Anything related to sales tips, strategies, best practices and more will go here.

Lead Liaison

5 Sales Lessons I Learned From Kindergarten

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5 Sales Lessons I Learned From Kindergarten

 

1.) The loudest person doesn’t always get the attention that they desire.
There is something alluring to others about being quiet, and a good listener.
2.) Tell the truth
People have an amazing ability to tell when you are being honest and transparent.  We often hear that “people buy from people”.   I would argue, that people don’t buy from the people they like; but rather from the people that they trust will take care of the situation if something goes wrong. By removing the fear of the worst case scenario, you accelerate action, build deeper relationships, and earn more referrals (People refer people to those that they can trust as well!).
3.) It’s ok to laugh at the appropriate times
Be real with people.  All too often we like to present perfect, professional lives to others. It’s ok to show your human side and connect with people as friends.
4.) Learning is how we grow
In Kindergarten, I remember waiting to see what the next learning adventure of the day was going to be.  As we grow older, learning slows down.  For some, learning comes to a complete stop.  Give yourself at least 20 minutes each day to read an article that is out of your comfort zone, or listen to a podcast.
5.) Be a leader if you want to enjoy life
I learned on the playground that if I wanted to play Soccer at recess, I would need to organize and lead.  That meant bringing the ball EVERYDAY so that kids equated recess=soccer.  That also meant that I would be the self appointed team captain so that we would quickly pick teams each day.  I would talk the game up amongst my friends before and after recess officially ended.  I didn’t realize it back then, but I added value to my fellow students, and through that value got to guide the other kids to play soccer as “their” choice of activity.  Just like it’s hard to sell if you don’t have a buyer to work with… it would have been hard to have played soccer by myself.
At the end of the day, the key lessons in sales are not about Spin, Challenger, or Consultative Selling. The key lesson is to understand your audience, earn their trust, and follow through consistently by providing value each day.
Everything else is just academic.
Lead Liaison

New DataSpring™ B2B Database Module Enriches Sales Enablement Solution, Offers Millions of Pristine Contacts & Company Profiles

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New DataSpring™ B2B Database Module Enriches Sales Enablement Solution, Offers Millions of Pristine Contacts & Company Profiles


Searching for contact and company data just got easier with the release of Lead Liaison’s DataSpring™ module. Native to Lead Liaison’s extremely flexible Sales Enablement platform, the module provides clean, premium business-to-business (B2B) prospect and company data compiled from the most reliable sources.

Nested in an intuitive swing-out side bar, the widget provides instant access to nearly 10 million company profiles and 400 million contacts. Searchable with advanced filtering options such as job title, location and industry, profiles can easily be added to the user’s CRM and Sales Enablement workflows with the click of a mouse. Data is automatically verified prior to delivery, subverting the painful process of manual list cleaning and importing.

DataSpring™ is native to the Lead Liaison Sales Enablement Platform at no additional cost. Users purchase contact credits at highly competitive prices that rival the competition and make the process of gathering valuable, GDPR / CCPA / PDPA compliant leads a painless process.

Director of Marketing, Brad Froese, says,

“Lead Liaison has built a reputation for being a one-stop software solution for marketing and sales professionals. Its modular structure delivers the kind of flexibility that is required to adapt to ever changing markets, enable high levels of creativity, and quickly execute on new strategies. DataSpring™ is the latest example of Lead Liaison’s “easy button” solutions that save organizations time and money.”

Available exclusively from Lead Liaison, DataSpring™ becomes available November 30, 2020 and is included with any Sales Enablement license.

For information or a demonstration of Lead Liaison Sales Enablement Solutions, visit: https://www.leadliaison.com/


About Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that help businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and sales automation to boost sales effectiveness. Additionally, Lead Liaison is the global leader in event lead management, enabling companies to capture and manage leads from trade shows and events. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible architecture, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Sales Prospecting Manual
Ryan Schefke

Sales Prospecting Manual: The Secret to B2B Sales

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To download the Sales Prospecting Manual: The Secret to B2B Sales white paper .pdf, click here.

