The Demand Creator Blog

When I started Imagine more than 15 years ago, I had four principles that I used to define what success is. 

• It had to enable me to grow - professionally, financially and personally.
• It had to be a place where its employees could grow - professionally, financially and personally.
• It had to make a mark by impacting the businesses we worked with, enabling them to become better by positively impacting their investors, employees and customers.
• The community around us must become better off because we were there.

I’ve used these principles to guide just about every decision I’ve made since we started. While certainly there have been days (and weeks and months) where I’m sure I could have done better, it is directly responsible for many of the non-typical things we’ve done:

Metrics can either be your best friend or worst nightmare. When things are going well, your life is great, but what happens when they start to go against you? You start to freak out. Our world today is centered around being the top or the best in whatever we do. In business, this is especially true when it comes to websites. If I could guess, I would say one of the biggest metrics you look at when assessing your website is the bounce rate. It might not be the first or second thing you look at, but it’s up there. I could also guarantee that at some point that number has been higher than you anticipated and freaked you out. What if I told you that a higher bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing? Take the opportunity to learn more about what to actually expect with bounces, and make the adjustments you think need to happen. 

What is a bounce rate? 

To put it in simple terms, a bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on your web page and then leave without traveling to another page (or blog) on your site. Most of the time this means they’ve only viewed a single page and then left. 

High Bounce Rate = Bad, Right? 

It depends. What are your website goals? What does your website look like? Usually, if you’re bringing traffic to a single page that doesn’t solicit for any other navigation or if your website is one page, then having a higher bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The same thing goes for blogs because most people come to read that specific content piece and leave. If you have a website that includes more than one page, then a higher bounce rate could indicate something is wrong.

This past year at HubSpot’s Inbound 2019 conference, we were fortunate enough to fly the whole team in to Boston for the week. We were ecstatic to attend and be there for Doug’s session - The Ultimate Sales Manager: Coaching Reps to Coach Themselves. The week went by quickly, the sessions everyone attended either reinforced what we were already doing or inspired us to try something new, and we all (the Imagine team) left Inbound with some key takeaways. No two people had the same impact which meant everyone could bring something different to the table when we got back.

The Imagine Team’s Takeaways

Fiona - Head of Content

I thought one of the most interesting (and obvious in retrospect, as these things often are) tips from Inbound was from Kelsey Raymond. She recommended that content creators should sit in on a sales call at least once a month to hear first-hand what’s keeping potential clients up at night. That way, you’ll be able to keep these concerns in mind when creating content. 

I also found Daniel Waas’ session helpful because he talked a lot about his ideal framework for a webinar. As someone who writes fiction in my spare time, it struck me how much it was like a VERY simplified structure for a novel. This just reinforced that all successful content, no matter the format, has some type of story structure.

On February 1, 2015, in Super Bowl 49, Seattle Seahawks head coach Peter Carroll made a fateful decision that has been recorded by just about everyone (who’s not a Patriots fan) who has a comment on it as not only a bad decision, but possibly the worst decision in the history of sport, or even in the history of decisions. But, was it actually a bad decision.

The Seahawks were trailing the New England Patriots 28-24 with 24 seconds left in the game. The Seahawks had the ball on the Patriots one-yard line on second down, with one of the league’s top rushers, Marshawn Lynch, in the backfield. 

Carroll called a pass, and the rest is history. Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler intercepted the pass, and the Patriots won the Super Bowl, preventing the Seahawks from repeating as champions. Carroll has been lambasted for the decision, often referred to as the worst decision ever made in the history of sports. Yet, the reality is the decision was quite good given the context of the situation and the probability of outcomes. (Don’t argue, it was a good decision and if you still believe it’s bad, read Annie Duke’s book Thinking In Bets to understand why it's not.) 

The reaction to Carroll’s decision is a perfect example of a common term used among professional poker players - resulting. Resulting refers to the action when a poker player creates too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome of decisions or actions that are taken vs. the quality of the decision, at the time the decision is made. In essence, resulting is the act of judging every decision by looking in a rearview mirror.

