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Lead Liaison

Automatically Qualify Leads for Sales

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Automatically Qualify Leads for SalesIf you’re in marketing then you’ve probably had your organization press you for more leads at some point. It’s usually sales that places high demands on marketing to continually generate more leads – and it’s usually marketing that claims they pump new leads into the funnel all the time. These debates on and on, back and forth, time after time until one group starts to form a negative opinion about the other. The walls of communication break down and trust disappears. Fortunately, there are two solutions to this problem. Define what is a lead is and automatically qualify leads for sales.

Create the Definition of a Lead

First, businesses should create a definition for a lead and establish certain criteria before “stamping” any old contact as a lead. Come up with certain criteria such as revenue, industry as well as level of interest before declaring all names in your system as a “lead”. Whatever your definition is, make sure it’s something both your sales and marketing team mutually agrees with. Place the definition into a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which should serve as a contractual agreement between sales and marketing.

Automatically Qualify Leads for Sales

Second, marketing can automatically qualify leads for sales. Many times sales people get frustrated by marketing as they feel marketing is just dumping business cards and “raw” contacts on their plate. Sales people feel like there’s been no screening or interviewing of the contact to qualify their interest. Instead of relying on your expensive sales team to qualify leads why not use technology to automatically qualify leads for sales. Lead Liaison’s revenue generation software can your marketing team automatically qualify leads for sales by:

1. measuring a prospects total “activities”. An activity could be a website page view, a form submission, a whitepaper download, an online chat and more. It’s a measure of how active the lead is. Based on this measurement leads can be filtered and distributed to your sales team.

2. using weighted measurement of a leads interest. Automatically qualify leads using a concept called “lead scoring”. For example, assign 20 points to a lead if they fill out a web form, add 10 points to a lead if they visit the pricing page and add 30 points to a lead if they visit your website more than two times in the past week. If the lead reaches 50 points or more then escalate awareness of the lead to sales and hand it off via email while automatically loading the lead into your CRM, such as Salesforce.com.

Defining a lead and automatically qualifying a lead are two steps your marketing team can take to build relationships with your sales team and prioritize leads for your organization.

Contact Lead Liaison if you’d like to learn more about our solution to help your business automatically qualify leads for sales.

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Revenue Generation Software Use Cases

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Revenue Generation Software Use CasesThe next series of posts you’ll see from Lead Liaison articulate various use cases for revenue generation software. Revenue generation software is unique in the marketplace as it ties together marketing automation, sales prospecting, lead generation and inbound marketing solutions together into a single platform. The elegance of these platforms is in the integration and ease of use. Below is a list of use cases we will highlight and link back to as we build out content for this series. As new use cases arise, we’ll add them to this page with a respective link. We’d love to hear from our readers, our customers and users of similar types of software – what use cases have you found beneficial to you, your team and/or your organization? To date, we’ve captured 36 use cases. Please post your feedback below and keep checking back as we continue to grow the list of revenue generation software use cases.

36 Use Cases for Revenue Generation Software

  • Align sales with marketing teams
  • Automatically qualify leads for sales
  • Easily send personalized email campaigns and send email on behalf of sales
  • Turn your website into a sales person
  • Automatically nurture leads on behalf of sales
  • Automatically identify buy signals for sales
  • Automatically triggering communications based on events – creating a dialogue
  • Segment your marketing database based on a contacts interaction with your marketing assets
  • Pass only the best leads to sales
  • Automatically distribute leads to sales
  • Reduce and unify data entry with full CRM integration
  • Measure effectiveness of your web pages or forms
  • Better understand who responds to outbound marketing
  • Create landing pages without IT involvement
  • Create web forms without IT involvement
  • Automatically track web form submissions
  • Track a prospects past, current and future online activities
  • Jump into inbound marketing with a blogging platform
  • Efficiently hand off leads from a vendor to a manufacturer’s rep firm
  • Marketing can automate processes for sales
  • Get a higher return on your marketing content
  • Measure return on your search engine marketing investments
  • Get an automated platform for your team. Finance, sales, supply chain and HR has one!
  • Find new leads on a daily basis
  • Focus on leads who really are interested in your solutions
  • Shorten sales cycles
  • Improve sales prospecting
  • Increase interaction with your prospects
  • Shorten response time to hot prospects
  • Know when a prospect is thinking about your solutions
  • Real-time notification of leads
  • Measure the impact of a sales meeting
  • Inside sales qualifying for outside sales
  • Knowing your prospect’s competitors, then selling to them
  • Know where executives should travel
  • Understand how competitor’s view your company