Overview

This manual is a step-by-step guide to sales prospecting. The manual was curated through real-life experience with the sales team at Lead Liaison. By following this manual your B2B sales team should expect to have a smooth-running, well-oiled B2B prospecting engine that you can use to fill the top of the funnel for $.78 per lead!

Get Prepared

Step 1: Identify your Target Market

Look at your past successes and determine which markets/industries you’re getting the most traction in. For example, is it the finance industry, health industry, high-tech, etc. Keep your focus on a specific marketing or vertical and base it off of past wins.

Step 2: Build your Team

Your team will consist of a Business Development Representative (also known as an Inside Sales Representative, or “BDR”) and a Sales Representative. Your BDR can be an internal resource or external resource, such as a contractor or part-time hire. With the B2B prospecting methodology covered in this manual, we’ve used an external resource. Here’s how we did it:

  1. Visit upwork.com. Upwork is a marketplace to hire contractors.
  2. Post a new job (it’s free).
  3. Here’s our post:
    • Title: Looking for an admin to help with data entry.
    • Description: Help with prospecting by following a guide to finding contacts using tools provided by our company. Enter the contacts into our sales automation system. Rinse and repeat.
  4. Hire your BDR for $3 per hour! Yep, we’re not joking. Here’s proof:

Hiring a BDR

5. Next, find your Sales Representatives. We suggest having Sales Representatives that work for your company. The Sales Reps will take leads from this process that engage (express interest or interact in some way) and follow up on them. They will also execute manual tasks that are combined with automated tasks as part of a sales plan that systematically, and intelligently, reaches out to your prospects.

Step 3: Build a Semi-Automated, Systematic Sales Plan

This step is a must if you want to build a prospecting machine. These systems are sometimes referred to as Sales Engagement, Sales Enablement, or Sales Automation. Regardless of the name, they all serve a similar purpose. That is, to make a salesperson’s job easier by making them more efficient with their day-to-day sales efforts. Enterprise systems will include a few key components:

  1. Sales plan
  2. Task manager
  3. Integration with CRMs and marketing automation platforms

The Sales plan is a combination of various actions such as emails (automatic and manual), offline communication (handwritten letters, postcards, etc.), tasks, and digital communication (text messaging) that can be added into your plan. With the right system, there are two ways to manage your plan:

  1. Create one plan that all of your Sales Reps can share.
  2. Create individual plans for each of your Sales Reps.

In the process below, we’re using method #1. Your VP of Sales or someone leading your sales team could create the plan and your entire sales team can benefit from it. This results in consistent communication for your brand and overall messaging. Our system of choice in this example is a Sales Enablement system from Lead Liaison. Other providers call their Sales Plan “Sequences” or “Cadences”, while Lead Liaison calls them “Rhythms”.

Here’s how to create your Sales Plan using Rhythms: http://youtu.be/6bKzl9LZcX8?hd=1

Start Prospecting

Step 4: Find the Right Person

In this part of the manual, these are the instructions you can provide to your BDR (the $3 resource).

  • Do not select more than two (2) people at the same company. It’s suggested you use only a single contact to avoid any issues with domain reputation.
  • Use these methods, in this order, to find the right person to target:
  • Look for these people (you fill in the X, Y, and … in the section below to give your BDR specific instructions). Remember, you should create a Saved Search in LinkedIn Navigator to simplify this process for your BDR.
    • First, anyone with “X” in their title.
    • Next, anyone with “Y” in their title.
    • Finally, if there’s no match on the above look for these titles:
      • …
      • …
    • Ideally, you’re looking for these key job titles:
      • …
      • …

Step 5: Find their Email Address

Have your ISR install these tools as their ISR Prospecting Stack. Using these three tools will guarantee your ISR can find a valid email address f86% of the time. See a more detailed analysis on this fact in this blog post.

