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Lead Liaison

Revenue Generation Software is Red Hot

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Revenue Generation Software is Red HotRevenue Generation Software may be the best thing you’ve never heard of. It’s a sales and marketing engine that’s loaded with fuel, ready for the ride of its life. Now is the right time and right environment for marketing technology to step up. In this article we cover why there’s a red hot market for marketing platforms like Lead Liaison’s and a huge opportunity for marketers to continue to reap rewards of these emerging solutions for years to come.

Three primary events are lighting fire to the space:

• Marketing budgets are on the rise
• The technology is extremely disruptive
• Data is finally easily accessible and abundant

Firstly, marketing budgets are on the rise. According to Gartner, In 2011 B2B marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were three times higher than IT budgets. Gartner reported marketing budgets at 10 percent relative to IT budgets at 3.6 percent. In 2012 marketing budgets will grow faster than IT budgets according to Gartner. IT budgets will grow 4.7 percent, all marketing budgets are predicted to grow 9 percent and high tech marketing budgets are expected to increase 11 percent. Looking five years out:

By 2017, a CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. – Laura McLellan, Gartner Group

Secondly, Revenue Generation Software is a disruptive technology. It forces companies to think about what matters most – revenue – and how they generate and measure performance around it. It gets companies to think about the transformation of a sales cycle into a revenue cycle. It brings sales, marketing and executive teams together to map out their processes for driving revenue. Marketing platforms that drive and measure revenue are here to stay.

Thirdly, marketing data is growing at a rapid pace. Compounded by changes in buying behavior – sales and marketing is forced to change the way they traditionally operated to better interact with data and prospects. As marketing databases grow there’s an opportunity for better transparency and usability of that data. CRMs make good use of data for sales people by acting as a system of record for the pipeline and the funnel; however, there is no equivalent for marketing. A layer of technology around marketing data helps to analyze data and create automated processes. With Revenue Generation Software businesses can finally leverage data for the benefit of driving marketing insights and measuring downstream prospect/client activities against their marketing spend.

Here’s a snippet from Ajay Agarwal, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures’, that highlights four primary causes of data growth. Ajay talks about how the web is a catalyst for the availability of data which fosters the perfect environment for marketers to leverage software as a service (SaaS) solutions like Lead Liaison.

Primary Causes of Marketing Data Growth – Ajay Agarwal

As more and more businesses across all sectors of the economy move to the web, this kind of data — and a massive amount of it — is finally available.

• A web business can mine thousands of signals from its prospects based on the hundreds of actions a consumer might make on a website (checking a price, looking at an image, reading a review, typing in a detailed search query, etc.).
• The holy grail of closed loop marketing is finally here. With sophisticated technology and analytics, marketers can link spending on customer acquisition directly to a set of downstream customer actions — whether those actions take place on the web, on a mobile device or in a physical location.
• Consumers with smartphones are conveying their intent while scanning QR codes, downloading mobile coupons or simply walking into a store with their location-aware device.
• Social networks are providing a new source of demographic data that, combined with Facebook’s Open Graph, offer marketers a new treasure trove of information.

Ajay further explains, “I am excited about this next wave in enterprise technology. Marketing will finally emerge from the backwater and will give rise to several multi-billion dollar companies.”

Want to learn more about this explosive marketing technology and why Revenue Generation Software is red hot? Please, let us tell you.

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Resources:
1) Five Years From Now, CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs Do
2) Marketing is the next big money sector in technology
3) Marketing Automation Getting VC Attention

Lead Liaison

Simplify your Database for Sales

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Simplify your Database for SalesIn an article last week by Mark Wicka on the B2B Lead Blog he talks about the challenges of prioritizing a company’s database. Mark describes how his company used an “opportunity grade” to create a snapshot of a prospect and prioritize the lead for sales.