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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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How to Get More Customers

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Have you ever taken the time to pull your team together and discuss how to get more customers? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. It’s not something businesses typically take the time to plan ahead for. Here are four ideas you can focus on to get more customers into and out of a revenue cycle.

• Know who your customers are
• Focus on inbound marketing
• Stay in touch
• Keep your sales team efficient

First, if you want to know how to get more customers you’ve got to understand who your customers are. What is your ideal customer profile? In other words, identify what industries they’re in, how much revenue they produce and where they hang out. Study your last 12 months of customer wins and analyze the profile of each customer. Do they fall into common categories? If so, jot those down into your Service Level Agreement (SLA). Once you know where your customers are you’re ready to progress to the next phase, focusing on inbound marketing.

Second, create an inbound marketing strategy and execute a plan. Inbound marketing is really not about how to get more customers, but how to be in the right place at the same time as your customers. Customers will come to you. See our article on Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing for a better understanding of inbound marketing. In summary, inbound marketing means you’re actively participating and distributing content through blogs, social media, SEO/organic search and paid search. Traditional outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail and trade shows. More and more marketers are shifting budget dollars from outbound to inbound marketing as they recognize buyers jump online to research solutions before they select a vendor to contact. Here’s why, see the projected growth for social networks and blogs over the next several years:

How to Get More CustomersChoose your inbound marketing investments carefully when planning how to get more customers. Ideal channels vary based on the type of business you’re in – B2B or B2C. For example, see the chart below. If the green bar is higher than the orange bar it’s an ideal channel for B2B marketers.

Getting Customers Through Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is like the bait on your fishing pole. Once you get the fish on the hook you’ve got to know how to reel them in and get them on the boat. A solid inbound marketing strategy combined with cohesive lead management life cycle processes that include sales prospecting, lead capture, lead follow up, lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution and lead nurturing will help you reel in the big fish.

Check back later this week for part two of how to get more customers.

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What is Dreamforce?

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What is DreamforceWe’ve never been to Dreamforce before. Last week was our first trip. If you’ve never been you’re probably wondering – what is Dreamforce? Here’s the answer, Dreamforce is what you want it to be. Surely everyone attending the event had different agendas. For us, it was all about soaking up the environment and seeing what’s new in the world of SaaS software. Dreamforce was an excellent opportunity to network and stay current on new technology and SaaS offerings. Below you’ll find a few highlights from our Dreamforce 2011 experience along with lessons learned.