  • Install the top three (3) ranked tools below. Each tool has a video demonstrating how to install it and how to use it.
  • Since there is an average of 21 business days in a month, use two separate email addresses (personal email such as @gmail.com addresses are fine) and install Clearbit Connect with those email accounts. You can use the free version of Clearbit Connect to generate 10 new email addresses per day for each business day in the month. If you need more, open more Clearbit Connect accounts.
  • Use your company’s Norbert account.
  • Use your company’s Hunter account.
RankToolInstallationUsageFree CreditsMinimum Paid Plan (Annually)Price per Email (Based on Annual Paid Plan)Notes
1Clearbit ConnectHow to use Clearbit Connect100 emails per month$6,000$.50 (12K emails)Paid Plan can be divided into 5 seats. Only pay for verified matches.
2NorbertNorbert installationHow to use Norbert50 emails$468$.039 (12K emails)Credits rollover. Charges on successful verification.
3HunterHunter.io installationHow to use Hunter.io100 per month$408$.034 (12K emails)Share across users for paid plan. Also crawls web. Use web for single credit instead of browser plugin.

Step 6: Enter Data Into your Sales Automation System

In this step, your ISR will enter data into a Sales Automation system, in this case Lead Liaison’s Rhythms. After the BDR finds the contact, create the Prospect in Lead Liaison and add them into a Rhythm.

Start Selling

Step 7: Use a Task Manager

Now that your BDR engine is running full steam, and people are added to your Sales Plan, that’s where the hand-off from the BDR to the Sales Rep occurs. The Sales Rep simply has to execute all of the tasks created by your Sales Plan. Since we’re using Lead Liaison’s Rhythms for our Sales Plan, it also comes with a nice, built-in task manager. Every manual email or task used in your Rhythm will get populated in your task manager. Here’s how to manage your tasks with the task manager: http://youtu.be/0heTYixWjZ4?hd=1.

As you work through your tasks, make sure to do your research. If you’re selling to major accounts, in what’s referred to as Account-Based Sales or Account-Based Marketing, research is really important at this stage. In the section below, we cover our favorite tools for research and provide some videos on how to use each tool.

Task Manager

Step 8: Research

Identify Technographics (Datanyze)

If it’s important for you to know what technology (lead gen, marketing automation, content management system, email marketing program, etc.) your prospect is using use a system like Datanyze (now owned by ZoomInfo) or BuiltWith to search technographics.

  1. Install Datanyze Insider for free: https://www.datanyze.com/insider
  2. Here’s a video on how to use it to find Technographics: http://youtu.be/0fF23vXfVoo?hd=1

Check out Funding Events (Crunchbase)

Funding events, competitors, financials, and more can be found with Crunchbase.

  1. Access Crunchbase.
  2. Review key company information: http://youtu.be/EfeGIK6pBhw?hd=1

Read the News (Owler)

Owler does the best job in the marketplace for finding competitors. If this information is useful to you, access Owler.

  1. Head to owler.com and sign up for free.
  2. Search the company for News, Competitors, and Press Releases. Here’s an example: http://youtu.be/fJsno3l_zLg?hd=1

Summarizing the Prospecting Stack

Here’s a summary of what your company would need to invest in subscription services for the total prospecting stack. We broke up the stack into a BDR Stack and Sales Rep stack. We computed a Cost-Per-Lead, or CPL, for this prospecting effort based on 10,441 leads per year. Not bad for $.78 per lead!!!

BDR Prospecting Technology Stack

TOOLANNUAL COST
Clearbit ConnectFree
Voila Norbert$468
Hunter$408
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Professional$779.88
Lead Liaison Sales Enablement User License$900
TOTAL INVESTMENT$2,555.58

Sales Representative Sales Technology Stack

TOOLANNUAL COST
Datanyze InsiderFree
Owler Free
Crunchbase $348
TOTAL INVESTMENT$348

Total Investment and CPL

TOOLANNUAL COST
Clearbit ConnectFree
Voila Norbert$468
Hunter$408
Datanyze InsiderFree
Owler Free
Crunchbase $348
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Professional$779.88
Lead Liaison Sales Enablement User License$900
Research Labor ($3 per hour).

Based on 40 leads per day. 10 minutes per lead.

261 working days in a year.

$5,220
TOTAL TOOLS$2,903.88
TOTAL LABOR$5,220
TOTAL INVESTMENT$8,123.88
COST PER QUALIFIED LEAD (CPQL). 10,440 per year.$.78
calendar sales
Ryan Schefke

How to Book More Sales Meetings

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Are you wondering how to book more sales meetings? If you’re reading this, then you’re likely a VP of Sales and having problems with the reps on your team or you’re an individual contributor and looking for the upperhand. In this article, we’ll expose some eye opening statistics and give you one of the key ways you can solve this very problem to start booking more sales meetings.