“When you have a database of thousands upon thousands of names, how do you help your team easily and effectively prioritize who to contact?” – Mark Wicka, B2B Lead Blog

The challenge Mark’s company faces is all too familiar for many businesses. It’s imperative to simplify your database for sales and marketing effectiveness. Fortunately, technology can help automate snapshots and create opportunity grades across your database. Lead scoring technology helps businesses grade their database based on various demographics, interests and behaviors. Lead scoring is included with most Lead Management Automation (LMA) software packages. When using lead scoring marketers can create lead scoring programs that grade their existing database as well as future leads added to the database. Lead scoring programs can be run in a one-time-only mode or setup to run continually based on the needs of the business.

Some lead scoring systems allow marketers to create multiple types of grades/scores; for example, a “Fit Score” or a “Behavioral Score”. A Fit Score grades a prospect based on how they match up against your ideal buyers profile wherein a Behavioral Score grades a prospect based on their online behaviors or overall activity (whitepapers downloaded, forms submitted, pages viewed, etc.). Additionally, select vendors provide a snapshot view of leads with the highest grade directly from within a CRM system such as Salesforce.com. Having a consolidated view helps sales and marketers know where they need to spend their time and how to manage their day.

For a glimpse into Lead Liaison’s LMA software and an overview of how we help companies automatically grade their database and simplify their database for sales effectiveness ping us!

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Lead Liaison

Strategic Marketing Tools

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Strategic Marketing Tools

Millions of marketing teams struggle finding the right strategy to market their solutions. Marketing tools help marketers do their job more effectively and efficiently; however, finding the right set of strategic marketing tools can be a bear. Fortunately, we’ve compiled a list of strategic marketing tools for you and encourage you to help us build upon this list. We categorized each tool into its respective marketing bucket. If your marketing team doesn’t have these tools to support their campaign, go get them! Note, we’ll keep this list dynamic and continue adding tools to it over time. What are your favorite strategic marketing tools?

Finding Professional Business Contacts

• Data.com
• Hoovers (primarily executives)
• LinkedIn
• Lead Liaison
• ZoomInfo
• NetProspex

Finding Companies

• Hoovers
• Lead Liaison
• Data.com (limited company search)

Social Media

• TweetDeck
• AddThis
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Radian6 (owned by Salesforce.com)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• SEOMoz
• SeoQuake (+ plugins for Firefox)

Analytics

• Google Analytics
• Adobe Online Marketing Suite (Omniture)

Revenue Generation Software

• Lead Liaison
• All the other wanna-bes

Email Marketing

• iContact
• Constant Contact
• Vertical Response
• Lead Liaison (closed loop)
• ExactTarget

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• Salesforce.com
• SugarCRM
• Microsoft Dynamics
• NetSuite
• Maximizer

Press Releases

• PRWeb
• PR Newswire

Disclaimer: Lead Liaison has no affiliation with any of these tools, except our own ;-)

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Lead Liaison

Automating Business – The Buick Way

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Automating BusinessOne of our founders recently bought a Buick Enclave. Most of the folks on our team are not car experts. Needless to say, we knew little about Buick Enclaves. When we heard she bought a Buick, we thought – “that’s an old man’s car”. Buick Regal, Roadmaster, Park Avenue, LeSabre – the list of old school Buick’s goes on. Why wouldn’t we formulate that opinion? Several of us got to take a spin in her new Enclave. Let’s just say this; it was a real eye opener. It reminds me how one can be so ignorant about new things. After all, you only know what you know. It got us thinking, if Buicks have evolved like this how has business evolved?

Business, in particular sales and marketing, has evolved considerably. Similar to what technology has done for Buicks, technology has given business a boost. For example, consider our founders Buick Enclave. The vehicle is OnStar equipped. Our co-founder showed us the OnStar iPhone app. We were amazed she could remotely unlock, lock and start her vehicle with the press of a button. And check this out – she remotely started the vehicle and it adjusted the climate control inside the vehicle based on the temperature outside. Wouldn’t it be nice if one could automate business with the press of a button?

