Tag Archive for: ROI

Lead Liaison

The Business Case for Revenue Generation Software

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Business Case for Revenue Generation SoftwareMaking a business case to your management team for Revenue Generation Software is not difficult to do as long as you’ve got the right information in hand. When presenting your business case we suggest sticking to the following outline:

1. Highlight Problem Areas
2. Show ROI
3. Advocate new marketing strategies

Keep your justification brief and be ready to drill down into specifics if asked. Let’s highlight some data points for each of the aforementioned areas to help you strengthen your business case for Revenue Generation Software:

Problem Areas

Many B2B marketing authorities have studied the lead management automation (LMA) and/or marketing automation industry. Here are some important facts that expose deficiencies in most B2B companies:

• Only 3-5% of new lead inquiries are “sales-ready”
• 70-80% of the other inquiries are latent demand that will buy within 2 years, but are typically lost, ignored or discarded by sales
• 73% of companies have no process for revisiting leads leaving databases to become “stale”
• 80% of marketers send unqualified leads on to sales
• 90% of marketing deliverables are not used by sales
• 90% of website visitors don’t identify themselves
• 87 out of 100 deals are left behind by sales
• It takes 7 to 9 proactive communications to gain a B2B decision-makers attention
• 30% of sales reps turnover each year, 7 months to ramp up

Consider the points above and assess whether or not your company faces these challenges.

Show ROI

Best-in-class sales and marketing teams generate 4x more closed deals than average teams using the same pool of leads. Closing 4X more deals will surely be an eye-opener for any manager or executive. In addition to a hard-ROI it’s important to highlight the soft-ROI. In other words, how else will revenue generation software positively influence your organization’s people, products and process?

ROI for Marketers

• Gigantic productivity boost for marketing. Marketers no longer have to run campaigns manually; they can automate them and schedule them in advance. Marketers can create more campaigns with fewer resources while delivering more, higher qualified leads to their sales team. Finally, marketing can respond more quickly and push out new campaigns at a rapid pace with drag/drop tools that simplify campaign creation without having to lean on IT for support.
• Marketers will keep their business one step ahead of their competition and claim the majority of a prospects mind-share using state-of-the-art technology that intelligently automates and improves processes. Leave no lead left behind and distance your company from its competitors.
• Marketers will get more out of their campaigns. Revenue Generation Software allows marketers to better track and measure metrics that help them tweak and tune performance of marketing campaigns. Campaign response rates usually double when Revenue Generation Software is used to drive campaigns.

Marketers aren’t the only people that directly benefit from using Revenue Generation Software. Sales people reap reward as well. Here are some highlights of how Revenue Generation Software will help your sales team:

ROI for Sales

• Sales people will get more information about their leads. Sales will better understand a prospect’s interest, past behaviors and overall interaction with your company.
• Sales will receive more qualified leads. Revenue Generation Software uses automated technology to qualify leads using company-specific criteria that’s unique to your business.
• Like marketing, sales will also see a gigantic productivity boost. Instead of getting a pile of business cards, an excel spreadsheet or CRM view of a bunch of “leads” from marketing (what sales people would call “contacts”), sales gets quick access to prioritized leads sorted by qualification criteria. Additionally, sales people get real-time alerts when their favorite lead or company visits your website.

Sales and marketing will benefit individually and especially as a whole. It’s not uncommon for sales and marketing teams to be disconnected and think independently. Unfortunately, prospects and customers suffer from disparate sales and marketing processes as communication breaks down. Through the implementation of Revenue Generation Software sales and marketers will naturally become more aligned. Your sales and marketing teams will experience:

ROI for Sales and Marketing Teams Together

• A common view of the company’s revenue cycle. A revenue cycle is a combination of a marketing funnel with the sales funnel. As B2B buyers change, marketing is able to make greater contributions to company revenue garnering closer alignment between organizations.
• Improved marketing and sales productivity along with stronger top line growth.
• A collective understanding of how to improve marketing campaigns, track leads, measure results, improve data quality and nurture leads through the funnel.

New Marketing Strategies

While making the business case for Revenue Generation Software it’s important to highlight how the software will help you hit your current goals give to you by your manager. It’s equally important to highlight what marketing automation will add to your marketing bag of tricks. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:

• Lead nurturing which increases communication with contacts in your database by sending them timely and relevant information to build relationships and progress them through your funnel.
• Monitoring website behavior which keeps a digital trail of information as prospects fill out forms, visit web pages, use keywords to search for your business and make return visits.
• Lead qualification using lead scoring to assign numerical values to leads that meet your qualification criteria helping to prioritize who is hot and who is not.
• Improved content creation strategies with the use of WYSIWYG editors and templates to build marketing emails. Also, drag/drop tools to build web forms and landing pages. These marketing tools are easy to use and don’t require additional 3rd party resources or IT – which saves companies money.

Building a Hard ROI

The below information is helpful when building a “soft” ROI to support a “hard” ROI (financials). Want to go a step further and build a hard ROI demonstrating financial return? We’ve got lots of experience doing just that! Contact us if you’d like a copy of our model and formulas which will help you build your business case for revenue generation software.

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Lead Liaison

Increase ROI of Inbound Marketing

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Increase ROI of Inbound MarketingWe recently had a meeting with one of our prospects who told us they do no outbound marketing (or “push marketing”) and focus solely on inbound marketing. At first, they said they didn’t need Lead Liaison because they don’t do outbound marketing. They couldn’t be more wrong. Coincidentally, if you’re only doing inbound marketing you can’t afford to not have Lead Liaison. This meeting as well as the overall public debate on inbound marketing vs outbound marketing sparked a discussion internally on how to increase ROI of inbound marketing using Lead Liaison’s revenue generation software. We documented some of these reasons for you, enjoy!