A few months back I traveled from Texas to Georgia. I was traveling to accompany one of our sales representatives in a meeting with a potential client. When I sat down with the prospect, I asked him what he was hoping to accomplish that day. He answered my question by saying he wanted to see anything and everything in our software. In my mind, I thought this meeting would drag on and on unless I took better control of it. Most sales reps would feel a jolt of electricity in their chair if they heard their prospect say this very same thing. They’d be ready to whip out their box of candy and start handing it out like it was Halloween. Instead of throwing him tootsie rolls and lifesavers (or a full candy bar like those wealthy neighborhoods like to do), I turned the question back around to him. I asked, what is it you’re trying to accomplish in your role. He said, “I want to have more conversations.” Now, that’s helpful. Instead of going off on another dog and pony show that could cover things that didn’t mean much to him, we narrowed down the focus.

This sales rep was no different than the 2.7 million other inside sales representatives in the U.S.  Their main goal is largely to generate interest and set up meetings. Unfortunately, most reps are inefficient at doing so and struggle with their approach. According to SalesWolf, Sales Development Reps (SDR) waste up to 40% of their time looking for someone to call. With the average SDR making 37.2 calls per day, that’s a lot of wasted time. There’s no secret sauce to booking more meetings; however, there’s one thing we wholeheartedly believe in. It’s quality over quantity and structure/process is not an option; it’s a necessity.

I recall a CEO of a company I used to work for saying to our inside sales team, “it’s a numbers game…just do more and it will happen.” While that could be true, sales leadership really never considers the burn out rate of an SDR after running them through the ringer. Bridge Group research sites there’s a minimum of 20% annual turnover in Sales, and up to 34% if you include voluntary and involuntary. To make matters worse, Deloitte found that Millennials are even more likely to leave their job sooner, as 25% said they’ll leave their current job within a year and 44% will leave within two years.

Now, consider the time it takes to ramp up a sales rep. ClearSlide and CSO Insights report that 71% of companies take 6 months or longer to onboard new sales reps; and at all companies it takes 9 months or more. If you do the simple math here, and consider best case scenarios, there’s a window of a year or two when a rep is fully up to speed and still working for your company. Why is turnover so high? Forbes states that sales reps don’t have coaches and mentors, and lack the latest sales tools.

Stop reading this if your company is not willing to spend money on the right sales tools. And stop reading this if you’re not ready to capitalize on the window of opportunity when your rep is ready to go, and still working for you! Why? Because you’re really not ready to have your sales rep book more sales meetings and you’re not open to adopting technology to assist. Some sales rep can be true superstars, but they can only do so much. Insidesales.com finds the average company spends $2,103 per SDR per year ($175 per month) on sales technology (not including CRM). Insidesales.com found the top five adopted sales technologies are, along with their adoption rate:

  1. Social prospecting, 82.5%
  2. List services, 58.5%
  3. Email engagement, 55.3%
  4. Phone, 43.4%
  5. Sales cadences, 37%

Adopting these five core technologies into your sales team’s strategies will without a doubt help them book more meetings. It will also help them spend less time looking for things to do. All five of these approaches can be applied using a single software solution, that takes less than half of the sales technology budget ($175 per month in 2018 according to Insidesales.com). The solution also dramatically cuts down ramp up time so companies can maximize the window in which sales reps are ramped up and employed.

By using systems like Rhythms from Lead Liaison, Cadences from SalesLoft, or Sequences from Outreach.io, sales reps can build a blueprint of their sales plan. The blueprint can contain social touch points, drive email engagement, and schedule phone tasks all while ingesting a list of contacts that you source.

Reps use these systems by mixing offline and online communication over time to form their outreach process. The systems have both manual and automated tasks, working together to move the “suspect” through the prospecting cycle and into the top of the lifecycle funnel. The system keeps track of engagement and creates tasks that reps can work on in a systematic way each day – helping to keep them focused on the job at hand.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s solution, called Rhythms, that help sales representatives book more sales meetings contact Lead Liaison today.