Guess what, we can! Sales and marketing is no longer the old school Buick. Marketers have an opportunity to “OnStar-their-business”. Businesses can take advantage of software that automates common marketing processes. For example, with a few button clicks marketers can automate lead nurturing, or drip campaigns, lead qualification, lead distribution and alerts that highly benefit sales. Let’s draw from another analogy in the spirit of Buick/OnStar. While having the iPhone OnStar app up, our co-founder showed us how to find a place using Bing, say the closest Indian restaurant, and push that destination to the in-car navigation or turn-by-turn system. When she jumped in the vehicle her Buick asked her if she wants to go to the Indian restaurant.

That’s similar to configuring an automated marketing campaign and pushing it out to your business. With marketing automation software marketers can configure their prospects route, navigating them through your business and driving them forward along the revenue cycle. Marketer can send automated emails and other actions as part of an automated program and either run/activate the program or schedule it to start at any time in the future.

It’s time to harness technology and start automating business.

For a demo of OnStar and Lead Liaison ping us!

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Lead Liaison

Do Not Complicate Marketing, Simplify It

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Don't Complicate Marketing - Simplify ItScott Brinker, a marketing technologist and author of the chiefmartec.com blog, recently posted an article on Why marketers should learn how to program. We couldn’t disagree more with several of Scott’s thought-provoking concepts. Do not complicate marketing – simplify it.

Technology changes marketing – without question. Social media, blogs, online surveys, email marketing, YouTube are all examples of technology that inspires marketers to think differently about marketing strategies and campaigns. Learning to program doesn’t help a marketer harness marketing technology. Computer programming is not for everyone. Some marketers are technical and some are not. For the ones that aren’t technical or analytically-minded, don’t try telling them to program as the solution. You’ll have better luck asking an English teacher to become a microbiologist. There are many types of programming (C/C++, Java, PHP, ASP…the list goes on), all programming is different (web based, machine languages) and learning is not an overnight endeavor. You’ll just confuse the marketer. Make their life simpler, not harder. The answer to how to embrace new and innovative marketing technology is…hold your breath, new and innovative marketing technology.

Technology can improve processes and also simplify them at the same time. Scott is correct; there are a growing number of choices for marketing software. However, marketers must choose wisely. They must be careful to not adopt software platforms designed by engineers – which virtually requires a programmer to configure. Adopting marketing software designed by sales and marketers, instead of engineers, is vital. These packages were built to offer simplicity and ease of use that marketers expect. Case in point, Scott showed a screen shot (snippet below) of a complicated flow chart depicting a marketing campaign. If you want marketers to run then show them a flow chart like this.

Marketing Campaign Flow Chart

Scott also discusses a few other points. He suggests the cast of players around a marketer is growing and learning programming will help you speak their ‘native tongue’. Why not learn from the players themselves? Surely the players don’t understand some of your marketing terms. They might be interested in a quick lesson. Collaborating with your colleagues will only foster intra-company relations and build moral. Maybe you could send them to Douglass Karr’s The Marketing Technology Blog to read about these marketing terms.

Whether it’s marketing terms or marketing software, let’s not complicate marketing, let’s simplify it.

For a simplistic, yet amazingly powerful, software package that increases effectiveness of your sales and marketing team check out Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software.

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Lead Liaison

Marketing Campaign Messaging

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Marketing Campaign MessagingMarketing campaign messaging is important, but it’s more important to think about who you’re messaging to. When building a campaign, it doesn’t make sense to make a one-size fits all message. Sales and marketing people need to tailor messaging around the recipient. Similar to giving a presentation, before you present you’ve got to know your audience. You must know who you’re presenting to. Are they engineers or marketers, technical or business savvy? If you don’t know the exact title or role of your recipients then try categorizing them into organization levels. We suggest using three levels; C-level, Director/VP-level and everyone else (rank and file). Here are some tips on how to focus your marketing campaign messaging around these organizational levels:

C-level

Focus campaign messaging on outcome and results.

Director and VP-level

Focus campaign messaging on process and improvement results.

Rank and File

Focus campaign messaging on features and benefits.

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Lead Liaison

Automatically Track Web Form Submissions

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Automatically Track Web Form SubmissionsWhen businesses automatically track web form submissions they get crucial insight into prospects interests. Three types of web form tracking are possible; we’ll cover each type in the details to follow. Regardless of type, we recommended web form submissions are tracked and matched with a prospects profile to provide sales with valuable insight on key buying behavior.

