Archive | Lead Nurturing RSS feed for this section

Social Capital: Enhancing Lead Nurturing with Social Media

Posted on July 9, 2010 by in CRM, Lead Nurturing, Social Media

There’s endless buzz these days about social media and how it’s going to change the course of marketing as we know it. B2B marketers are scrambling to keep up with this trend by mastering the intricacies of social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There’s no question that these applications can be powerful tools for marketers who want to spread their message to potential customers. But consider social media from a different perspective. What sort of value can marketers get from these tools when using them to craft relevant messaging that will optimize their lead nurturing efforts?

As it turns out, social media outlets offer a wealth of valuable prospect data that’s there for the taking. Social media profiles typically contain obvious items that you might already have in your prospect records, such as job title and company name. Oftentimes you can see past distinctions, employment history, and other information that marketers typically find helpful. But don’t dismiss the rest of that profile data as unimportant. You can still get plenty of value out of it! Knowing more about your prospects can only make things easier for your marketing and sales teams. Small tidbits such as knowing a prospect’s alma mater, favorite sports team, or weekend hobbies can help establish and build the kind of friendly rapport and ongoing relationships that lead nurturing requires in today’s extended sales cycle.

Since you’re making use of what is essentially freely available public information, you shouldn’t feel like a virtual stalker for collecting prospect data in this way. But there is a very fine line between tailoring your message to appeal to prospects and making them feel like you’re some creepy marketer watching their every move. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Even though they’ve made this information public, it would still intimidating for your prospects to be contacted by some eerily omniscient salesperson with a zenlike ability to somehow sense their every like and dislike. So make sure that your team knows how to use this valuable information appropriately.

Here are some examples of how a salesperson might use, and abuse, prospect data collected through social media channels.

Example 1: Who’s the Boss?

Prospect X is a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, as evidenced by the virtual shrine on his Facebook page.

  • Appropriate – While engaging in the usual sales call banter, your sales rep might casually work in something like, “Yeah, I’m dragging a little bit today…stayed out too late at the Springsteen show last night.” If the prospect doesn’t bite and keeps quiet about their love for The Boss, the rep can assume that they’ll probably need to make a stronger connection with this prospect in order to be effective.
  • Inappropriate – Sending Prospect X an unsolicited copy of the latest Bruce Springsteen album comes off as overly personal, which can backfire: “Hey! Did you get that Springsteen CD I sent you out of the blue? You’re a big fan, right? How do I know that? Well, uhh…doesn’t everyone love The Boss?”
Example 2: Trick or Tweet?

Prospect Y has been tweeting increasingly often about her dissatisfaction with your competitor.

  • Appropriate – Knowing full well that Prospect Y is unhappy with the competitor’s product, your salesperson could ask casually, “So…is your current solution meeting your needs?” If Prospect Y responds as expected, it is an open invitation to explain what you have to offer and highlight why your product is more suitable.
  • Inappropriate – The salesperson cuts right to the chase with something like, “I see on Twitter that you’re using our competitor. Clearly you need a change.” This will not only weird out the prospect, but the sales rep’s presumptuous tone will likely be a big turnoff.
Example 3: The Missing Link?

Prospect Z’s LinkedIn profile lists an undergraduate degree obtained at ABC University.

  • Appropriate – Once they’ve gotten Prospect Z talking about college football, your salesperson can mention, “My favorite team is the ABC University Sharks.” An engaged prospect should perk up and mention that they went to school there, thereby establishing that all-important connection your  sales rep is looking for.
  • Inappropriate - The salesperson makes a clumsy attempt at forging a connection, saying “You went to school at ABC University, didn’t you? I’m not sure, but I think my cousin went there.” Attempts like this will only fall flat with your prospect, perhaps even raising the red flag that someone’s been doing a little too much snooping on LinkedIn.
Social media is power. Use it wisely.


Best Practices in Lead Qualification: Interest vs. Intent

Posted on April 30, 2010 by in Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Strategy

In our previous post, we discussed some basic lead qualification measures, including using a combination of explicit and implicit factors to determine your best leads. Now, lets take a closer look at a particular aspect of implicit lead qualification – judging interest versus intent.

This is how you being to separate the leads that are in the research phase, and may require more nurturing, from the leads that are sales ready and need to be called on immediately. The standards are going to be different for every company, but you should start to develop a system based on the types of collateral that you offer. Most companies have a variety of conversion opportunities and marketing materials available to potential customers, including items like white papers, webinars, case studies and contact forms.