Sales Enablement
Lead Liaison

The Importance of Integration in Sales Enablement

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Sales enablement – a strategic, collaborative discipline, designed to add value to customer interactions and improve predictable sales results – is a business function that has grown rapidly over the past few years. In fact, when CSO Insights began its annual Sales Enablement Optimization Study in 2013, just 19.3 percent of organisations had a dedicated enablement function or programme, and that figure reached 59.2 percent in 2017.

In the end, sales enablement is about ensuring that salespeople, marketing staff, customer service reps and business leaders all understand how they can help meet customer expectations and maximize the amount of revenue the organization generates. In this article, we look more closely at the role that integration plays in enablement and explain some of the steps organizations can take to align sales, marketing, and customer service.

Setting Shared Objectives

For an enablement strategy to work, it is important to understand that, while different departments will have different individual aims and objectives, the primary objective of the sales organization is to maximize sales effectiveness, help customers and improve sales results. Ultimately, for sales enablement to be successful, the individual departments need to share those objectives and understand the role that they play in helping to achieve them.

This means that sales reps need to be equipped with the skills and knowledge to maximize success, the customer service staff needs to adopt best practices to deal with problems quickly and keep customers happy, and the marketing department needs to generate interest in the organization and highlight the company’s merits. Enablement leaders must then ensure all of those things happen, but that departments never lose sight of the core objectives.

“One of the major reasons sales enablement is so challenging is due to interdepartmental misalignment and a lack of ownership for enablement initiatives,” says Alyssa Drury, writing for Seismic. “Marketing plays an integral role… but it is often thought of as a sales responsibility, causing tension between the two departments. This alignment is [also] impossible if marketers aren’t thinking about how they support the sales force.”

Connecting Sales Coaching

While it is far from the whole story, a significant part of sales enablement is sufficiently training and coaching sales staff, so that they can carry out their role to the best of their ability. However, this requires integration, because sales reps need to be taught how to make use of content created by the marketing department and how to make use of CRM software, which links with the customer service department.

For sales leaders to achieve this, it is best to formally align their sales coaching and sales training processes to their sales enablement framework, so that all aspects are covered.

Yet, according to the CSO Insights 2017 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, only 11.3 percent of organizations have a dynamic coaching process in place, where their sales coaching efforts are connected to their enablement framework. Nevertheless, when this does occur, average win rates stand at 66.1 percent, compared to the average win rate of 51.8 percent, representing a 27.6 percent improvement.

What this demonstrates quite neatly is that an integrated sales enablement strategy pays off in terms of enhancing sales effectiveness and improving business results. However, it requires leaders within the organization to take the time to connect coaching frameworks to enablement frameworks. Additionally, it is imperative that organisations take the time to equip sales managers with the skills to carry out that coaching.

In addition to coaching, the use of solutions to automate processes for sales staff, like Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution for prospecting, free’s up Reps time to be focussed on the activities that they can really add value to.

Establishing Buyer Personas

Finally, one of the best ways to make sure different departments are integrated with one another and on the same page when it comes to sales enablement is to establish buying personas. Essentially, these are generalised representations of your sales organisation’s customers, and these can be used to teach staff about why customers choose to buy your products, services or solutions and what affects their decision throughout the customer journey.

These buyer personas should be based on real research and the actual customers you attract and want to attract. Once credible buyer personas have been drawn up, these should be shared with all departments, so they can all gain a deeper insight into the different stages of the customer journey and better understand the role that their particular department plays in bringing a customer closer to making the decision to purchase.

“Essentially, a company must establish a buyer persona and then share that persona with all key players in marketing and sales,” explains David Reimherr, a content marketing expert and the founder of Magnificent Marketing, in an article written for Social Media Explorer. “That allows people to understand the stages of where their customers go for answers, what influences them to buy, and so on.”

Moreover, the marketing department and customer service department need to consider how they can help reps to improve their sales effectiveness. This may mean creating higher quality content, which is more likely to appeal to customers, or sharing customer information through CRM software, which could be used to make sales more likely.

