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Lead Liaison Press Release

GoExhibit! Enhancements Released As Peak of Trade Show Season Nears

Dallas, TX – Lead Liaison’s event lead management solution, GoExhibit!™, is growing in popularity among event marketers across the globe. With the increase in users comes an uptick in user requests. At Lead Liaison, an uptick in requests means more innovation at a faster rate. The sales and marketing platform that is “built by its users” released a list this week of Q1‘19 enhancements to GoExhibit!™.

Enhanced customization was a key focus in this update. Users are now able to change the app’s color, insert their logo, and custom content sections for embedded content like maps, videos, and more. When event managers give their reps access to the mobile lead capture app, they can now customize the invitation. Users can send those invitations by email and/or text message.

GoExhibit!™ also released lead capture support for NFC badges as well as automatic post-show reconciliation, a method that can be used when Lead Retrieval providers do not offer a Developer’s Kit for integration. With these enhancements, GoExhibit!™ now supports nearly every method of lead capture. If exhibitors are able to obtain a list of attendees, they can now import and merge that information with the data captured by their team.

Voice memos and voice-to-text capabilities up the ante, enabling booth reps to spend more time having conversations and less time typing notes. “Remembering all of those important little details after a conversation is an issue that booth representatives often face,” says Ryan Schefke, Customer Success Manager at Lead Liaison. “They don’t want to spend precious time writing on a notepad or typing into their mobile device. We wanted to create something that allowed them to move onto the next opportunity as quickly as possible, while still collecting enough information to form meaningful relationships post-show. That’s why we developed voice capabilities inside of our mobile app.”

Users with a GoExhibit!™ – Run Your Own Event license now have the option to print multiple badges at one time with Avery labels, or one-at-a-time with a Dymo printer. The new Self-Service Badge Printing feature allows event attendees to register or check-in at the front desk and print their own badges at the same time.

To read a full recap of Lead Liaison’s updates, read their Enhancement Round-Up Q1’19.

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). To access our Press Kit, visit www.leadliaison.com/press-kit.

Lead Liaison Press Release

Lead Liaison Announces Next Iteration of Event Lead Management, GoExhibit!™

Dallas, Texas – Lead Liaison first launched their event lead capture solution, GoCapture!™, in October of 2017. They have rapidly become the global leader in event lead management. Today, they announce the next iteration of their solution, GoExhibit!™, which includes advances in customization, event creation workflow, enterprise-level ROI reporting, registration, check-in, upcoming Windows support, and more.

The company, known worldwide for their marketing and sales automation solutions, has been hyper-focused on supporting live marketing events over the last year. They started by answering the need for a better, more efficient way to capture leads. Antiquated badge scanners and arbitrary lead collection apps weren’t giving enterprise businesses everything they needed.

Lead Liaison designed a single solution that manages pre-event communication and preparation, onsite event lead capture, and intelligent post-event follow-up. The updates announced this week further distance GoExhibit!™ from competing solutions.

The enhancements allow companies to customize the lead capture experience with brand colors, logos, other custom content such as explainer videos or maps. Furthermore, GoExhibit!™ now provides enterprise-level reporting. The Events Dashboard allows users to track their events and measure ROI. Example data points include average cost per lead (CPL), revenue generated, return on investment, post-event engagement activity, and more.

GoExhibit!™ isn’t just for exhibitors. The solution also supports companies running their own events with a customizable check-in and registration system. An integration with Avery, announced last month, allows companies to customize and print badges in real-time, or prior to an event.

The GoCapture!™ app is compatible with iOS and Android smartphones and tablets with Windows support right around the corner. GoExhibit!™ integrates with all major CRMs (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.), marketing automation platforms (HubSpot, Eloqua, Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud, etc.), analytics solutions (Domo, Revelation™, etc), and lead retrieval providers (Cvent, Experient, etc.).

To commemorate the release, Lead Liaison collected a host of resources for businesses interested in implementing this show-stopping solution. The Event Lead Management Kit contains many educational resources, including a detailed presentation of the features GoExhibit!™ has to offer.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s event lead management solution, GoExhibit!™, click here.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, 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).

