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Lead Liaison

VisiStat

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VisiStat Inc. vs Lead LiaisonVisiStat Inc. has a nice solution for aggregating website analytics. They do a great job of tracking search words, website visitors, popular pages, search engines and more. However, if you’re looking for more than a website analytics solution Lead Liaison can help. These days visitor statistics aren’t enough and Google Analytics usually provides sufficient website stats for your business. Most small to medium sized businesses need a complete lead management system that includes B2B visitor tracking as a feature, not a focus, of a holistic sales and marketing software platform that complements CRM systems.

Many companies choose Lead Liaison over solutions like VisiStat. because of our ability to provide lead management, lead capture, lead qualification, lead conversion, lead generation and lead nurturing capabilities natively in a single package. The breadth of our offering is very unique but is not the only strength of our software. We take visitor tracking to the next level by providing true real-time analysis of B2B traffic accessible via any website browser or our desktop application. We enable companies to see what businesses are on their website at any given moment, what pages they’re looking at and engage in real-time chat sessions – ideal for inside sales teams. Our deep integration with leading people and company data as a service (DaaS) providers allows Lead Liaison to tap into rich sets of data on over 200 million businesses and 35 million professionals to further enrich B2B visitor stats. No other company offers this level of native integration.

Why You Need More than VisiStat

Tracking website stats won’t grow your business; however, Revenue Generation Software™ will. Start taking advantage of Lead Liaison’s software to drive more leads to the top of the sales funnel and shorten sales cycles by accelerating prospects through the pipe. Experience the power of Revenue Generation Software™ for visitor statistics similar to VisiStat and many more features of our platform!

We invite you to see a different solution from VisiStat Inc. and encourage you to learn more about Lead Liaison by speaking with one of our Revenue Success Managers.

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ActiveConversion

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ActiveConversionLooking for an alternative to ActiveConversion? If yes, then we welcome you to learn more about Lead Liaison by clicking the button below. ActiveConversion is a strong point solution and focuses on a few areas; namely, lead scoring and visitor tracking. They leave sales prospecting, email marketing among other capabilities to third parties. They have a few other nice features but ultimately, that’s where vendors in this space fall short. B2B companies want integrated solutions, not disparate features. Unfortunately, vendors (and consequently many businesses) have fallen into a trap. “Marketing automation” is the me-too phrase in the industry. It’s the buzzword that vendors and consumers have latched onto. Many vendors claim to do “marketing automation” – why not, it’s gets them the exposure they need. We’ve said it many times – no one wants to automate marketing but everyone wants to generate revenue.

We’re Different from ActiveConversion

Lead Liaison is not following the me-too model. Since the genesis of our company in 2008 we’ve focused on extending our Revenue Generation Software™ platform. The operative word is “platform”. Marketers need a holistic solution to generate, qualify, nurture and manage leads. CRMs such as Salesforce.com serve as an excellent accounting system for leads, contacts and accounts; however, they don’t give businesses the structure they need to truly perfect their lead management process and cultivate an environment around revenue generation and sales and marketing synergy. We’re the revenue engine for a business that unifies sales, marketing and executive teams. We’re different from competitors and companies like ActiveConversion because of our focus on delivering solutions to sales and executives in addition to marketers. Our integrated solution also sets us apart. Instead of relying on 3rd party email marketing services that don’t delivered a closed-loop experience, we’ve developed our own professional-grade closed-loop email marketing system running a world-class email engine under the hood. We’ve tightly integrated CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com into the DNA of our product. We’ve also spent thousands of hours on the user experience. If we can automate a feature, make a drag-drop component or in any way give our users the visual experience they need to simplify their job then we do it. Add our “no-limit” business model on top of the aforementioned benefits and you’ll see why our solution is so attractive to businesses. In summary, here are a few reasons why you should consider Lead Liaison over companies like ActiveConversion:

  • We’re highly adaptive to our customers needs. We don’t create our products, our customers do.
  • Hands down, the easiest solution to use.
  • We’re a platform, not a product.

We invite you to see a different solution from ActiveConversion and encourage you to learn more about Lead Liaison by speaking with one of our Revenue Success Managers. To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button.

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Pardot Competitors

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Pardot CompetitorsPardot claims to have only a few competitors; however, in reality they‘ve got more than two. Pardot’s competitors range from small visitor tracking only solutions to marketing automation vendors. Small to medium sized businesses typically gravitate toward Pardot because of price and the attraction to the buzz around “marketing automation”. Don’t miss out though, take a look at Lead Liaison – we’re not just marketing automation, that’s a feature to us, we’re revenue generation software that drives your business. Don’t get us wrong, Pardot offers a great solution for most companies; although, if you’re in the market for more than software that automates a marketer’s job then check out Lead Liaison. There are a few things we do better than our competitors at Pardot; namely, ease of use, sales prospecting, real-time technology, a focus on revenue generation and a better, simpler business model.