Author Bio:

Monika Götzmann is the EMEA Marketing Director of Miller Heiman Group, a global sales consulting firm, helping organizations to create effective sales enablement strategies. Culturally savvy, she has years of international experience in B2B marketing on behalf of dynamic, world-class enterprises. She likes to share her insights achieving sales effectiveness.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s solution for Sales Enablement as a strategy, click here.

Ryan Schefke

What’s the difference between marketing automation and sales enablement?

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What’s the difference between marketing automation and sales enablement? On the surface, the two solutions seem very similar; however, they serve different purposes. In this article we’ll compare and contrast marketing automation with sales enablement.

Primary User

The first difference is with the primary user. Sales enablement is used by sales people whereas marketing automation is used by marketers. Now, don’t get me wrong – sales enablement can be used by people in roles outside of sales, but we’re talking about the primary user here. Marketing automation is more advanced than sales enablement and is designed to meet the demands of different types of sophisticated marketing campaigns. For example, marketing automation actions can have different business logic (rules) wrapped around the actions while sales enablement actions have no additional criteria. Marketing automation also has a number of different action types, such as the ability to change field values, delete records, sync records to a CRM, distribute leads, and more. On the other hand, sales enablement has only a handful of actions commonly used by sales people when doing outreach, such as emails, handwritten letters, text messages, and postcards.

Where Do the Emails Come From?

The second difference between marketing automation and sales enablement is the way that email messages are sent. With marketing automation, emails are sent through the marketing automation provider’s network. Emails sent through sales enablement are sent through the company’s email server. This is typically an Exchange server, Google, Office 365, etc. With sales enablement businesses have more control over their messages, typically better deliverability, and optional unsubscribe text in the emails.

Email Tracking Differences

The third major difference between sales enablement and marketing automation is the level of email tracking. Marketing automation solutions typically track opens and clicks; however, they do not typically detect when someone replies to an email. On the contrary, sales enablement solutions can detect replies, out of office notifications, forwards, and more – making it easy to automatically take action based on this outcome. With sales enablement, people can be automatically removed from the flow when they reply to a message or the conversation can be paused for a defined period when an out of office occurs. With marketing automation, prospects need to be manually removed, or removed with an automated action, if they need to be pulled out of a workflow. Ideally, your marketing automation platform is used for building an already established relationship; whereas sales enablement is ideal for creating brand new relationships. As a result, the need to manually remove people from a marketing automation workflow is much lower if the focus is on building an existing relationship.

Who You’re Targeting

This is a great segue into the last difference between the two systems, which is who the solution targets and where the solution is used in the overall buyer’s journey. Because of its simplicity and sales-friendly setup, sales enablement is ideally suited to fill the top of the funnel. Relationships are usually not forged yet at this stage, and sales enablement can help build those connections. Companies with an inside sales team, business development reps, or reps focusing on major accounts will benefit from using sales enablement. Marketing automation is ideal for people in the middle or bottom of the funnel, when a relationship already exists. Since communication is sent out through the providers network its important to follow the providers rules and sending policies, and send to only prospects with whom you have a relationship with who want to get your email. With sales enablement, emails go through your company’s servers. How you send messages and to whom is up to you.

In Summary

Feel free to use the below summary to forward to your friends and colleagues to help them better understand the differences between marketing automation and sales enablement.

For a demonstration of Lead Liaison’s solution to sales enablement and/or marketing automation click here. Also, learn more about marketing automation strategies here and learn more about sales enablement strategies here. If you care about account based marketing, this strategy will be helpful to beef up on too!

Hope this helps!

Marketing automation:

  • is used by marketers
  • is intended for middle to bottom of the funnel people
  • is perfect for nurturing warm prospects, building stronger relationships, onboarding/upselling customers
  • delivers emails through Lead Liaison’s network
  • requires a process to be setup to remove people from an automation
  • emails require an unsubscribe link

Sales enablement :

  • is used by sales
  • is intended for top of the funnel sales activities
  • is perfect for Account Based Marketing (ABM) and prospecting
  • sends emails through your company’s email server
  • automatically removes people that reply from any automated communication stream (Lead Liaison Rhythms™)
  • emails do not require an unsubscribe link
  • is a platform to set sales goals
Lead Liaison

