customers’ needs and requirements and this understanding can lead the first operator to understand this to a market advantage. New market segments may open due to such changes, and targeting them efficiently can make a big difference.

Using deep analysis of your company, your competitors and your customers you can harness the power of your customers code™ to make the entire sales process more effective, and better match your customers’ needs.

Sales efforts in the mobile market have significantly evolved over the last few years. Due to market stagnation and saturation, the arena is becoming more and more competitive. An effective acquisition solution is key in today’s mobile operator arena, due to the highly competitive market.

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The problem of measuring the results and overall impact of an acquisition campaign may seem simple at first glance, but mobile operators facing this question discover more and more complicated issues associated with this problem. This post will try to describe the main problems that arise when conducting an acquisition campaign, and trying to measure its results.

What could be simpler? Just measure the ratio between the number of acquisitions, and the number of leads, right?

Wrong… There are numerous factors which complicate this simple measurement method:

1. Seasonal changes – comparing acquisition rates across different times is very problematic. Your reference acquisition rate may be from the Christmas shopping period, and you may be trying to compare it to mid-Q1 results. Market trends and rules change, and results must be compared using A-B testing between competing acquisition flows at the same time.
2. Leads exhaustion – In many cases, there is an urge to pass judgment on the new acquisition process too quickly. Typically, an acquisition process takes weeks to really mature and show reliable results. Giving “1^st day results” from a new campaign is very likely to show only 50% of the true potential – many leads need more time to convert (in some operators 70% of telemarketing sales are made after 3 calls or more) ; as many as 20% of the leads will not answer on the first call attempt ; CSRs take some time to adjust to new flows or leads sources ; and more.
3. Natural drift – there are other acquisition sources working in parallel with your acquisition campaign – ATL campaigns, POS, other campaigns, door-to-door activities, other channels, etc. It may very well be that an overlap between the leads in question and another acquisition channel caused a higher / lower conversion rate to be measured. To neutralize this effect, a control group is needed in parallel with the acquisition campaign.
4. Amount of leads – it is natural to “try a few hundred leads” before a massive campaign decision. Well, with industry acquisition rates ranging around 1.5%, trying only 300 leads will not allow any distinction between 1% conversion, 1.5% or 2.3%. They will all give the same results with very high likelihood (although one is 50% lower than 1.5% conversion, and the other 50% higher). To really distinguish between these figures, 10’s of thousands of leads must be used in each campaign.
5. Measurement inaccuracies – As always with massive operations, small errors might always occur. A few conversions may be missed, a CSR may make a mistake feeding in data, and a closed lead was not always contacted. To overcome these errors, larger numbers of leads are important.

The best advice for measuring acquisition campaigns is to plan the campaign correctly, use enough leads to have a significant statistical sample and to use tools that automate and streamline the measurement process.

The process of leads nurturing is a critical step in acquisition management, however one which is frequently missed by mobile operators. In most industries, sales people spend most of their time performing “leads nurturing”– viewing sales leads not as disposable, one-off cold calls, but rather as an important process that generates interest, buying intentions on the part of the prospect, enriching the prospect profile and looking for the right timing and the right contact channel to approach the lead.

The graph on the left shows a typical result of a mobile telemarketing acquisition campaign. As can be seen, more than half the leads don’t answer the calls (either because the number is invalid or inactive, or simply because they do not answer such calls) ; between 20%-30% of those who answered turn out to be the operator’s subscribers (sometimes due to data problems, sometimes because leads are mostly fixed lines) ; at least another quarter are not in the relevant segment – for instance a business lead when the offer is a private contract ; typically a quarter of the relevant 

leads, in the correct segment who answered the call are interested in the offer – they either agree to receive another call, call back the call center or agree to set a meeting ; and finally – about 20%-30% of those interested actually buy. Overall conversion rate of this process is typically under 1.5%.