An alternative that focuses on what’s important

Pardot focuses mainly on marketing automation whereas we focus on revenue generation. Which one does your business care more about? See our article on The Marketing Automation Mistake which outlines the downfalls of vendors tying their brand to “marketing automation” and focusing solely on automated marketing. Unfortunately, marketing automation is only a feature. Lead Liaison focuses on solutions for sales, marketing and executives that bridges the gap in organizational alignment and helps businesses rapidly grow revenue. People care about revenue generation, not marketing automation. That’s why we trademarked Revenue Generation Software™ – we own it, we live it, we do it.

Unlike all Pardot Competitors we also offer a true real-time solution that allows us to provide real-time, live B2B visitor tracking. Our unique technology also allows us to provide native real-time chat capabilities for inside sales to engage live with the hottest prospects surfing your company’s site.

Don’t leave sales out in the cold

Sales prospecting is another feature that sets us apart in the industry. With our solid foundation of sales experience on our staff we understand the challenges both inside and outside sales people face on a daily basis. We responded to those challenges by adding sales tools commonly used for prospecting such as professional contact searching of more than 35M people and business searching of more than 200M businesses. List building, which helps sales people create regional sales strategies, rounds out our sales prospecting feature set. It’s important to note this capability is built natively into our platform whereas Pardot and Pardot’s competitors send users to third party sites. We keep our functionality within our platform – under one roof.

Our business model is also very customer friendly. We keep it simple by eliminating number of emails sent per month, number of users or number of contacts in a company’s database. Pardot and Pardot’s competitors typically have limitations such as number of emails sent per month, number of landing pages, number of forms and more. It’s no wonder why analysts suggest users of “marketing automation” software face adoption issues and typically use only about 20% of functionality. There’s not much you can do when your hands are tied behind your back. Lead Liaison keeps it simple and prices our software based on four editions. You can’t get any simpler.

Competitors don’t like late entrants

Finally, we stand alone in the category of ease-of-use. Our solution was built from the ground up with the user experience in mind. Agreeably, we did enter the market place later than most companies, including Pardot, but that’s not a bad thing. We watched many companies try to keep up with their competitors and fail by adding functionality as an after thought, creating a spaghetti-like mix of features for end users. Lead Liaison invites you to see a demonstration of our software to see how our user experience is unparalleled and ties together ease of use, sales prospecting, real-time technology, a focus on revenue generation and a better, simpler business model into a single platform.

If you are interested to learn how Lead Liaison can help your company grow revenue then we’re happy to give you a demonstration of our Revenue Generation Software™ platform.

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How to Get More Sales

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Identifying how to get more sales is often a struggle for many companies. Whether you’re an early stage start-up trying to meet the pressing demands of your board and/or venture capitalists or a seasoned company stuck in a rut; every business could gain from more sales. Too many businesses put the cart in front of the horse. To get more sales, you’ve got to drive revenue by converting more leads. Our mission at Lead Liaison is to help your company focus on better lead conversion and get your business generating 4X more qualified leads. In the graphic below we highlight five main activities (vertical sections across the bottom row) that identify how to get more sales by nurturing leads, capturing more leads, having better lead follow up, personalizing communications and improving sales effectiveness. The horizontal sections layered on top of the main activities are supportive activities. How to Get More Sales Let’s dig deeper into the main activities. Here’s a short summary of how Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software technology can help your business get more sales by focusing on five key areas: 5 Principles to Get More Sales

Nurture Leads

Nurture Leads to Get More Sales How many times has your sales staff disregarded a potential lead or an inbound inquiry? Go ahead, be honest. Experts estimate 70% to 80% of all inquiries are latent demand that will buy within a few years but are lost, ignored or discarded by sales. What’s worse is that 73% of all companies have no process for revisiting leads. That’s a lot of lost revenue and a goldmine of more sales for your business. By using smart technology to intelligently nurture leads via relevant, personalized communications businesses can keep prospects top of mind and accelerate time-to-revenue.  

Capture Leads

Capture More Leads to Get More SalesIt doesn’t take a wiz-kid to know that more leads results in more sales. Use several landing pages across your business and embed forms with a minimal (no more than four) amount of fields. Use progressive profiling technology to intelligently identify what information you’ve already collected from a prospect and either hide the field or replace it with a new field that will help your business build a richer prospect profile. Also, use pre-filled form data to keep your database clean. For example, have a “job role” field that only had C-level, VP-level, Director, Manager and Assistant/Coordinator as the choices. When you need to profile your database (how to do database profiling) you’ll be happy you pre-filled forms. Do the same with company names and locations. Lead Liaison can help with that.