Automatic Web Form Tracking

Requires no configuration and converts unknown leads (no name and/or email) to known leads (name and/or email) by automatically identifying a website visitors name, email and company after a web form submission. Automatic Web Form Tracking integrates with company’s existing web forms but has limited operational advantage as this method only captures specific form fields.

Hosted Web Form Tracking

For a more flexible approach, marketers use hosted web form tracking to automatically track web form submissions. Using this method, marketers visually build web forms by dragging/dropping fields into place. Web forms are embedded into landing pages, which can also be built using a visual interface. Marketers spin up new, targeted web forms in less than five minutes to easily support specific campaigns.

Existing Form Web Form Tracking

Marketers that have a host of existing web forms on their site can redirect web form submissions to our servers. Lead Liaison’s engine captures lead information enabling marketers to augment a form submission with operational activities. Example operational activities are: automatically responding to leads from the lead owner, adding people to lead nurturing campaigns or automatically qualifying a lead.

All three levels of automatic web form tracking synchronize results with CRMs, such as Salesforce.com. Synchronization records a web form submission event along with the type of form submitted and can optionally automatically create a new lead along with key company profile information (revenue, description, industry, etc.) in the CRM. Additionally, historical information such as email opens, email click-through, website visits and more are attach to a leads activity history resulting in sales-ready leads.

Contact Lead Liaison to learn more about how your business can automatically track web form submissions.

What advantages or disadvantages do you see by automatically distributing leads to sales?

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Lead Liaison

Marketing on a Small Budget

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Marketing on a Small Budget

Are you a small business owner who needs marketing on a small budget? If so, you’re not alone. New businesses are popping up every day. The number of businesses in the US alone is pushing 25 million, many of which are B2B businesses. How do you generate more business in such a competitive environment? Here’s the good news, marketing on a small budget is possible by doing four basic things:

1. Purchase and setup a CRM system
2. Create a systematic approach to content creation
3. Start blogging, with references to your content (or a blog post as your content)
4. Procure Revenue Generation Software to automatically filter hot leads and maximize your first three investments

I remember when we first started Lead Liaison. It was embarrassing to monitor Google Analytics and only see three to four website visitors per day. No one could find us. Since being found we’ve increased our web traffic by seven fold, up 775%! We did it with a $0 marketing budget. To get found, you’ve got to get on the internet. The easiest thing to do is to create a blog system that automatically optimizes your pages for SEO. Create SEO-enabled content by optimizing your page around certain phrase or keywords and watch your traffic sky rocket. In fact, we’re writing this page with “marketing on a small budget” as our keyword. There’s no better way to market on a small budget than to create blog posts, for free!

Continue feeding your blog posts with valuable content. Check out our post, 101 Business to Business Lead Generation Ideas and Tips to get some content ideas. Here’s a quick tip, use an existing whitepaper, “section it off” and blog about each section. Also, use 3rd party content and blog about that – blogs don’t have to be ideas of your own or unique content. Just avoid copying/pasting content. Search engine spiders are smart.

Finally, get the most out of marketing on a small budget by purchasing Revenue Generation Software to rev up your marketing engine. Revenue Generation Software provides CRM integration, email marketing, lead distribution, lead generation, lead management, lead nurturing, lead qualification, marketing automation, sales prospecting and sales force automation in a single package. Most systems can be purchased for the price of a trade show. If you’re struggling to budget for Revenue Generation Software drop a trade show or pull back on direct mail and consider the ROI of Revenue Generation Software. Your team will see a significant boost in operational efficiency, more leads, more qualified leads and adopt a systematic approach to your sales and marketing process – which small businesses usually struggle with.

Let us know if you’d like to learn more about marketing on a small budget, creating a blog that’s automatically configured for SEO and what Revenue Generation Software can do for your business.

