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How to Optimize Websites to land B2B Deals with Bill Leake

Digital Marketers wanting to land B2B deals are often optimizing for the wrong metrics, focused solely on conversion rate and getting low-quality leads. You’re doing it wrong! That’s why I interviewed my friend and seasoned B2B expert, Bill Leake, to discuss the most common mistakes in b2b marketing and how to optimize your website to land b2b deals the right way.

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Peep: So many people that want to B2B deals are actually optimizing for the wrong metric. Bill: Most digital marketers are really just focused on 50000 people hit my web site and gosh my web site conversion rate is 2 percent. I need to get it to 3 percent.
Peep: Hey guys I'm here with my friend Bill Leake.
He is a seasoned B2B expert and I was just chatting to him about optimizing for B2B. And you were telling me that so many people that want B2B deals are actually optimizing for the wrong metric. Bill: A lot of times we see teams that are over optimizing for what's taking place on the website or get to the web form or you know get good contact info which is a good start. But that ultimately might still be one month, four months, two years before there's actually a revenue event. Peep: What kind of deal size we're talking about here? Bill: You know it typically... Deal size tends to be correlated with time and length of the sales process. The smaller the deal size the more likely even in B2B you could have a very rapid transaction something within a few days to a few weeks. Typically once the deal size gets up into the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people are taking longer to make the decision. And it might involve several different individuals. Peep: Right. So you get a lead in and that was actually the deal is happening off line. There are sales people involved. Bill: Yes. Peep: And so when people are optimizing to get the let's say the lead in. So what's wrong with that? Bill: Well they may be getting the right person. I mean I can easily get leads and we both know that if we want to maximize conversion rate we take out an ad word that says free bags of money and we have a landing page and on it says give me your data and I'll send you a free bag of money or whether you send the money or not. I mean who knows. But you're getting a lot of leads but are those really leads. Peep: So what should you do? Bill: You actually want to do a little bit of qualification on the landing page and in the ad copy if you're selling e-mail marketing software and your niche is targeted to people who have a list of more than 100000 people do you really want the names of people who are looking for MailChimp? Or is that just going to waste the time of your sales reps. So you want to actually decrease your conversion rate a little bit. In the early stages of the journey. So you're not bringing in lots of what are effectively bad leads we'll just waste the time of your sales force? Peep: One of the things that work for our agency was on the lead generation form we added a dropdown for what is your budget for this project and the minimum was like 10k or whatever. And we got instantly got rid of people with no money? Bill: I mean we want to help you do a lot of good good work in the industry. Giving away free stuff for people with no money. The goal is to grow them into people with money so that they can write your check someday. Peep: Right right. So what other common mistakes they are seeing when people do B2B marketing optimization Bill: We see a lot of times were the the people responsible for conversion and for the Web site are not getting the data back from the eCRM system they're not getting it back from the the ActOn the Infusionsoft the Marketo. They may not be pulling data back from Salesforce.com or whatever they're using PipeDrive, ZOHO, on the low end and really you want to figure out of the things that enter the funnel, which are the ones that are making it further down the journey and getting close to a revenue event. And think about conversion optimization really is maybe 12 different conversions that occur down the process some of which occur post web. What kind of tracking would you typically want to set up there you'd want to have every single touch tracked ideally? So from first first contact on the Web site or even even where they were being marketed to with the display ad or something else out there. And then every time they're seeing something digitally. And then also you know did they attend a seminar. You know how many how many e-mails did they get. Which ones did they respond to? How many? So you're able to take that whole data set and it really is it does turn into a big data problem. And that's why in marketing automation they have all this lead scoring and those kinds of things. And most digital marketers are kind of blithely unaware of all that stuff. They're really just focused on you know 50000 people hit my Web site and gosh my Web site conversion rate is 2 percent. I need to get it to 3 percent. Peep: Sure. So we have this data silo problem where we have the CRM here and then we have live chat here and web analytics here and email marketing. So how do you make all of them talk to her. Bill: Now they're there is there is going to be a problem with dirty data? There are bunch of different databases out there. Google Analytics is probably not the single source of truth if you're in B2B unless you're selling stuff on the website. So you have to you have to figure out which is our which is our source of truth and get all those datasets into one database. We're possible with all those codes and then look at it and see what can we learn from them? Peep: Do you use customer data platform, CDPs, for this? Bill: You can you can I mean some of. Those I think are going to be much better a couple of years from now than where they are now they're being they're being oversold with a lot of hype you kind of look at those high curves they are kind of near the top of it right now. So I mean heck we do a lot of Excel, crazy Excel.
You know Google's Data Studio is not bad for some of this stuff.
You can you can you can throw some things into a statistical program. I mean the key thing is really thinking through what are the stages of a journey? When you call a funnel and then kind of where does the data live in each of those stages? And sometimes it actually takes a couple years before you actually assemble the data set to have statistical significance. Peep: Right right. And so you want to track if they initiate life at track to make a phone call through the website right. We have integrated call tracking. Are chat leads better than website leads? Are phone leads better than chat leads? And generally the answer is yes to both the more intimate the event. Where a human's getting closer to a human and it's an interactive natural conversation. The more people are likely to take the next step in doing business.

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About The Pe:p Show

The Pe:p Show is a series of short and to the point videos. Topics that I’m covering go way past conversion stuff – it’s about optimizing all the things: your life, health, relationships, work, and business. I will also be interviewing industry peers on various topics like digital marketing, growth hacking, and more.

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How to Optimize Websites to land B2B Deals with Bill Leake

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