Lead Liaison Debuts Standalone Event Lead Capture and Management Solution

Dallas, TX – This week, Lead Liaison announces a new event lead management solution powered by their event lead capture app, GoCapture!™. Previously, GoCapture!™ was only available as an add-on to the company’s robust marketing automation platform, Lead Management Automation (LMA)™. Now, the solution stands on its own, providing businesses with everything needed to manage leads before, during, and after any trade show or other marketing event. It also seamlessly integrates with their free CRM, called OneFocus™, and marketing automation platform, or any third-party CRM or automation supplier.

TOMRA Sorting Solutions was one of the first to make use of this standalone solution. “After reviewing multiple lead capture companies, TOMRA began working with Lead Liaison and tested GoCapture!™ at a number of U.S. and European trade shows,” says Kathleen Chance, Sales and Marketing Support Manager for TOMRA. “Lead Liaison has been amazing to work with. During these tests, Lead Liaison was available to assist and we were able to make a number of adjustments on the fly based on live feedback from our sales team on the trade show floor.”

GoCapture!™ allows users to customize forms, quickly capture pre-qualified leads onsite, and then immediately segment, tag, follow up, and nurture those leads without missing a beat. What makes Lead Liaison’s solution particularly unique, is that they do not restrict usage across all users, mobile devices, back office users and events. No other lead capture app in the market does this.

The sales and marketing solution provider wanted to offer this as a standalone solution because the company had the chance to offer a very unique business model. Today, there is nothing in the market that has the flexible license structure and unlimited usage options that Lead Liaison offers. Even companies that offer similar solutions have very restrictive business models when it comes to number of users, devices, and events.

“It was a natural extension to what we do. We saw a gap in the market and a overall need. No event lead capture solution has a native integration with marketing automation and CRM. Before our solution, companies would hack together forms and solutions from their marketing automation provider. Nothing was purpose-built for marketing events.” says Ryan Schefke, Customer Success Manager. “We wanted to be the first to market with this unique solution. Having a single platform to manage your event creates efficiency gains as one system manages all aspects of your workflow from point-of-capture to customer – with no limits.”

Information can be collected by scanning a badge, scanning a business card for transcription, auto-populating from a list, or having the lead fill out a form at a kiosk. The app works on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.

Lead Liaison’s event lead management solution also hosts a powerful “back office,” through which the leads can be imported, synced, segmented, tagged with appropriate event information, enriched with social data, and placed into a nurture campaign.

To learn more about event lead management as a business strategy, visit https://www.leadliaison.com/event-lead-management-strategy/.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

The Value of a Qualified Lead

As salespeople we are all excited about what we do, that’s why we do it. We are passionate about our products, services or solutions and will talk to anyone anytime about it if they show the least bit of interest. That’s what makes us great at what we do, but I also feel like maybe we’re giving the cookies away for free. It’s in our nature to “sell, sell, sell” anytime we can, but I’ve found that’s not always the best approach. You know you’ve got a great product, so don’t give it away the first time you talk to everyone. Make sure you have a truly qualified lead, before dedicating more valuable time. 

There’s a system of selling called the SPIN method that, if you’re not familiar with, you should take a look at. The method can be broken down into a few basic parts. SPIN stands for: Situation, Problem, Implication, Need/Payoff. This is how to qualify your leads: ask questions! Find out what their current situation is. Do they use a competitor? Do they have events or marketing goals they need to scale up to meet?

Then ask questions to identify the problems they are having. Is it lack of communication between sales and marketing? Are they filling their pipeline and losing customers in the mix? The implication is as simple as “What would your team do with…?” or “If I can solve that for you would you…?”.

These steps are all you should be doing to find a qualified lead. Once you get to that point you’ll know; if it’s a good fit and what pain points they have that you can solve. Hopefully, a bit of additional qualifying info such as: do they have a budget, are you talking to someone with the authority to make this purchase, and what is their time-frame for the need (classic “BANT” criteria).

From there you can decide if it’s worth YOUR time to spend more time with them, or nurture them and move on. Hopefully that 15 minute call got them excited to move to the next step: filling their need. Go ahead and set up that next meeting! Now you’re spending more time with qualified, interested leads and not giving the cookies away for free to every person you talk to.

Interested in seeing other ways Lead Liaison can help your sales process? Check out our Sales Enablement solution here!

