Episode 6: William Wickey - LeadGenius
On week’s Leaders of B2B Podcast I sit down with William Wickey, Senior Manager of Content and Media Strategy at LeadGenius. This interview is packed full of information on B2B marketing and what LeadGenius is doing in that arena.
In our time together, we talk about how LeadGenius helps their clients, some of the project management systems William has in place for managing a complex marketing role, and a recently released book he coauthored on current trends and tech in the B2B world.
Why people use LeadGenius
LeadGenius provides high quality leads to their clients, and William tells us that they do this by using a combination of machine learning and crowdsourced information. He explains that most applications are good at getting things right about 75% of the time, and that is why they make sure to give it the personal touch.
In fact, LeadGenius verifies every single data point they deliver.
People often come to LeadGenius with one of two use cases:
They need new leads
They know there is a vertical they want to target, but they don’t have the contact information they need. And that leaves them with three options.
They can go buy lead lists
They can have sales teams do it themselves
Or they can outsource it and manage the process
Each of these options have drawbacks. Buying lists can be costly and give you outdated information. Having the sales team search can take away from time where they could actually be selling. And, managing an outsourced team can be difficult logistically.
People approach LeadGenius, because they are able to specify who they are looking for and know that the team will deliver high quality leads that meet their requirements.
They have a gigantic (messy) database
Enterprise level companies often have tons of contacts in their CRMs, and these can quickly turn into a jumbled mess.
LeadGenius can go through these databases, update information, and fill in missing fields. On top of that, they will hone in on where the opportunity is for a company once the records are cleaned up
Their goal is to make it efficient for outbound sales and marketing teams to sell.
Managing a complex marketing role
When I asked William the main responsibilities of his role at LeadGenius, he pretty much named everything under the sun.
Marketers often find themselves in this position where they have to wear a ton of hats, and it becomes a huge challenge to stay on top of everything that needs to get done.
The team at LeadGenius has an agile marketing project management system. They use Jira to keep them on track. Where a lot of project management systems have the typical “to do”, “in progress”, and “done” columns, Jira breaks things down in more detail, adds prioritization, and separates tasks in different veins.
It’s a pretty robust system, but it tackles a lot of the challenges that William has in managing his day to day.
When managing a ton of things, it can also be easy to lose focus on what is important. LeadGenius focuses on specific objectives and key results (OKRs) for measuring their success.
Some of those results they are focusing on are their number of qualified leads, total leads, growth from month to month, and their conversion rate of trials to sales.
B2B Trends and Tech
LeadGenius coauthored a book with Prezi and Ambition titled The 2017 B2B Trends & Tech Guide, and I got to talk to William about his involvement and learnings from that.
He was the first to admit that there are a ton of trends guides and a ton of tech guides out there, but the goal with this was really to make the information as actionable and easy to digest as possible.
He is really glad that this book was able to bring trends and tech together, because you often need the tech to implement the trends out there. And, you can’t use the tech well if you aren’t familiar with the trends.
From a company standpoint, this was a great content piece to be involved in creating, because it really adds value to people at every stage of their sales funnel, and it lets people know how they are thinking about the market and it establishes trust with their audience.
Final thoughts
One of William’s key takeaways from working on this book is the increase in importance of account based marketing.
While a lot of companies are hoping to make this shift to account based marketing, it creates huge operational hurdles. Instead of focusing on individual contacts, companies have to find a way to effectively connect with multiple decision makers in an effort to convey the right information to all of the right people at once.
A big focus of LeadGenius is navigating the best ways to help companies make the switch to account based marketing.
Another big takeaway was the resurgence of outbound marketing. With the tools and data available today, outbound marketing is a huge opportunity because of its ability to be personalized, speed, and scalability.
With outbound, you can target the exact people you want. You are only limited by the information you are able to go out there and get.
This trend of companies relying more heavily on outbound is driving decision making and technology adoption for tons of people.
I loved having William on the show, and I hope you got a ton of value out of this episode.
Be sure to check out everything William and LeadGenius are working on by visiting the following links:
leadgenius.com
blog.leadgenius.com
b2btrendsandtech.com
@wwickey on Twitter