Things like white papers or time spent browsing on the site would be early indicators of interest. This person is starting to learn about your industry and becoming familiar with the benefits of your product. They may not be ready to enter the sales process yet and bombarding them with aggressive sales calls could turn them off to your product. When you have a new lead that is showing a tentative interest in your product, place them on a nurturing campaign to help them along in their education process.

Intent occurs when the prospect ‘raises their hand’ and shows specific buying activity when interacting with your materials. This can be in the form of viewing a very specific case study, filling out a contact form, reaching out to you with a question or signing up for your free trial. These people already understand the benefits of your product and they want to know if you’ll be the right fit for them. They were probably already on your radar; Perhaps you met them at a trade show, they previously downloaded some of your materials or you’ve been nurturing them along the way. These are the people that you should assign to your sales representatives immediately, even indicating with a note that they are ready for quick follow-up. The sales team can then use the tracking data you’ve gathered to craft the targeted call that will tell your prospect that this is going to be a the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Remember, these factors are unique to your company and your sales cycle. In some cases, a white paper might be a great sign of buying behavior. You can start to determine the right indicators for you by using your marketing automation data to look for patterns in past successes and using those as a starting point for identifying your best leads.

Best Practices in Lead Qualification: The Basics

Posted on April 6, 2010 by in Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring

If you are lucky enough to have a large flow of inbound leads, chances are that not all of them are a perfect fit to your ideal customer profile. While the sales team may be excited to receive so many new leads, identifying the quality leads that will lead to sales can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.

One thing that marketers don’t always remember about their sales counterparts is that sales is a fast-paced game and their success typically depends on closing leads this quarter. If they reach out to a new prospect several times and they aren’t able to get in touch with the person, they will move on to the next name on the list. Unless you have a system in place to return leads to a nurturing campaign, they likely get tossed into the abyss and never looked at again. One statistic that really shows the impact of throwing away those leads is this: 70% of your mishandled leads will buy from a competitor within 24 months. Just because the person wasn’t ready to buy today doesn’t mean they should be disregarded. Six months down the line when they are a bit more educated, they may be ready to speak with a sales person.

So how do you as a marketer ensure that you’re only passing along the leads that sales can focus on closing? You won’t be right 100% of the time, but the best way to pick out sales-qualified leads is by using a method that combines implicit and explicit evaluation factors. Implicit factors are what a prospect does on your website. This means deciding a person is qualified based on the fact that they filled out a contact form or did a search for pricing. You can track these activities at the individual level using a marketing automation system. Explicit factors are who the prospect is; For example, is the prospect a part of your target industry or do they possess decision making power? You can start to collect these facts using forms on your website or by connecting with tools like LinkedIn and Jigsaw. The reason it is important to look at both of these factors is it prevents your sales reps from wasting time on a prospect who may be highly active on your site but turns out to be a recent college graduate looking for a job.

While explicit factors are fairly straightforward, determining the best implicit factors to look for is a bit more subjective. In a future post, we’ll discuss best practices for looking at these more tricky factors of lead qualification.

Mastering the Metrics: Visitors

Posted on April 4, 2010 by in Analytics/Reporting, Lead Nurturing

In the last installment of our Mastering the Metrics series, we covered Visits. Today we’ll discuss Visitors.

Visitors are the number of unique individuals who view a website in a given time period. This differs slightly from the Visits metric in that it allows you to measure a website’s reach, as opposed to just its traffic. Visits measure the volume of traffic itself, but comparing this number to the number of visitors will help you understand what type of traffic your website is generating and what sorts of visitors you’re attracting. If you consider that one visitor can have multiple visits over a certain timeframe, you can begin to judge the quality of your visitors. For example, you can tell whether your site has a small group of die-hard fans who visit the site repeatedly and often, as opposed to just a bunch of casual visitors who stop in once for a peek but never return.

By tracking visitors and visits during a specific timeframe, you can also use this metric to measure the concentration or urgency of activity by repeat visitors. Therefore, the time period you look at can be an important factor in calculating this metric. If one visitor makes repeated visits to the site in the course of a day or two, you can bet that they’re seriously interested in your site — they may be doing research before they take the next step. These are good visitors to target and reach out to since their interest has been demonstrated by their repeat visits.