Lead Follow Up

Better Lead Follow Up to Get More Sales It’s imperative companies quickly distribute leads and respond to leads within five minutes to increase lead conversion rates. Research shows that responding within the first five minutes greatly improves the chances of getting the sale. Use automated technology to send email responses from a lead owner. See our article on automatically distributing leads for more information.

Personalize Conversations

Personalize Communication to Get More Sales Use marketing automation technology to deliver marketing messages that match a prospect’s interests. Furthermore, make sure to create a marketing content map that maps marketing content to industries and buyer personas. Send them material they care about. Don’t generalize your audience. Read our article on email automation to learn more about personalizing communication. Make sure you also close the loop on your nurturing. Traditional email marketing systems do not have the ability to tie in past and future online body language with email activity. Tracking email opens are metrics of the past.

Sales Effectiveness

Improve Sales Effectiveness to Get More Sales Sales definitely wants to know how to get more sales. They can do it, they just need to be more effective. Traditionally, sales people would have to keep constant reminders or wade through prospect upon prospect in a flat database. Use lead scoring, lead activities and lead grading technology to help prioritize leads for sales. Build richer prospect profiles by collecting a prospect’s buying behavior (keywords searched, pages visited, multi-visits, etc.). Use alerts to signal your favorite leads or notify lead owners of key buying signals. Help sales do their job by adding technology that takes the guess work out of sales. If you are interested to learn how Lead Liaison can help your company get more sales using the aforementioned approaches and a host of other innovative technologies let us know. We’re happy to give you a demonstration of our Revenue Generation Software platform. To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button.

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12 Ways to Repurpose Content

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Repurpose ContentLooking for ways to repurpose content? Many companies struggle creating content. Marketing content is important, but pervasiveness of that content is even more important. Much like a spider casts a web far and wide; marketers must cast their content in a similar manner. However, instead of getting worn down trying to create new content for each marketing channel (LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.) repurpose content for each marketing channel.

To start improving inbound marketing create one piece of content. We recommend writing a blog article as your starting point. Keep blogs short and rich with insightful information. Think about who your audience is. Ask yourself, who will read this content and why would they read it? Once your blog article is created repurpose your content on the internet to allow potential buyers to easily find your company. We came across Brody Dorland’s post, A Lesson in Content Repurposing, Infographic Style. Brody provides a very useful infographic with some print instructions to hang the graphic in your office. The graphic outlines 12 things marketers can do to repurpose content and improve inbound marketing. We’ve also pinned it to the side of this post for your convenience. Click on the image to see a larger view.

Finally, close the loop and measure ROI of your content. We suggest using lead tracking technology such as ours to help you automatically scan inbound leads, qualify, distribute and nurture them. Follow these steps to repurpose content and measure content ROI. Your sales team will be chanting your name! Ping us using the short form on this page to learn more about how our technology can help you get the highest return on your content creation dollars.

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The Two Fundamentals of Strategic Marketing

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Fundamentals of Strategic MarketingWhat are the fundamentals of strategic marketing? Chocolate and milk, salt and pepper, popsicles and hot weather – it’s easy to find two items that complement each other. Strategic marketing requires two items that also go well together. In an era driven by the internet, marketing has become a different animal. Marketing is no longer about creating fancy, high-gloss fliers or spending thousands of dollars at the next tradeshow. It’s about the digital age and adapting to new buying behaviors shaped by the internet. The digital age has fostered the creation of two fundamental and complementary items that should be the core of every Strategic Marketer’s toolbox, a website and a database. As more and more applications leverage the internet as the backbone for communication companies have greater dependency on their website and database as their most valuable asset.

The first fundamental of strategic marketing is a company’s website. A company’s website should be easy to navigate and look professional; after all, prospects will judge a company based on the appearance of its website. Also, a website is the primary landing page for prospects. It’s critical that a company’s website be laced with targeted and brief (no more than four form fields) landing pages to convert unknown visitors into known leads. Finally, prospects may find your company on Facebook, LinkedIn, partner sites, press releases, blogs and more; however, they’ll eventually come to your company’s website in the final stop of their journey. It’s imperative strategic marketers use B2B visitor tracking technology and proper lead management automation to capture the 96% of all unknown website visitor traffic that goes undetected (never fills out a form). Make sure to capitalize on marketing expenditures by capturing, tracking and managing leads using technology from companies like Lead Liaison.