Highlights from Dreamforce 2011

1. What is Dreamforce without marketing automation? – there was lots of it. Eloqua, Silverpop and Marketo had the biggest booths (or should we say “spent the most money”). Rumor has it Eloqua and Marketo dropped close to $1M each for the event. Eloqua and Marketo seem to be in competition to be bought by Salesforce.com. We predict some kind of acquisition will happen within the next 12 months. Heck, we even saw banners showing Salesforce’s SaaS “software stack” with a placeholder there for “Marketing Automation”. Marketo might be the best choice for Salesforce.com as Eloqua has just filed to go public, making it a bit more difficult to acquire. Hubspot is also a possibility especially since Salesforce.com invested millions into them back in March 2011.
2. Most vendors in the Marketing Automation space price their solution with a floor of $12K.
3. There are many more social media monitoring (listening and engaging) solutions available in the marketplace than we expected. It’s a very competitive space. It was interesting to hear about CoTweet, acquired by ExactTarget in March 2010. A basic version of CoTweet is free. ExactTarget is trying to integrate their platform as much as possible and create an “App Store” around their platform.
4. Will B2B marketers get confused with the emergence of “App Stores” like the one from ExactTarget? These seem to be in direct conflict with Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.
5. Vendors that didn’t show a live demo of their solution (only a PowerPoint or video) didn’t show very well.
6. There was a big splash about Data.com. Its clear data.com wants to be the “App Store” for data. It’s got a lot of potential but the lack of available content left lots to the imagination.
7. Form auto-completion and simplification seem to be a new exciting thing. For example, Reachforce and Demandbase both have solutions which require visitors only enter their name, email and company. While the visitor is typing in the company name values automatically display below the field suggesting the visitor’s company and location. Once the user selects their company and location from the drop down additional data such as location, industry, revenue and other business parameters are appended to the form entry and fed into a lead management system.
8. RingCentral had a nice system to automatically bring up a lead or contact in Salesforce.com when a user receives a phone call from a respective lead/contact. We want one!

Lessons Learned from Dreamforce 2011

1. Wear tennis shoes or comfortable walking shoes.
2. Get a copy of the “Cloud Expo Guide” and circle the booths you want to visit.
3. Arrange to meet with customers and partners before Dreamforce starts.
4. The Expo floor closed rather early – 3:45PM on some days. Choose the 2nd or 3rd day to walk the show floor. You’ll get about eight straight hours.

What is Dreamforce to you? What did you learn from Dreamforce 2011? Please feel free to share your experiences.

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Necessary Skills to Address the Marketing Gap

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Necessary Skills to Address the Marketing GapLauren Carlson of Software Advice recently published an article entitled New Skills Needed to Address Marketing Gap. Lauren, and others, made some interesting statements and we thought we’d share them with our readers. The statements describe necessary skills to address the marketing gap and underscore the growing importance of marketing’s role as the B2B buying landscape evolves. Below is a compilation of our favorite comments from her post. Feel free to read Lauren’s article for more insight on this subject.

“Marketing automation is more than a tool. It is a strategy.” – Lauren Carlson, Software Advice

“B2B organizations are losing upwards of 10 percent of revenue per year due to their inability to properly align sales and marketing around the right processes and technologies, according to IDC. To put that in perspective, that would be a $10 million loss for a $100 million company.” – Lauren Carlson, Software Advice

– Carlos Hidalgo, Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute

Marketers who define their job as filling the top of the funnel will not be successful with marketing automation software. Lead management has to be built on a strategy that focuses on managing the entire pipeline, not just one end of it. – Lauren Carlson, Software Advice

Learn how Lead Liaison can help you develop the necessary skills to keep pace with the changing B2B environment. Contact us today!

What’s your opinion on the necessary skills required to address the marketing gap?

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Lead Nurturing to Keep Your Customers

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Lead Nurturing to Keep Your CustomersLead nurturing is an excellent tool for new prospects; especially those who aren’t quite ready to buy yet. Lead nurturing helps sales people build relationships with prospects while ensuring prospects keep the vendors solutions top-of-mind. All of this is great for prospects; but, what about the benefits to existing customers? Businesses rarely think of lead nurturing as a tool to help their customers. Let’s explore one way you can use lead nurturing to keep your customers.

Simply put, lead nurturing will help keep your customer’s business. Let’s suppose you’re running a subscription-based business. Every year, or every contract period, customers need to renew. Discussing renewals with customers you’ve rarely communicated with over the current contract period can be uncomfortable at times. It’s natural to think – “if ain’t broke don’t fix it” – so why wake the sleeping dog. But, is that the best way to practice business? Nurturing your customers during their contract period will keep the relationship warm and invite your customer to provide you with feedback. But remember, it is imperative you send lead nurturing content from a person, such as an Account Manager, rather than a company. Company-to-individual communications are much more impersonal than one-to-one communications.