Marketing Automation for the B2B Marathon

Posted on January 20, 2010 by in Email Marketing, Lead Nurturing

On the Buzz Marketing for Technology blog, Paul Dunay discusses the four traditional “P’s of marketing” (product, price, placement and promotion) and how they stack up against what he deems the four “C’s of B2B marketing.” The four C’s proposed are:

  • Content
  • Connection
  • Communication
  • Conversion

These fit in much better with the longer, more complex sales cycle many B2B marketers face. Selling B2B products requires relationship building and continuous engagement between the buyer and the seller. While some of the traditional elements, such as pricing, do play a part in the decision making, I think everyone would agree that buying a high-priced business product or service is a different process than grabbing that pack of gum that’s on sale in the checkout lane.

Dunay mentions B2B marketing can be seen as a marathon, not a sprint. Well, I don’t know about you, but I think running a marathon is pretty exhausting work! Not to mention that many reps are working multiple deals at the same time, trying to find time to give enough attention to each prospect while still pursuing new opportunities.

Think of a marketing automation system as the water stations along that marathon run. True, nothing can replace hard work and personal engagement, but with a good nurturing program and automated email rules, you can take a break once and a while. Custom email messaging can be personalized from each sales rep and sent out at predefined times or triggered based on prospect activity. This allows you to continue to build that connection and keep the communication frequent while freeing up time to work on other tasks. With alerts in place, you can easily see when a prospect converts or becomes active again so that you can follow up with a personal call.

Boosting your traditional sales techniques with a little bit of behind-the-scenes help from marketing automation will ensure you’ll cross the finish line in record time.

Marathon Runners

Off-Label Uses of Marketing Automation – Part 3

Posted on December 29, 2009 by in Analytics/Reporting, Lead Nurturing

Using marketing automation tools to gain leverage with customers (as detailed in Part 2) is an excellent example of an off-label use of marketing automation. But perhaps the most intriguing story I’ve heard yet is of a marketing automation specialist who lost a client to a competitor. Making use of the keen sleuthing capabilities of their marketing automation tools, the vendor was able to see that shortly after the client left, they started visiting the vendor’s website again. The vendor reached out to the ex-client with an innocuous inquiry as to how their new implementation with the competitor’s product was going, casually mentioning that they’d noticed the ex-customer’s recent visits to the site. As it turns out, the competitor’s product leaves much to be desired, and the ex-client is very dissatisfied. Several months of nurturing later, the original vendor has set up a demo with the old customer, and the prospects of winning them back look very good.

Remember: Marketing automation works great when used as prescribed, but you can maximize your ROI if you get creative with off-label uses of marketing automation tools.

Marketing Automation Craves Content

Posted on September 3, 2009 by in Lead Nurturing, Site Design

When implementing a marketing automation system, even all the bells and whistles in the world won’t save a site with a lack of great content. Content is key to conversion. Your marketing automation system will help you set up prospect-friendly forms and landing pages, but it is up to your offering to convince them to fill them out.

So what is good content?

Content should have some educational value. This doesn’t mean it can’t tie back to your product, service or sales proposition, but you want to offer something that will leave your reader or viewer with some solid business advice, best practices tips or thought provoking conversation starters.

Most companies have a variety of types of content, from case studies to webinars
to news stories about the company’s success. When seeking to increase conversions or lead activity, think about carefully crafting the right combination of these items. Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. When you are just discovering a new product, what do you want to see?

  • It’s likely that you first want to understand what the product does and how it relates to your goals (white paper or webinar).
  • Maybe after you’ve learned a a bit about the product, you may be interested in learning how others use it  successfully (case study).
  • Finally, if you see value in the product you may seek out alternate vendors and investigate them more deeply based on factors like industry certifications, awards and success.

Conversion relies heavily on the first stage, education. If you don’t have an arsenal of interesting  offerings, the forms you built will remain untouched, the automation rules lie still and your database sits empty. Marketing automation is a tool to help ease the pain of lead generation, but it requires a solid strategy to set the wheels in motion.

Developing Your Lead Nurturing Strategy

Posted on August 28, 2009 by in Lead Nurturing

For a long time, marketing would bring in new leads, pass them off to sales and that was that. If sales reached out and a prospect wasn’t ready to move to the next stage, that lead would often get abandoned and eventually forgotten. The problem with this is that even if someone isn’t ready to buy today, that doesn’t mean that they may not be interested six months down the road. By disregarding these less sales ready leads, you are throwing away valuable marketing dollars.