The world of sales has a big resulting problem that it must address to address a number of vulnerabilities that are dragging on business performance.

Companies are spending more money than ever before on technology applications (and that doesn’t even account for the “free” software that’s been installed). Our Martech Advisory Services group has had a front-row seat from multiple perspectives:

• Designing, building and maintaining our tech stack
• Advising companies on the design of their tech stack
• Deep implementation with a variety of companies to help them drive greater sales velocity

Over the last three years, we’ve seen an explosion in both the choices and active demand for Martech. Three years ago we had to “push” the tech utilization conversation to our clients. We had to demonstrate the business for considering the use of new technology before we could talk about anything specific. Today, we’re getting “pulled” into the conversation.

On one hand, this is good news (at least for us). Businesses, more than ever, understand the need to optimize and accelerate their processes and they understand that new technology is often required to do so.

On the other hand, we started to see that there was some bad news about this as well. Increasingly, organizations viewed technology as “the” solution to a problem. What’s more, in the tech stack analysis we did, we often saw that companies had bigger stacks than ever and were often not utilizing the existing apps they had appropriately and/or were considering new apps to solve problems that their existing tools could solve if they were using them better.

These observations led to a growing hypothesis we wanted to test. The hypothesis is that while there is growing (exploding) demand for new technology, most companies would be better served by improving how they’re implementing their existing tech stacks and processes before adding new tech.

To test this hypothesis we decided to look at how mid-market companies are utilizing a core part of any growth tech stack - their marketing automation platform. So, over the last two months we conducted a fairly in-depth research project. 

Everyone creates content. If I had to guess, I’d say you’ve most likely created at least one piece of content today. Why? Because you want to create engagement. In fact, a primary objective of content is to create engagement. Yet, most content is either unidirectional (blogs, web pages, podcasts, videos, etc.) or very high effort/high cost (social media). This kind of content gets looked at once, maybe twice and then never seen again. You don’t want to bore your audience with the same kind of content over and over. Engagement is better when you can make it participative rather than passive. 

Quizzes are a great way to switch how people engage with your product. They’re often a relatively low-effort way to build participation and enhance engagement (and generate new leads). This form of content is less about reading and watching and more about impact and connection. It means more when people can do things and interact. Quizzes engage more. Your audience is able to engage more of their brain. Sometimes that means it’s more enjoyable, sometimes more memorable, and sometimes it just plants a better seed that will influence your audience at a later time.

Welcome to this edition of Just Say No to Shitty Sales & Marketing; today I’m focused on lead nurturing. No tactic that is more consistently used and important through the entire customer acquisition and success process than email. 

Email is a critical component and in many ways, it's the only channel that we truly, fully own to create a one-to-one communication mechanism. Your ability to master email in general and lead nurturing specifically has a tremendous impact on your ability to grow consistently and to grow smart. But why does so much lead nurturing suck? You know what I'm talking about. You get the same “nurturing” emails that I get and well, the nurturing is anything but, well, nurturing. 

What is the purpose of lead nurturing? Why is lead nurturing so important? The numbers are going to speak for themselves. Companies that do lead nurturing well enjoy significant enhancements in the results that they get. But, you need to understand that just because you do lead nurturing, or maybe what I should say is just because you call something lead nurturing, doesn't mean that it's gonna drive these types of results:

• Leads who are effectively nurtured generate 20% more sales opportunities than those that aren't effective. 
• Lead nurturing generates 50% more sales-ready leads.
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases. 
• Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue acquisition than just broadcast emails. 
• 82% of prospects say lead nurturing that was targeted and specific to them influenced their ability to make decisions. 

Effective lead nurturing drives better results. There’s no question about it. When you consider that 75% or more of the leads that we generate are not ready to buy it quickly becomes clear why lead nurturing is so important.

BUT. IT’S. NOT. WORKING. It's like we’ve taken “boiler room” come out of the boiler room. Our entire approach to customer acquisition has become so flash in the pan. It’s like if you're not ready to buy then sellers don't have time for you in their approaches. 