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Lead Scoring – The Fast Way to Convert Leads

lead scoringIn order for marketing automation to be successful, you need to understand the quality of your leads. Leads are evaluated based on their readiness to buy, with cold leads requiring a lot of nurturing and hot leads ready to take their credit cards out and buy. Lead scoring is an effective way to identify hot leads, so that you can send them over to your sales team. Companies that do this properly spend more time focusing on leads that are “ripe”, while “unripe” leads continue to be nurtured through other automations.

Lead Scoring 101 – How It Works

When people visit your site, they complete a series of actions, and each action tells a story. If someone reads your About Us page, it shows a little bit of interest. However, if someone drops something in a shopping cart or downloads a white paper, it tells a different story. Every person who visits your website is a lead but each person is different, and you must treat them as such. You cannot treat the person who visits your About Us page the same as you treat the person who abandons something in the shopping cart.

That’s where lead scoring comes into play. With this marketing automation strategy, you assign a value to each action on your site. For instance, you could say that putting something in a shopping cart is worth 100 points and downloading a white paper is worth 50 points.

Setting a Target Score with Lead Scoring

You will need to set a target score that indicates a lead is ready to go to your sales team. This magic number means someone is ready to talk to a member of the team and make a purchase. Don’t set this number too low, or you’ll aggravate your visitors. Then again, don’t set it too high, or you’ll lose potential customers. This will take some practice. Spend some time finding your industry’s sweet spot. Each industry (and even each company) has its own sweet spot. Finally, don’t pick a number and stick with it. Have sales and marketing work together to always fine tune the lead scoring threshold. Consider creating a sales and marketing service level agreement to identify what should be scored.

Consider Other Qualifications Besides Lead Scoring

For many companies, lead scoring isn’t enough. Qualify your leads further by combining lead scoring with additional criteria, such as age, location, education level, company, and more using concepts like lead grading. It’s possible to adjust the lead score based on these criteria to better represent the quality of the lead.

Lead scoring is an advanced process and one you should not take on by yourself. It’s something that you get set a process for and move on, giving you more time to closing that deal. Automate it with easy-to-use software like Lead Liaison. This lead scoring software will help you identify your leads and convert them into customers.

 

Understanding Your Leads With Lead Liaison

Understanding Your Leads With Lead LiaisonIn order to both market effectively to your customers and enable your sales team to be able convert potential customers, you need to start understanding your leads, both on an individual scale and your lead database as a whole. After all, even the most skilled sales team can put up less than stellar conversion numbers if they are handed too many leads, or are not given the appropriate information to sell to promising leads. Lead Liaison incorporates a wide variety of features to help your marketing team gather information about your leads, and integrates this with features to communicate that information with the sales team.

Gather Information About Your Leads To Market Effectively

In order to learn whether your leads are ready to buy or receptive to your companies’ services, you need a way for your marketing team to gather information about them. Lead Liaison features many tools to help accomplish that. One of the most important ways to do this is with automatic lead scoring, which will score activities such as web form submissions, page views, video activity, document downloads and many other statistics, all of which can customized. In addition, Lead Liaison will connect to a lead’s social media profiles, pulling any pertinent data and adding it to their profile, helping you understand as much as possible about your leads.

All of this information is compiled into Lead Liaison’s hot lead dashboard, entitled Briefcase. This tool is designed to help your sales team interpret the data that your marketing team has gathered about leads, and will help your sales force be able to quickly access how warm any given lead is. These levels are based on a wide range of qualification factors, such as overall activity, buy signals and lead grade so the software can comb the entire database to eliminate duplicates, ensuring your sales reps never irritates a potential customer with over access.

Maintain A Relationship With All Leads, Cold Or Hot

Leads are not only potential customers when your marketing or sales team first comes in contact with them, and many of your potential leads may not be ready for the service you provide at the moment they enter your radar. In order to maximize these cold leads, and convert them into customers when the time is right, Lead Liaison has automated nurturing tools to open a conversation and keep your company present in a potential customer’s mind for when they do require your services. Our automated tools will continue to track a customer who may not be a warm lead yet, and will inform you if their pattern of behavior indicates that they could potentially become a candidate for conversion.

Lead Liaison offers many useful and efficient tools to help you, your marketing department and your sales team understand all of your leads information in order to help make sales. Visit our revenue generation blog and marketing automation resources page to learn more about how you can increase your business with Lead Liaison, and visit our website to learn more about how our software can help you gather information about your customers.