Even if your company is not selling subscriptions then they’re probably selling perpetual licenses – unless they’re in the business of providing services only. Most perpetual licenses have a Maintenance and Support fee associated with them. Consider the opportunity to use lead nurturing to secure customer’s Maintenance and Support payments as well.

Start using lead nurturing to keep your customers payments coming and you’ll find your renewals, as well as relationships, much easier to manage!

Learn how Lead Liaison’s nurturing solutions can help you secure revenue with your existing customers! Contact us today!

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2011 B2B Marketing Budgets

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B2B Marketing BudgetsA recent study by Marketing Sherpa showed a breakdown of B2B marketing budgets in 2011. Frankly, I’m shocked to see how businesses are allocating their marketing dollars. I propose B2B marketing companies re-prioritize their budgets by re-allocating dollars from one marketing investment to another to produce a higher ROI and generate more revenue. Specifically, marketing investments in website design and trade shows should be decreased while marketing investments in social media, marketing automation and lead nurturing should be increased.

Increasing B2B Marketing Budgets

Marketers must recognize it’s a buyer’s world. More and more buyers conduct research online before ever contacting a vendor. The internet-era changed the landscape of sales and marketing. Data sheets, white papers, webinars, blogs, forums, public profiles, employees, competitors and more can be researched without ever picking up the phone. It’s the same concept as in the B2C world when consumers buy a car. Case in point, Polk and Autotrader.com conducted a survey of 4,005 U.S. consumers and found 71% of those surveyed conducted research online before buying their car.

2011 B2B Marketing BudgetsThe same process applies to the B2B world. More than 80% of B2B buyers research the internet for answers about products and services before calling a sales rep. With the proliferation of mobile phones and tablets this percentage will surely rise. B2B marketers have got to be in the right place at the right time (social media), monitor/listen to buyer’s behavior (marketing automation) and engage prospective buyers (lead nurturing). As the volume of online and/or digital activity increases, so does the opportunity to interact and engage with potential buyers. Lead nurturing helps B2B marketers create meaningful dialogue with prospects based on their research and interests. The net result of lead nurturing is stronger relationships and shorter sales cycles as prospects will keep you top of mind through consistent and on-target communications. For these reasons B2B marketing budgets should include social media, lead nurturing and marketing automation as a high priority.

But, what if there’s no more money in the budget for these items? That’s an easy problem to solve. Reduce investments in website design and trade shows and re-appropriate the funds.

Decreasing B2B Marketing Budgets

Trade shows are generally a thing of the past and put pressure on B2B marketing budgets. We’re not implying you completely do away with trade shows; however, reduced investment should be considered. Trade shows are expensive and usually cost about $10,000 minimum just to get in the door. Do yourself a favor and analyze ROI from past trade shows. The easiest way to do this is to look at past sales wins and identify if the lead came from a trade show. If you can’t tie revenue to your trade show investments they’re not worth it. Although, attending a trade show might help prospects recognize your brand/image; sometimes you’ve just got to show up. My advice is to pick a few select trade shows that you must attend and get an exhibitor pass for the others.

As for website design, I encourage B2B companies consider moving their website into a content management system (CMS) such as Drupal or WordPress. These tools have very professional off-the-shelf themes and several plug-ins for search engine optimization, blog authoring and more. You might spend a little more up front to change your site but its well worth it over time. Many of the processes which you rely on 3rd parties for can be automated and you’ll have more control over your content and of course, reduce costs.

Take your money saved from trade shows and website development and invest in social media, lead nurturing and marketing automation.

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The Marketing Automation Mistake

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The Marketing Automation MistakeThere’s a big marketing automation mistake. The marketing automation industry is growing fast. At least $200M was spent acquiring marketing automation software over the past year. That’s a staggering figure considering the “marketing automation mistake”. If some very fundamental misnomers were avoided in the infancy stages then the market would not just grow, but grow rapidly.