Increasing Conversion Through Leads Nurturing

The process of leads nurturing can dramatically increase the resulting conversions by handling the different factors shown in the graph above. Similar to the data an operator has in its CRM on existing subscribers, important information on prospects can streamline and improve the entire telemarketing process. The information for this can be provided from various sources:

• Open web data – places like forums, listings, ads, blogs contain very rich data on many of the prospects, which can be harvested to significantly improve acquisition performance
• Call center past campaigns – during the campaigns, a lot of data is collected on the failed prospects – names, locations, contract information, calls unanswered, and more. This data should be recorded and reused in later campaigns.
• Past CRM data – given the high churn rates in the mobile market, more than 50% of the subscribers in a given country were with at least one other operator in the last 2 years. This provides abundant information on personal details, usage patterns and contract information.
• Other information sources

All this information can now be tamed to improve every step of the acquisition process:

• Telemarketing call setup – the CSR needs to be informed of critical available data before making the call, in order to maximize the amount of relevant, answered calls. First, a good method for screening existing customers is important to reduce the campaign’s negative impact. Secondly, selecting the right customer to call at the right time based on available data significantly increases resulting interest.
• Call scenario data – having key data such as name, region and segmentation of the prospect is key to generate a successful telemarketing call. This data can help the CSR get past the opening sentences and into the actual offers, and thus generate much more interest.
• Sales – bottom line sales ratio is of course dramatically increased when the limiting factors in the graph above are improved.

Effective leads nurturing requires adequate call center systems, integrated with various data sources into a central acquisition data base. Such solutions exist in the market, and have been proven to significantly improve acquisition results in a number of mobile operators.

Telecom operators’ marketing teams are constantly pushed to offering new competitive pricing plans and service innovations in order to attract a very demanding and sought-after audience.

In the quest to increase market share and acquire new customers, using mass media campaigns, operators create a negative effect for their own user base- an effect that is hard to identify and therefore mitigate and solve later.

Introducing a new breed of value-hunting subscribers – The Revolvers!

Any mass-media acquisition campaign using special promotions, that is not personally tailored and directly presented to prospects is also received by your own existing customers. As an operator, you can be sure that they (existing customers) will be quick to understand the underlying message you are giving them. Neglected, they will do 2 things – take advantage of your new proposition by activating a new subscription with the new pricing plan, while losing faith and loyalty to your network and customer care image.

Financially, this has many negative effects on marketing performance – Increased churn (virtually, since the user is still in the network!), reduced ARPU and an increase in the number of inactive lines. Sales, on  the other hand, live well with this phenomenon in the short term – more activations, of any kind, are always welcome there (especially in end of quarter days).

To stop the revolving doors and improve overall customer value and satisfaction, operators should adopt the following strategies:

Direct and personalized acquisition campaigns

Price discrimination is an effective marketing strategy to extract more value from different customers. The Telecom industry is the perfect venue for such a strategy as it offers integrative service packages, where exact functional value is hard to measure. Approaching customers “below the line” and tailoring a value-based offering for each customer profile is the right way to go. It is done effectively in the business segment for years. Evidence shows that in many countries, the consumer market is adopting a similar approach.

“Existing customer comes first” rule

Using BTL channels for direct acquisition approach enables customer value maximization. However, existing customer retention should not be jeopardized.

Operators should adopt a golden rule – An existing customer should always be able to easily move to new price plan, offered to newly joining subscribers. Some operators have even gone further than this, to offer existing customers superior terms in upgrading devices than what they offer new joining subscribers. The main target of that is to stop the revolving doors and lower “revolving churn” rate. Doing that proved very efficient, both in retention and in acquisition, for the long term success of these operators.

Itay Gissin

Customer Retention is important, however, operators globally are facing challenging churn-rates and even in cases where they reduce the churn, operators face market share stagnation and ARPU decline. Operators realize that investing the $ on Retention only keeps the equilibrium between the operators and doesn’t facilitate an opportunity for an innovative and quick operator to improve its market share and ARPU.
Only an effective combination between Retention to Acquisition of new subscribers will put an operator to a direction of healthy growth and improve its investors ROI.
Operators monitor their CPGA, which is the Cost Per Gross Add (also known as SAC – Subscriber Acquisition Cost).

Mintigo has defined the CPGA BER, Acquisition Break-Even Ratio, which is the ratio between a operator CPGA and its ARPU.

Common BER values for European Operators:

Mintigo, the leader in Customer Acquisition, is working with operators globally to reduce the BER and make acquisition much more effective by:

• Increasing the ARPU of targeted prospects
• Increasing the conversion rates
• increasing the effectiveness of the outbound call center
• Providing tools which allow operators to make valuable conversions with reduced end-user subsidies