Ten Things Marketing Should Review with Sales When using Marketing Automation

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marketing and salesMarketing automation software is a necessary solution that all viable businesses should use. I’ve said many times that marketing automation is like CRM 20 years ago. Companies that are not using marketing automation risk losing ground to their competitors, who likely are using marketing automation. Unfortunately though, companies seem to think that marketing automation is just for marketers – when it’s not! Salespeople can realize a number of gains from marketing automation software, such as better, more qualified leads, key alerts, reports that identify new leads, and more. Marketers are the main buyers of marketing automation software. However, they’re not always clear on what they should tell their sales team once they bring the software in-house. Here’s a list of ten things marketing should review with sales when using marketing automation:

  1. Ask them if they want to get a daily alert via email that sends them a list of businesses checking out your company’s website in the area they are responsible for. For example, a rep covering Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska might only want to see companies visiting your website only in these states. Also, it’s possible to see the people that visit your website, but limit that to only people with whom the sales rep is the “lead owner” of. Ask them if they prefer to filter out what’s on the daily report. For example, only see leads they own, etc.
  2. The Automated Lead Flow Management guide would be a good document to read through to see what’s possible: http://www.leadliaison.com/resources/library-of-resources/. Can your sales team agree on a flow for all inbound leads that help your company establish a process for managing, distributing, and nurturing inbound leads?
  3. Try to better understand from them how they segment clients, so the marketing automation provider can help you build dynamic segmentations from your database. In other words, what “groups” of people do they want to communicate with frequently and why?
  4. Do they ever want emails to be sent by marketing on their behalf? Most marketing automation platforms can send emails from the Lead or Contact owner.
  5. Better define lead distribution processes with them. Most marketing automation systems can help you set up a rock solid lead distribution process.
  6. Get a feel for the buyer’s journey. The Marketing Content Map, http://www.leadliaison.com/resources/library-of-resources/, can help you map out the buyer’s journey. Make sure you build nurturing around each of these journey’s to build the relationship as prospects move through the sales cycle.
  7. Ask if they want to nurture customers (up sell, cross sell ops, birthday wishes, contract anniversary reminders, etc). Marketing automation is not just for top of the funnel activities, but also for bottom of the funnel relationship building.
  8. You could ask them what activities make a qualified lead in their mind, and start building a scoring model with them (what activities to score, what points, etc.). If you’re really digging in, we have a guide that kind of acts like a contract between marketing and sales, called the service level agreement between sales/marketing. You can download it here: http://www.leadliaison.com/resources/library-of-resources/.
  9. Ask them if they want to add a plug-in into their email client (Google Mail, Outlook, etc.) to send trackable 1:1 email. Most marketing automation providers offer plugins to email clients. We do this with our Send & Track plugin.
  10. Ask them if they could use help nurturing trade shows leads (if you attend trade shows). This last one is sort of specific to Lead Liaison. We have a mobile app to simplify the process from lead capture, to transcription, to nurture! It’s a pretty slick end-to-end process.
Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: What is Dynamic Content?

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Dynamic Content: its meaning and how to apply it. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

Are you asking yourself, what is dynamic content?

dynamic contentDynamic content can be the magic link between content and conversions. It is content within a website, a form, a landing page, or an email that changes based on the interests or past behaviors of the viewer. It creates an experience that is customized for the viewer that that moment, and can quickly grab your prospect’s or customer’s attention by personalizing content to the visitor.

It eliminates the need for multiple landing pages, depending on things like location. If you want your webpage to have an image of barbeque when someone from Texas is viewing your page, that’s an example of a dynamic webpage. It’s a way to hyper-target your audience.

How does it work?

Marketing automation tools such as Lead Liaison build a rich profile of your website visitors that strengthens over time. That tool can then combine behavioral information (things the visitor does within your website) with demographics from your CRM. Then, that data can be retrieved in real-time and used in a rule set that tells the system when and where to show personalized content.