Marketing at the Top of the Funnel

Marketing at the Top of the FunnelWhat does it mean to focus your marketing at the “top of the funnel?” The sales funnel is essentially a model that depicts the purchasing process of prospects. The top of the funnel, the widest part, is where your brand makes itself known to the potential customer; this is prospect awareness and education. As the funnel narrows, so does your prospect pool. Here, your marketing and sales efforts become much more direct and personalized and you can focus on quality lead nurturing. The bottom of the funnel is when the purchase is made—leads turn into paying customers. When you maintain strong marketing at the top of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel should never be empty.

Marketing at the top of the funnel can include several different types of practices; a couple of the most successful include social media marketing and content marketing (namely, via blogging). Take a look at all of your current marketing channels: email marketing, blog posts, search ads, social media posts, how-to videos, etc. Which are the ones that educate prospects and invite them to explore your website? In order to answer that question, you need to have a solid understanding of who your prospects are and what they’d like to know. The best way to figure that out is to monitor your marketing analytics so you can keep an eye on the numbers that matter in terms of your company’s goals. Taking a look at these numbers will show you which articles are most popular, what your social media followers like to read, and which landing page designs are most effective in terms of leading the prospect to the information they are looking for.

As far as the overall process of the funnel, here’s a simplistic overview:

  1. Start with content marketing (blog/social media).
  2. Insert links that take the visitor to your landing pages.
  3. Provide something of value on the landing pages (for example, whitepaper downloads).
  4. Continue to nurture the lead with personalized information that helps them to make their purchasing decision.

When implementing marketing at the top of the funnel, communication between marketing and sales is key. This allows the sales process to continually evolve and increase effectiveness with each cycle. An effective marketing plan leads to a more effective sales process. Involving marketing at the top of the funnel means implementing productive marketing strategies at the early stages of a prospect’s interactions. Here, you can weed out the ones who are not likely to turn in to paying customers, saving your sales team time on those wasted efforts.

How to Create a Successful Sales and Marketing Collaboration Plan

How to Create a Successful Sales and Marketing Collaboration PlanIt’s no secret: a well-oiled organization understands the necessity of inter-department collaboration and productive communication. In order to boost lead generation, keep leads nurtured and happy, and gain return customers, you must have a successful sales and marketing collaboration plan in place. Maintaining a healthy communication internally should translate to developing a strong engagement with the target audience which helps boost your rate of return.

Marketing automation, smartly implemented, can make this process easier and more efficient. However, without sales and marketing collaboration and alignment, your sales team will inevitably waste time following leads that just aren’t qualified (yet). By keeping both parties in the know on how to properly analyze your lead tracking practices, you’ll find it’s much easier to nurture leads and provide personalized marketing efforts. Cold calling everyone who signs up for your newsletter will probably deter leads from taking the next step and you’ll risk looking desperate. Strategize and implement a clear and concise protocol for points of contact to potential leads at the appropriate times.

Maintain two-way communication

Studies have shown that returning customers make up a significant portion of your revenue, so proper lead nurturing sets the stage for a lasting relationship. Ensure your sales and marketing collaboration plan includes guidelines on how and what is communicated between departments. This level of collaboration means greater customer satisfaction through better communicated ideas. Let your marketers set up sales for success through targeted marketing campaigns that communicate a positive message about your brand and delivers what the potential customers are looking for.

Keep tasks relevant and separate (don’t do the same thing twice)

While collaboration is key, it’s still a good idea to have tasks and responsibilities that the marketing team is responsible for, and tasks and responsibilities that the sales team is responsible for. This is the reason for the division—play up each department’s strengths. The marketing team should be able to create killer content that gives the sales team the upper hand when it’s their turn to reach out to qualified leads. Sales and marketing collaboration means communicating key points between departments, not consolidating the whole process into just one team or the other.

Strategic implementation of your marketing automation practices between sales and marketing is critical. Because most of your potential customers will find your brand through the internet, chances are they can easily find your competitors as well. Use the analytics from your marketing automation to draw up a plan of action for your leads as they request more information and take the next steps. The joint efforts of both departments will enforce this plan of action. The marketing team needs to head up key strategic, back-end development while the sales team can focus on maintaining lead (and customer) satisfaction. Keeping the customer in mind throughout the whole process means keeping everybody engaged and will provide the greatest return.