Instead, you should lay out a lead nurturing track (or a few!) to keep in touch with your prospects by sending interesting information their way every so often. Using a marketing automation system, you can easily customize and automate your nurturing drips, triggering them based on both time passed and a prospect’s activities.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when planning your lead nurturing campaigns:

  • Set Expectations – Like in any series of emails, best practices say that you should welcome your recipients with a note informing them of what to expect from future messages. Usually, a friendly note as a follow-up to your conversation and acknowledging that you’ll be sending them some relevant information over the next few months does the trick.
  • Segment Your Lists – If you interact with different types of prospects, think about their specific needs and interests and make your messaging relevant. This means you’ll probably have more than one nurturing track in your bag of tricks. You could chose to segment by any number of distinguishing factors like the product they are interested in, their job function or their industry. Then make sure to follow up with targeted content that will be beneficial to each type of lead. Creating segmented nurturing lists should be simple using rules in your marketing automation system.
  • Its All About Timing – Don’t bombard your prospects with too much content – even the best content can feel like spam when your inbox is flooded with it. Think about how annoying it can be if you’re watching a movie on TV and the same commercial comes on every 15 minutes. Not good, right? Instead, plan to send content every couple of weeks to keep your brand top-of-mind without overwhelming your recipients.

Marketing Automation from a Sales Perspective

Posted on August 3, 2009 by in Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring

When you hear the term marketing automation, sales is not always what comes to mind, but when you learn more about the software it is easy to see that sales benefits just as much as marketing from the tool. The goal of marketing automation is to increase ROI. One way it does this is by offering many features that will really improve the efficiency of your sales team. I have come up with a list of the top 3 ways that marketing automation is used through sales to help your sales team get excited about this new software!

  • Automated Sales Alerts – The system monitors all prospects and allows you to set automated alerts when someone takes action, for example if you want to be alerted every time someone searches for pricing you will be sent an alert automatically when someone searches for it.  Along with the alerts, the sales team will receive daily updates of any activity that a prospect has taken in the past 24 hours.
  • Lead Scoring and Grading – This aspect of the system is something your sales team will find extremely useful. Instead of cold-calling and chasing after leads with no interest in your product, this feature allows the leads to come to your sales team prioritized in a list of those most likely to become opportunities. Lead scoring adds points for every activity the prospect does on your website. You are able to customize the amount of points and what activities will get points. For example, when they search pricing a lead may get 5 points, but just landing on your page would give them 1 point. This helps weed out people who accidentally came upon your site. Lead grading works along with lead scoring to triage leads, it gives your lead a grade based on how closely they fit the criteria of you ideal customer. Criteria used to grade a lead can be company size, location, industry, or anything else you feel is necessary to give a company a proper grade. Together they act as a great way to figure out which leads you need to follow up with first.
  • Automated Lead Nurturing - This is a great way for your sales team to keep up with those leads that are not yet sales ready. Using drip nurturing programs, your sales team can reach out to these leads periodically so when they are ready to take that next step they remember your company. It is hard to keep up with leads that need to wait a little longer before making a decision, and this enables personalized e-mails to be sent without taking any time from the sales team.

New Leads…Now What?

Posted on July 29, 2009 by in Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy

After patiently waiting, your social media and online marketing campaigns are starting to pay off, and the leads are starting to roll in. So many you don’t even know what to do with all of them. This is where marketing automation comes in. The most important thing to remember about leads is that they need to be nurtured, and marketing automation software is the best way to do it. They offer many different features that are helpful when nurturing potential clients.

Activity Tracking - A key part in developing a prospect is finding out what they are really interested in which makes this feature so great. Being able to see what they have looked at and how long they spent looking at it is a great way to gauge a leads potential and position your campaign accordingly. It also allows you to send them information on certain aspects of your company that they seem to be interested in which will put your company’s name back in their head, even if they are not ready to buy.

Drip Marketing – This is another great element that gives companies the ability to automate their nurturing programs. With this feature you are able to set up a series of automated emails, check for prospects who take action, automatically assign them to a sales rep, or for those who don’t, trigger a new series of targeted messages to try and encourage interest. Drip marketing also makes it easy to keep in contact with prospects who are not yet ready to purchase. The best part of this is that prospects are continuously engaged with hardly any time spent on the company side.

Autoresponder E-mails - These e-mails are great because they give prospects the idea that they are receiving personalized e-mails from someone at the company, when in reality it is automated. This feature saves time, and will give you a lot of brownie points with the prospect, who will think you took time out of your busy day to write them an e-mail.

Marketing automation software offers so many benefits, but the value of its lead nurturing capabilities alone makes it worth it. Those who have been in B2B sales know that nurturing prospects and current clients is a big part of the job. It can be very time consuming, something that can be changed with the use of a marketing automation system.

Newer posts