You can set dynamic content to change based off of things like:

  • Location
  • Lead score
  • Actions taken (such as clicks, email opens, document downloads, and more)

You can use it to:

  • Customize a viewer’s web experience
  • Personalize emails – a viewer’s name is retrieved from your contact database and inserted into the email

“In-house marketers who are personalizing web experiences and who are also able to quantify the improvement (in the context of online sales or their key website performance metric) are seeing, on average, a 19% uplift in sales.” – Linus Gregoriadis, Econsultancy

Dynamic content is a powerful tool for businesses, marketers, and for user experience. Learn more about implementing this within your own marketing by clicking here:

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Lead Liaison

What to Include in Handwritten Sales Follow-up Letters

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What to Include in Handwritten Sales Follow-up Letters

Effective Sales Follow-Up

You have a prospect on the line, and now you just have to reel him or her in. Once you get him or her to shore, you’ll have money in your pocket and the admiration of your co-workers. While you could pick up the phone and beg the prospect to take the bait, handwritten sales follow-up letters are much more effective. Include the following components in your follow-up sales letter to increase your conversions, regardless of your industry.

Write About Benefits Instead of Features

Your handwritten sales follow-up letter should focus on the benefits you can offer instead of the features you provide. This is often referred to as selling the sizzle instead of the steak. Don’t tell people that the car you’re selling has an amazing engine. Tell them it will go fast. Don’t tell readers that your keyboard has low-profile keys. Instead, tell them it will speed up typing. Focusing on the benefits over the features will make your products stand out to the reader, which is a huge step in converting prospects.

Keep the Ball in Your Court

Control is an important part of sales. The person who has the control gets to take the lead. If you relinquish control, you will have to wait for the prospect to contact you, which might not happen. Maintain control by letting the prospect know what your next step will be, whether it will be a phone call, email, or another letter. Prospects can reach out to you before you take that next step, but if they don’t, you can follow up without feeling intrusive since they are expecting it. 

Reference Past Communications 

Personalization is key with sales. You will be more successful if you personalize your communications. With that in mind, reference past communications or interactions you’ve had with your prospects. If you make your prospects feel special, they will be more likely to take the next step and become customers. 

Your sales letter is possibly the most important tool you have in your sales arsenal. If you use the tool wisely, you will turn a high number of prospects into paying customers. Consider using a service for your handwritten sales follow-up letters so you will have ample time to handle your other sales duties. 

Start Sending Handwritten Letters Now

Lead Liaison

How to Prospect Using Handwritten Letters

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How to Prospect Using Handwritten Letters

Get Ready to Prospect Using Handwritten Letters – Be Different

With technology, people are always looking forward. They constantly think of new ways to tackle problems or attract customers. Sometimes, though, you need to take an old school approach to get the job done. That’s the case when it comes to prospecting. Instead of letting technology get in the way of your prospecting success, use handwritten letters. Once you know how to prospect using handwritten letters, you’ll wonder why you haven’t been using this method all along.

Write Letters That Are Easy to Scan

People are used to reading on the web, where articles include headlines and are easy to scan. You can provide the same experience with your handwritten letters. Make the paragraphs short and to the point and include bullet points, if needed. People should be able to glance at your letter and pick out the main points without any problems. 

Use a Handwritten Envelope

Your letter will only be effective if the recipient opens it. People are more likely to open mail that has a handwritten envelope, so take the time to write the names and addresses out. If you don’t have the time, a service can do it for you.

Don’t Include Teaser Copy

Some people like to put what is often referred to as “teaser copy” on the envelope. They use words like “FREE” and “URGENT” on the envelope, thinking it will increase the open rates. Instead, it makes people think they have received junk mail. 

Use the Letter as Part of an Automated Sequence

Handwritten letters are an excellent way to prospect, but you can’t expect people to respond to them. People aren’t going to sit down and write a letter back to you, and many people won’t pick up the phone and call. That’s why you need to make them a part of a sequence. Follow your handwritten prospecting letters up with phone calls or emails so people can respond. Putting the letters inside of a sequence also makes it easier to nurture your leads.

Now that you know how to prospect using handwritten letters, it’s time to get started. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to write a great sales letter or if you don’t have the time to put into the process. You can use a service to handle the letters for you. Services can even include the handwritten letter as part of an automated prospecting plan.

Start Sending Handwritten Letters Now

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