The second fundamental of strategic marketing is a company’s database. Much too often strategic marketers let a company’s database go “stale” – leads rot, become out of date, incomplete and untouched. In fact, 73% of all companies have no process for revisiting leads. Moreover, with only 3-5% of inbound leads being classified as “sales-ready”, most leads get touched initially then never again. Shockingly, 70-80% of the other inquiries (leads that are not “sales-ready”) are latent demand that will buy within two years, but are typically lost, ignored or discarded by companies.

Better lead management is a necessary fundamental of strategic marketing and starts by profiling a database (using lead scoring), segmenting a database and nurturing a database. Strategic marketers must make sure to think of their database as the most valuable resource the company has and think of their database as their baby. Keep it clean, bring it in for checkups and make sure to nurture it over time. Don’t ignore your baby! Take care of it, give it structure, don’t forget about it and it will continue to give back to you and your company.

To explore how your company can have better lead management please ping us and we’ll tell you how.

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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

Reasons to Invest in Marketing Automation

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Reasons to Invest in Marketing AutomationLooking for a reason why you or your company should invest in Marketing Automation? Here are four reasons to invest in marketing automation:

Table Stakes

The adoption of marketing automation technology is expected to increase by 50% by 2015 (Sirius Decisions). Marketing automation has seen the fastest growth of any CRM-related segment in the last 5 years (Focus Research). Marketing automation isn’t an option. It’s table stakes to compete. Don’t miss the boat.

Buyers Buy Differently

By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship without talking to a human (Gartner Research).

Email Remains a Vital Strategy

89% of marketers said email was their primary channel for lead generation (Forrester Research). With a delivery rate of just 75%, achieving strong inbox placement remains a challenge in the B2B sector (Return Path).

Major ROI

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost (Forrester Research). Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads (The Annuitas Group). Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group). Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months (Gartner Research). Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10% (Aberdeen Group). Gartner estimates a 15% savings on creative production with marketing automation. Gartner estimates a 5% reduction in marketing waste through automating fulfillment.

Let us show you more reasons why you should invest in Lead Liaison’s software that provides marketing automation and more.

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Marketing Technologies

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Marketing TechnologiesMarketers have a plethora of diverse marketing technologies to help with advertising, social media, operations and other aspects of their job. The overwhelming abundance of marketing technologies pulls marketers in different directions. It’s often times helpful to take a step back, re-focus and look at marketing technology from a 10,000 foot view. Scott Brinker, www.chiefmartec.com, created a diagram of the various marketing technology groups. We thought we’d share it with you. Scott groups marketing technologies into three domains:

• External promotion (orange) such as advertising and social media marketing
• Customer experience (blue) that you operate and control, such as your website
• Marketing management (green) that runs the organization behind the scenes

Where does Lead Liaison fit into this diagram? The toughest part is sticking our software into a box. We’re not just a single product or technology, rather – a platform. Our revenue generation software overlaps with marketing automation, email marketing, landing pages and micro sites, sales automation and business intelligence to improve customer experience and facilitate marketing management. As our platform evolves we’ll likely leverage core feature sets from other marketing technologies to continue to expand our platform while enhancing our value to sales, marketers and executives.

Want a demo of our revenue generation software?

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A Simplified Perspective on How Marketing Automation Works

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How Marketing Automation Works - Simplified ViewMarketing automation is a simple concept if you’re in the industry or familiar with these types of solutions. But, what if you’ve never heard of marketing automation before? Take five minutes to read this simplified summary of how marketing automation works.

Eric Wittlake made some very important points about marketing automation. Let’s summarize what Eric says about the premise of marketing automation:

Marketing automation is built on the premise of delivering the right communication to the right person at the right time. When your competitor’s delivery of content is more timely than yours, you have been trumped. Even great content will not engage your audience if the need has already been met by someone else’s more timely delivery. – Eric Wittlake, Babcock & Jenkins

Eric also highlights what fuels the marketing automation engine,  successfully delivering the right content at the right time hinges on data. Data that is provided explicitly by prospects, and more importantly, data that is provided implicitly through their engagement with your communications and content.

Eric does a great job summarizing the marketing automation workflow. It’s important to note that marketing automation is only as strong as its weakest link. If any of the three links mentioned below break down then the marketing automation model loses strength. Eric discussed the drawbacks of removing a link in the workflow. We’ll invert Eric’s thinking to view the benefits of continuing the marketing automation cycle.

• Continued database profiling and lead qualification enables accurate follow up communication.
• With accurate follow up communication, prospects will engage.
• With engagement, lead profiles and lead scores are updated to deliver the right message at the right time.
• Rinse and repeat…

Check out our other articles to learn more about lead scoring and how to do database profiling.

Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) heads up the media practice at Babcock & Jenkins and is an active B2B and digital marketing blogger at B2B Digital Marketing.

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