Posts Tagged ‘marketing automation’

Aligning Sales and Marketing Definitions of “What is a Lead”

Monday, January 11th, 2010

One of the many healthy side effects of introducing a marketing automation system is the updating of definitions for each stage of the sales/marketing pipeline. The definitions of what constitutes a lead are often reviewed, discussed and determined during the implementation of a new Marketing Automation system. This takes place so companies can easily communicate with different kinds of potential customers in tailored, appropriate ways.

Many companies find, during this process, that Sales and Marketing have developed different definitions over time, and regaining unanimity via a fresh round of discussions can help to align potentially disjointed efforts and make the pipeline more efficient.

One set of definitions might be as follows:

Prospect – an individual who, based on title, company, and/or industry, should be interested in a product/service
Lead – has responded to some form of Marketing outreach (downloaded a white paper, took part in a webinar, visited the website, etc.)
Opportunity – has been contacted and qualified (via BANT or similar method – budget, authority, need, timeframe)

The call to action, then, for any company that has not brought together Sales and Marketing together within a reasonable period (say 18 months) is to bring them together to discuss how each department views and communicates with Prospects, Leads, and Opportunities. If your company is evaluating a Marketing Automation system, this discussion is even more urgent, as Marketing will be better equipped to use this information to nurture each category of potential customer in a focused, targeted manner with nurturing campaigns on an ongoing basis!

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Posted in Sales Enablement, Sales and Marketing Alignment, lead definition | 3 Comments »

How Can You Get a Better Response?

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

I  get asked, “How do I get my prospects to respond to my campaigns?”

This best way is to look at your best customers, and then target direct marketing efforts at companies with similar profiles.

At True Influence we rank current customers by three criteria:

  1. How much revenue do they represent over time?
  2. How profitable might each customer be?
  3. How well do their needs “fit” what True Influence has to offer?

Then look for similarities among the unique attributes of these top customers. What industries are they in? What is similar about how they use your products? Are they large, medium or small? Where are they located? Who are the key decision-makers and what are their titles?

Targeting is everything. There are few things worse than marketing to uninterested prospects.  It’s really important to find fresh, filtered data from a reputable data provider to add to the direct campaign mix.   There are a few really good data providers depending on your needs but for most cases Jigsaw is very good. They have a great model to keep B2B data fresh and relevant and our customers have very good results using their data especially for email campaigns.

Focus your marketing with these basic direct marketing strategies and you’ll improve the overall quality of your campaigns. And remember, test everything.

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Posted in Campaign Management, Data Acquisition, Data Management, List Management, List Segmentation, customer driven marketing campaigns | No Comments »

3 Ways to Make Your Automated Follow-Up Email More Personal

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
An automated follow-up email is a standard touch point in a majority of marketing automation campaigns. Here are 3 Ways to make this email touch appear more personal.

1) Include the original message in the reply inline or as an attachment
2) Prefix your automated reply with ‘Re:’ and the original incoming email subject line
3) Respond after a short delay- instead of setting up an instant reply (like an Out of Office Reply)

When we normally reply to an email message to an individual, the original message is included in the reply automatically inline or as an attachment, the text ‘Re:’ is prefixed to the original subject and used in the subject of the email, also there is a time delay involved in reading the original email and framing a reply to it.

Making your automated system mimic a normal user can help make your corporate email marketing communications appear much more human and personal. Little changes such as this can often make a difference in how customers perceive your communications and in turn, your company.

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Posted in Campaign Automation, Email Design, Email Marketing, Email Subject lines | 1 Comment »

Is Website Tracking Relevant for Marketing and Sales?

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Products like Alexa (owned by Amazon.com) Google Analytics or Compete are interesting tools for high-level marketing metrics. They measure basics like web visits, page views etc. and do a fairly good “arial” view of what’s happening on a web site. But are these tools relevant to sales?

We’ve found a deeper view is needed to make this information relevant to sales. The web pages your prospects visit, how they got there, and how often they come back tell you a great deal about their interests and when they may be ready to make a purchase. By augmenting your web analytics with lead tracking capabilities, you can identify individual prospects by name, (even before they fill out a form) and see what pages they visit. You can track their relevant behavior, assign a score to it and pass the information to sales real-time.

Sales insights such as these allow you to build much richer, deeper prospect profiles. Now your sales team has a reason to call their prospects and they are able to more minutely tailor their pitch to meet each prospect’s individual needs based on what pages they visited.

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Posted in Campaign Automation, Campaign Management, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Scoring, Website Optimization, appointment setting | 2 Comments »

What IS Lead Nurturing? And What IS IT NOT?

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Lead nurturing is a really misunderstood topic in marketing today. In fact, most marketers don’t understand what it IS and what it IS NOT at all.  So, here we go. Some thoughts on what it IS and what is IS NOT for you.