Misnomer #1 – Marketing automation is a horrible name. Think about it. If I were a marketer and heard about marketing automation for the first time would I want to automate my job? If I did, I might not have a job. That’s like hiring your replacement. No one would volunteer for that. What these solutions do is automate very mundane or historically expensive tasks such as building web forms, landing pages or email marketing campaigns. Marketers no longer have to rely on creating html or 3rd party IT resources to get the job done. Now, they can do it on their coffee break. Marketers can visually build web forms and landing pages to easily wrap lead capture around any marketing campaign or event. These solutions also automate the process of following up with leads and building relationships with prospects over time via personalized and relevant communications- also known as “lead nurturing”.

Misnomer #2 – Lead scoring is a really poor term and misconstrues the real benefit of this feature. What lead scoring does is help sales and marketers automatically qualify prospects and/or customers. Why wouldn’t vendors call it “lead qualification” then? By using the term “lead scoring” it’s caused several other vendors in the space to follow suit and *only* score a lead. In reality, lead qualification is much more than just associating a number to a person. It’s about listening to what a prospect/customer wants and monitoring their overall engagement with your company. It’s much more meaningful to measure overall activity as well as key buy signals to properly qualify a lead.

Educators in the marketing automation space preach – “think like the buyer, not the seller”. I wish initial vendors in the space did just that. If they did, we wouldn’t be talking about “marketing automation” or “lead scoring”. Instead, we’d be talking about revenue generation and lead qualification – what matters to the buyer.

Weeding through the varying vernacular and various misnomers could lead to a serious headache. We side with advice from one of the industry’s top analysts, David Raab. If you’re looking for a solution from a vendor in this space do as David suggests:

…there’s just one right way to select software, and that’s to have vendors walk through scenarios based on how you plan to use it. – David Raab, Raab Associates Inc.

What mistakes have you seen in this space? What do you disagree with in this article? We’d love to hear from you.

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Marketing Automation for Small Companies

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Marketing Automation for Small CompaniesIf you’re thinking marketing automation is only for big businesses, think again. Marketing automation for small companies is available now. Historically, micro, small and medium sized businesses (typically <= $5M in sales) couldn’t afford marketing automation systems. It used to be a requirement to spend six figures on a professional program. With the introduction of scalable features and pricing in software packages such as Lead Liaison’s, small companies can benefit from marketing automation.

Putting economics aside, let’s discuss why marketing automation for small companies is advantageous. Most small companies share many of the same problems. For example, they

• need more leads
• have limited sales and marketing resources
• need to understand their market and audience better
• have fairly primitive marketing processes

Marketing automation for small companies will help a business appear larger than they actually are by automating marketing processes such as email marketing, drip nurturing, lead response, lead follow up and more. Small companies also benefit from marketing automation through automated lead qualification technology. Marketing automation what leads are interested in by tracking search words, pages viewed and place a score on the lead (lead scoring) to help prioritize hot leads for sales. Systems such as Lead Liaison also include unique “Buy Signals”. Buy Signals are triggered when prospects and/or customers express certain conditions indicative of a potential sale. Here are a few additional reasons why marketing automation for small companies is ideal:

1. Capturing leads via lead capture technology – creates a new source of leads, vital for any small business.
2. Closed loop email marketing – helps an organization raise awareness of their solutions and boosts brand awareness. A “closed loop” alerts sales of leads that are genuinely interested saving precious time with trade show or webinar follow up.
3. Building relationships with customers and prospects via lead nurturing – automates sending of relevant and personalized communication based on your prospect’s interests.
4. Know how leads find your site – connecting search words and page views with a visiting website company via lead tracking.
5. Consolidated activity into a single repository via CRM integration.

If you’re in search of marketing automation for small companies look no further and reach out to Lead Liaison. We’d love to help.

Are you a small company using marketing automation? If yes, how has marketing automation helped you?

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