I know how hard it is to generate the engagement of a lead/prospect that fits your ideal client profile. I know how hard it is from the perspective of the seller or the marketer. I also know how it feels from the perspective of the buyer and I'll speak for myself. 

In 2010, we made a critical decision at Imagine. We decided that we needed to move beyond our focus on sales and support the entire customer acquisition & success process. This led to the creation of lead generation services, which led to becoming a HubSpot partner, enabling our clients to successfully implement inbound and content marketing.

I don’t often share the (real) reason that we made this shift. I remember the culminating event as if it were yesterday. I was debriefing with one of my sales coaches about the progress with a customer, and let’s just say that the progress wasn’t very good. 

The sales team we were working with wasn’t embracing the approaches we were hired to implement and was struggling overall. In the debrief, I was being informed of the obstacles and objections the sales team were confronting, and further, why those objections meant our approach wouldn’t work.

I have to admit that was one of the most frustrating days of my career. I thought to myself, “Why is this so damn hard for them? I’ve been selling for decades and I’ve never had these problems, and while - yeah, sure I’m good - I’m not so good that I’m immune from common obstacles and objections.”

It was in that moment I was struck with a BFO - blinding flash of the obvious. I realized the one element that I’ve always had everywhere I’ve ever sold (or led sales teams) that this team did not have. That element was content. I’d always had content to support my efforts because I’d always created content if the content I wanted wasn’t already there.

I realize this observation from today’s perspective isn’t so enlightening. Today, content is a given. The problem is that as content has proliferated, its impact has decreased (which has further fueled the proliferation of content). A lot of people claim that the reason for this is that quality decreased. While I can’t argue with that observation, I’m certain that’s not the cause.

The cause is that people are doing content wrong.

I had the entire client services team together this week for two days. (Check out the awesome picture of the rain delay/postponement we all enjoyed Tuesday night.)

As we worked through the agenda for our get-together I posed a question to each person on the team. Here’s what I asked, “The CEO of one of our clients calls you up directly and asks you, ‘How are we doing with content?’ How do you answer their question?”

We then proceeded to have a conversation that I’m certain is remarkably similar to conversations that take place weekly at growth advisories and agencies like Imagine and within marketing and demand generation teams at most companies. Each person answered the question with a noticeable connection to their area of expertise. There were a lot of “it depends” and a variety of data points like traffic, growth, conversion, bounce rates, time on page, and more.

Like I said, the same conversation that takes place everywhere. The same conversation that has led to the exponential increase in content that has caused a precipitous increase in lead and customer acquisition costs, with little to no impact on outcomes. Many advisors argue, with some legitimacy, that content marketing in general and inbound marketing specifically is no longer worth the cost and effort.

I was not satisfied with these answers. They give no one insight and they end up creating a lot of noise. I’m a big fan of finding the signal and I believe that if you measure something, you best be able to identify that signal and create some scoring mechanism to guide you to where you want to go. So we proceeded with the conversation.

We don’t have to tell you your ability to convert web traffic into qualified leads is a crucially important component of any demand generation effort. Yet, far too often we see that companies who have invested in marketing automation and in the creation of relevant content fail to pay proper attention to key conversion pages.

Conversion pages are those “critical few” pages whose primary purpose is to create a specific action. That action could be downloading a white paper, initiating a chat, requesting a demo, registering for a webinar, etc. The last thing you want is for your customer to land on your page and be confused and leave or take the wrong action. That wouldn’t only cause stress on them, but it would also cause stress on you. 

In the world of modern demand generation (and to be really, really trite) the only constant is change. However, despite the range and rate of change, there are still some things that are as true today as they were several years ago. People are still people, and if you want to capitalize on the hard work you’ve put into your content marketing, you’ll want to be sure you're following these five success factors of a conversion page. 

While there are dozens (or hundreds) of tips that can help you optimize performance, these five factors are the core attributes of performance. 

The Five Elements of a Strong Conversion Page