It IS NOT Lead Nurturing When:

  • You  send the same old stuff (white papers, case studies etc.) over and over again to the same old prospect list and expect a different result.  Sound like the definition of insanity?
  • Your sales team calls prospects that are in the early stages of the buying process every month just to “stay in touch” with them.
  • You offer brochures or data sheets to early in the sales process about your product or service and expect a prospect to read them.

It IS Lead Nurturing When:

  • You send an automated series of targeted emails that include content based on the prospects’ interest, role or location.  The purpose is to answer a question or offer more information – automatically.  Lead nurturing is sending information that is relevant to their problem or tries to help them do their job better without asking for anything in return.
  • Your sales team makes calls based on marketing “touches” that adds value to the interaction. This gives them a valid business reason for each call.
  • You focus on sharing content that’s relevant to them even if they never buy from you.  Getting them to remember you by not “selling” them through external offers but by creating internal pressure for them to buy from you.

Just like you,  your audience is well educated and does not want to be sold. But they do want to buy and are hungry to be educated so you can take advantage of that. And,  in the end, real Lead Nurturing will create a sales pipeline that is very predictable and more reliable for your marketing and sales management efforts.

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Posted in Campaign Automation, Campaign Management, Contact Management, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Multi-Channel Communications, Nurturing Campaigns, True Influence, appointment setting | 5 Comments »

What is Lead Scoring?

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

It seems that conversion rates suffer when experienced salespeople chase bad leads.  It happens every day. That’s because, in most marketing and sales teams , it’s impossible to know when lead information is promising and when it’s a waste of time and money.  That’s where automatic “Lead Scoring” can help.  In fact, with Lead Scoring you can instantly identify, verify and qualify lead information at the very moment prospects are interacting with you.

With True Influence Lead Scoring, marketing and sales can have insight on prospect information — the instant it arrives. First, we verify the contact information against your data, ensuring that lead information is actionable.  In the same fraction of a second, we score the lead based on custom-tailored user behaviors and prospect information.  With this, Lead Scoring enables you to increase your conversion rate by directing the best quality leads to the best equipped sales people. Then you can personalize your sales scripts to deliver the most compelling message, offer, price or discount. And this insight flows just as easily into your follow-up communications to your new lead, which you can personalize based on their scores. With Lead Scoring, you’ll produce more relevant communications and speed up your sales cycle.

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Posted in Lead Generation, Lead Management, Lead Scoring | 1 Comment »

Does “Pay-for-Performance” Lead Generation Really Work?

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Pay-for-performance lead generation, on the surface, is an appealing notion. The idea of selecting an outsourced agency to do your telemarketing for you—and only pay them for the appointments they actually provide. They assume all the risk, right? How can you beat that? But, in the real-world, business-to-business appointment setting is a very risky model.

No B2B lead generation program (no matter how well planned) produces overnight returns. There’s always a period of planning, testing, execution and measurement. With that reality, it takes some upfront training and management to get results. And with telemarketing personnel turnover so high and training so expensive, does this model really make sense? Particularly if the pay-for-performance telemarketing agent does not get immediate results, they are motivated to push unqualified appointments into the funnel to reach their quota commitment. This is why telemarketing leaves most B2B marketing and sales departments empty-handed and eventually causes a jaded feeling about pay-for-performance lead generation overall. The fact is that the model isn’t broken. But, it has changed and the market needs to change with it for a better result to occur.

Some things to think about before you pay-for-performance

  • Look at the process first and make sure to invest time to figure out the ROI.
  • Don’t rely on people only. Invest in scalable and automatic lead generation that will occur overtime, not overnight because if demand gen does work, you’ll be hiring more sales people and they in turn will need more and more leads.
  • Measure everything. The great thing about modern demand generation is the “digits are meant to measured”.  Today I can launch a program and see everything that happens in real-time, based on the prospects behavior. Now that’s real demand being created!
  • Experience matters. This type of modern, digital lead generation is fairly new. Not everyone understands how to do it correctly, so do some due diligence and hire a team of marketers that are experienced and have shown real ROI results for other B2B companies.

Here, at True Influence, we’ve launched a new program called LeadPAC’s that deals with pay-for performance very nicely. To make this work we’ve partnered with the best-of-class data provider Jigsaw to create an almost limitless flow of sales-ready leads for our customers. For companies that sell to SMB and have a recurring need for higher quality lead flow, this is a great solution.

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Posted in Lead Generation, Pay for performance, Sales Enablement, appointment setting | 4 Comments »

Have 90 seconds to spare?

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Finding that there are just not enough hours in the day to do what you need to do?

You’re not alone – so many other organizations have leaner marketing staffs yet more on their plate. We hear this lament from customers and prospective customers and we appreciate that you’re pulled thin.

Marketing automation and lead nurturing through drip campaigns are tools to help you do more with less. For a quick overview of how True Influence could help you, we invite you to take a look at our 90-second tour. Its a tiny time investment to understand just how we can help you nurture leads and increase your marketing and sales effectiveness.

Take a 90 second tour

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Posted in Campaign Automation, Lead Scoring, True Influence | No Comments »