Using technology to increase ROI of inbound marketing

Lead Liaison provides a revenue generation platform that boosts ROI of inbound marketing. Here’s a list of how our solutions can help you:

Lead tracking

As prospects find you as a result of your SEO, content and social media strategies (three core components of inbound marketing) they’ll eventually find their way back to your website. Lead tracking technology identifies the name of the business visiting your website along with business intelligence information (revenue, location, description, etc.), telling sales when someone is interested – all in real time. Lead tracking also records a website visitor’s online behavior including pages viewed and keywords used in searches to help sales and marketers understand what prospects care about.

Content creation

Revenue generation software helps marketers spin up new landing pages and web forms in minutes. Instead of relying on HTML programming or IT support, marketers create professional looking landing pages and web forms using a visual designer. The visual designer is similar to PowerPoint and uses drag and drop technology to construct content. Generous use of landing pages and web forms is typically a good thing. It’s common to create a landing page with a web form for each new content area or content piece in your marketing library. Doing so will increase the probability of capturing leads and increase ROI of inbound marketing.

Database segmentation

As an alternative to buying purchased lists or list rentals, which typically offer ROIs in the 1% – 2% range, marketers can leverage technology and their own internally developed database to increase ROI of inbound marketing. Outbound marketing typically implies buying large lists and sending out generic, non-personal email blasts. Using database segmentation marketers can “carve out” specific sections of their database to deliver optimized content relevant to prospects interests.

Lead nurturing

As new prospects discover you via your inbound marketing techniques, revenue generation software will help you nurture your leads. Lead nurturing delivers consistent communications to your new-found leads based on the prospects interests, demographics, and lifetime interaction with your marketing content. Recycling and nurturing your database will increase ROI of inbound marketing by lowering investments in inbound marketing as highly qualified leads never fall through the funnel or get left behind.

Lead qualification

A growing investment in inbound marketing probably means a growing number of inbound leads. Lead qualification, sometimes referred to as lead nurturing, uses technology to automatically score leads and identify who’s hot and who’s not. Lead scoring helps sales prioritize time effectively.

Emphasizing inbound marketing over outbound marketing while leveraging revenue generation software will shorten sales, produce higher quality leads, and improve organizational efficiency.

See our post on inbound marketing vs outbound marketing for a more thorough comparison between the two marketing strategies.

We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How do you feel revenue generation software can help your inbound marketing efforts?

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Lead Liaison

Measuring Marketing Performance

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Measuring Marketing PerformanceOrganizations must continually measure performance to improve and grow. Measuring marketing performance is critical as marketing plays a vital role in an organizations strategy and execution. The trend in measuring marketing performance is shifting from activity-based measurement to results-based measurement. In this article, we’ll discuss the change in performance measurement and suggest ways to effectively measure your marketing performance.

From activities to results

Historically, marketing performance has been measured on activities. For example, consider a trade show event. Marketers were typically measured on number of trade shows attended in a given period along with number of leads collected from the show. Similarly, consider email marketing. Marketers were graded on number of email opens or click throughs. It’s true, what gets measured gets done. When measuring marketing performance focus on what really matters, results. Instead of counting email opens and number of cards collected from trade shows, measure marketing based on revenue. What percentage of contacts results in an opportunity or a closed deal? If marketing and sales are both measured on revenue performance companies will benefit from closer sales and marketing alignment.

How other companies are measuring marketing performance

A recent study conducted by MarketingSherpa on more than 900 marketers asked which key performance metrics helped them evaluate marketing ROI. Interestingly, the top 5 measurements each pertain to a deal (end of the sales cycle) and cost of the contact (beginning of the sales cycle), which both greatly influence the revenue cycle.

Marketing Performance Measurement

How to impact important marketing metrics

With a renewed focus on revenue results and new metrics in mind, marketers can execute their revised strategy. To accomplish this, many marketers use technology, such as marketing automation, to achieve their goals. Lead Liaison provides revenue generation software, which includes marketing automation, for this reason. Here’s how Lead Liaison’s technology supports each metric:

• Closing percentage. Lead nurturing uses customer/prospect profiles to send scheduled, intelligent communications that build relationships and close more deals. Lead scoring automatically qualifies leads to send only the best leads to sales. Sales remains focused on sales-ready leads and optimizes their time around revenue, resulting in more wins and higher close percentage.

• Cost-per-acquisition. Lead tracking and lead generation technology creates leads from various inbound marketing activities. Leads opt-in to Lead Liaison via web form submission, response to an email campaign, or manual opt-in to become a lead in the system. Generating more leads with the same amount of inbound marketing results in higher marketing ROI and lower cost-per-acquisition.

• Cost-per-lead. Marketing segmentation allows marketers to segment a database based on a number of demographics (revenue, location, etc.) and activities (product interest, recent website visits, etc.). By re-marketing to an existing database, a company’s most valuable asset, marketers get “stale” leads on nurturing programs. As a result, marketers do not have to acquire as many leads via list brokers or trade shows. By using what a marketer already has they reduce cost-per-lead.

• Average deal size. Companies end up paying more for quality solutions from trusted advisers whom they’ve built relationships with. Lead nurturing builds the necessary relationships with customers and prospects over time while establishing the vendor as a trusted authority.

• Time to close. Lead nurturing ensures companies are in constant communication with leads using relevant messaging. Leads will always have the company and/or solution at the top of their mind. Additionally, leads won’t “stray”. In totality, these factors result in shorter sales cycles and less time to close.

We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How is your company measuring marketing performance?

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