Most marketing executives will have lead generation close to the top of their list of goals in 2010; however generating quality sales leads has never been harder, or easier - depending on your strategy.

Careful consideration of a lead generation strategy for 2010 will reduce risk of the following; weak lead flow, poor quality leads, sales blaming marketing, sales doing lead generation, products failing to achieve potential, getting fired, fund-raising challenges, getting sold under-value, and finally running out of cash and corporate death.

How can Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment help?

• By identifying buyer-persona goals, problems, and relevant issues, we can connect buyers to how products are used to create value. Creating remarkable online content that conveys clear messaging around relevant capabilities and appropriate keywords will help you get found on the Internet, engage buyer persona's and increase inbound lead-flow.
• Creating one message and set of sales tools that can be reused across the company by sales and marketing, in the Internet site, blogs, .pdf's, white-papers and in sales conversations; creates clarity, congruence and amplifies the message.
• Capturing proof points or evidence of client success and integrating them into marketing material and sales conversation establishes credibility and believability.

How do you rate your own messaging?

1. How well do you think your messaging connects with buyer needs?
2. Do you have any issues with multiple messages in use across the business - is the sales team all presenting the same message or are they wasting time and effort making up their own presentations?
3. Are your customer success stories all documented and  structured around value-creation capabilities. Are they readily available to your prospects and clearly understood by direct and channel sales teams?

The following client-brief discusses how Messaging Alignment and Inbound Marketing strategy work together.

An AMC client announced a new product to supplement existing offerings and wanted to generate leads and market buzz around their product. The company website, like that of many technology companies, was highly product-centric and traditional marketing techniques and PR placements were ineffective; they tried Pay Per Click campaigns, but generated few inbound leads.

We were engaged to help align sales and marketing messaging and improve sales performance.

Step 1 was to conduct a Sales and Marketing Alignment Workshop, where we brainstormed and developed the following messaging structure.

• Buyer persona goals, needs and issues identified,
• Product and company capabilities were matched against buyer goals/needs in Buyer-Relevant Messaging Templates,
• Best-practices diagnostic questions and buyer-vision questions were added to help sales people qualify the buyer and envision using the products,
• Capabilities were extracted from the templates to create a Messaging Architecture to drive Internet and collateral messaging.

Step 2 was to integrate the new messaging into the Website and collateral, transforming it from product-centric to customer/problem-centric.

Step 3 HubSpot was recommended for blogging, analytics and creating landing pages. The client began an Inbound Marketing strategy including blogging, webinars, social media integration, email campaigns and lead nurturing.

Step 4 we conducted our Selling in the Internet Age classroom sales training and Performance Support program to train the sales team to use the new messaging and develop consultative selling skills.

As a result of these combined efforts and a tremendous amount of work from the small marketing team, the client is generating hundreds of new high quality leads per month and achieving Google front page rankings for many of their keywords.

In Summary:

Marketers wishing to improve lead generation should aim to develop messaging that is buyer-relevant and structured around how products are used to create value. By integrating proof points that support relevant capabilities into the messaging structure, along with solution summaries that capture the nature of the buyers problem, resolution and value; marketers are able to create a maintainable messaging architecture for use across the company and with partners, that adapts with feedback over time and drives Inbound Marketing lead generation strategy.

Please register for our Webinar with HubSpot on Monday 25th January 2010, to learn how to help clients generate more leads & close more sales by offering inbound marketing and sales and marketing alignment services. In this webinar, Marketing and PR agencies will learn how to offer services that help clients:

• 

  Align sales and marketing messaging
• Set lead generation service level agreements for their marketing teams. 
• Establish systems that helps marketing teams increase sales productivity. 
• Establish reporting systems for accountability.
• Establish feedback loops from sales, so marketing can improve impact of marketing activities on revenue growth