Making Workflow Automation Simpler and More Manageable

Workflow AutomationOne of the most challenging tasks business owners face is workflow automation. Without someone sitting in the middle of everything and pulling all the necessary levers to get things done, many businesses struggle with engaging in a variety of tasks – including marketing automation and lead flow.

Workflow automation doesn’t have to be painful, and it doesn’t require hiring a full time project manager for your business. The right marketing automation system can give you a workflow out of the box without a lot of hassle or time training.

Determining Your Workflow

The key to using software to get your workflow automated is to establish dependencies. This means that once an action happens on the business side, tasks, follow up and lead flow are created automatically.

Before marketing automation, business owners and project managers had to determine and set up these lead flow channels themselves. Workflow changes all that. The right marketing automation system allows your company to create these dependencies, schedule them for you and keep everything in one place so you know what isn’t getting done and can delegate accordingly.

For instance, say your dashboard registers a new lead. This lead comes in the form of an opt-in, containing an address and business information. You can set up a dependency on your backend to add this new lead to a certain geo-targeted or relevant content list. You can set tasks in your project management system for your sales team to call this lead within a few days after you get it.

The Power of Workflow Automation

You can also collect emails and send correspondence each time a new user visits your site. That’s something that a human project manager simply can’t do for you – no one should be tasked with watching IP addresses and a ticker all day to try to get leads deeper into your funnel. That’s why automation is so important – it takes the hassle out of marketing and gives you the option to create dependencies that allow business management tasks ease of flow.

Lead Liaison’s dependencies and workflow automation are set up within a program called Sparks. Lead Liaison’s automated software will monitor your back end and lead flow, and then create a series of events in the system once certain triggers happen. From a filled out lead form to a visitor coming to your site, different Sparks can be set up to create events in the backend of your business you can use to make your daily operations more productive. We’d love to show you how Sparks works – connect with us today for a consult!

Do You Have Control of Your Lead Tracking?

Take Control of Lead Tracking

Do You Have Control of Your Lead Tracking?

It’s time to take control of your lead tracking. Are you wasting time manually researching, following up, and tracking each lead? Sure, it’s not a waste of time; thorough research and proper follow up are the stepping-stones to closing the deal. Having full control of your lead tracking will allow for your reps to be better informed and better prepared to close. But, manually populating each lead’s profile is a time-consuming and often

repetitive task that, I would guess, is not all that exciting. Not only does this

method of lead tracking waste valuable time, but it also opens up the opportunity for human error. You send several follow-up emails each day to your leads. Then, for each one, you still have to input all of the relevant details into the CRM. Whew! Not following the full routine of lead tracking is detrimental to your future relationship with the lead. Take control of your lead tracking and spend more time closing leads instead of repopulating data into your CRM.

Keep up with your leads

Tracking leads (and keeping documentation of it) is increasingly important in building your relationship with them. How can you follow up with a relevant, personal message if you don’t remember where you left off? Every rep does it differently, some prefer handwritten sticky notes, some input it directly into the CRM. Either way, making that information readily available for your next interaction allows you to pick up where you left off. It also allows you to transfer the lead to another rep, if need be. Lead tracking done through marketing automation allows you to filter out the leads that just aren’t interested, or may be interested next year, or are only interested in this one specific product, etc. Take control of your lead tracking—keep up with them to help you figure out what they want and when they’re ready for it.

Strategize the next moves

Lead tracking through marketing automation should provide a record of their response times. When did they respond to your last email? Was it in the morning, or at lunch? Chances are, their response times are indicative of when they’re available, and therefore the perfect time for you to reach out to them next time. Leads are quickly lost if you become an inconvenience for them. Manage your leads and maintain control of your lead tracking by working with their schedule.

Lead Liaison’s Send & Track plug-in works seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook and lets you take control of your lead tracking. Using this marketing automation tool keeps your leads out of that scary black hole of lost emails and wasted communication. The Send & Track plug-in adds a button to your Outlook that automatically inputs the correct data into your CRM and tracks all of the future activity with that lead. Not sure if the lead opened the last email you sent them? Send & Track will tell you that too. Plus, it automatically syncs data to your CRM for leads that have already been entered into the system.