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Lead Liaison

Automatically Identify Buy Signals for Sales

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Automatically Identify Buy Signals for SalesIt’s almost always the case that sales could use more help from marketing to qualify leads. Marketing is glad to help; however, they’re up to their eye balls in work. Cranking out new content, preparing for the next big trade show, managing the company’s CRM, fine tuning the website and answering to other members of the leadership team to name a few. Wouldn’t it be nice if marketing could automatically identify buy signals for sales?

Now they can! With no effort…it’s all done automatically, behind the scenes using technology. Historically, vendors have struggled getting their marketing automation solutions adopted by B2B businesses. A typical system introduces way too much complexity and an overwhelming number of features; marketers need a simple solution. Case in point, it’s important to make it easy to automatically identify buy signals for sales. Some businesses don’t want to spend countless hours configuring “lead scoring” rules and setting up business logic. Here’s the good news – now they can do it out-of-the-box, with zero configuration.

Lead Liaison allows marketers to turn on/off the most common buy signals. For example, here’s a short list of what can be enabled/disabled to automatically identify buy signals for sales:

  • Clicking through multiple emails in a certain number of months
  • Multiple website visits in a certain number of weeks
  • Web form submissions
  • Total activity (a measure of how active and interested a lead is)
  • Website visitor viewing more than a certain number of web pages
  • Website visitor viewing a specific web page
  • Viewing a landing page

Even better, buy signals can be layered on top of one another. For example, a select number of buy signals could be enabled requiring all buy signal conditions are met before sales is contacted.

Quick lead follow up is also vital. Its imperative the sales person receives buy signal alerts from marketing via a text message (SMS) or an email to reduce delay in lead response time. More importantly, sales should be able to choose how they’re notifying and if they’re notified.

At Lead Liaison, we’re getting rid of the complexity in traditional marketing automation and helping marketing automatically identify buy signals for sales. Feel free to contact us to learn more about how we can help you solve your sales and marketing problems!

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Lead Liaison

How to Get More Customers by Staying in Touch

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Staying in TouchEarlier this week we posted an article on how to get more customers. This post follows up that article adding an additional suggestion on how to get more customers. Once you know who your customers are, focus on inbound marketing and adopt a revenue generation software platform such as Lead Liaison’s, you’ll be in great position to execute on another critical piece – staying in touch. Let’s highlight how to do that.

Staying in Touch Using Lead Nurturing

Some marketers call it drip marketing, others call it lead nurturing. Both are very different. Lead nurturing is aware of a prospects online activity whereas drip marketing is ignorant to a prospects online activity. Regardless of the differences, they both share a common underlying benefit – allowing businesses to stay in touch with their prospects and customers.

Let’s take an example of how important this is from one of our own recent experiences. We’ve been looking for a new IT-related solution for deployment mid-2012. About three months ago I told the sales person we’re about 12 months out from making a decision. I haven’t heard from him since. As a result, both the sales person and their company is losing my mind share. I’ve since looked at other solutions.

If lead follow up is poor, it makes me wonder what kind of service I’ll get if I become a customer. So, why does this happen? It’s simple. Sales people are paid to do what?…sell! If they don’t smell a sale, most often they’ll forget about you as they’ve got “more important things to focus on”. Unfortunately, the sales person and the company is losing out on a great opportunity to stay in touch with me. It doesn’t mean they’ve got to call me every week or email me every day bugging me to make a decision. They could focus on educating me; sharing use cases similar to mine, providing me with getting started material, sending me references and more. If their communication was brief, friendly and helpful I’d welcome their messages and most likely keep them top-of-mind. I’d probably also convince myself I don’t need to look elsewhere and this company has what I need, from great service to a great product. The bottom line is that lead nurturing helps businesses stay in touch with their prospects by “recycling” leads into nurture marketing campaigns until they’re ready to buy.

Furthermore, nurturing allows clients to receive personalized communications. In the example above, I’d probably think the sales guy is doing his best to keep me updated since the communications looks like it’s coming from him…and if I replied to the email he’d get my response. To sum it up, lead nurturing is a simple way to satisfy “The Golden Rule of Networking” – as Ivan Misner puts it.

To better understand how Lead Liaison’s revenue generation software can help you stay in touch with your prospects and customers contact us today.

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