Automatically Identify Buy Signals for Sales

Automatically Identify Buy Signals for SalesIt’s almost always the case that sales could use more help from marketing to qualify leads. Marketing is glad to help; however, they’re up to their eye balls in work. Cranking out new content, preparing for the next big trade show, managing the company’s CRM, fine tuning the website and answering to other members of the leadership team to name a few. Wouldn’t it be nice if marketing could automatically identify buy signals for sales?

Now they can! With no effort…it’s all done automatically, behind the scenes using technology. Historically, vendors have struggled getting their marketing automation solutions adopted by B2B businesses. A typical system introduces way too much complexity and an overwhelming number of features; marketers need a simple solution. Case in point, it’s important to make it easy to automatically identify buy signals for sales. Some businesses don’t want to spend countless hours configuring “lead scoring” rules and setting up business logic. Here’s the good news – now they can do it out-of-the-box, with zero configuration.

Lead Liaison allows marketers to turn on/off the most common buy signals. For example, here’s a short list of what can be enabled/disabled to automatically identify buy signals for sales:

  • Clicking through multiple emails in a certain number of months
  • Multiple website visits in a certain number of weeks
  • Web form submissions
  • Total activity (a measure of how active and interested a lead is)
  • Website visitor viewing more than a certain number of web pages
  • Website visitor viewing a specific web page
  • Viewing a landing page

Even better, buy signals can be layered on top of one another. For example, a select number of buy signals could be enabled requiring all buy signal conditions are met before sales is contacted.

Quick lead follow up is also vital. Its imperative the sales person receives buy signal alerts from marketing via a text message (SMS) or an email to reduce delay in lead response time. More importantly, sales should be able to choose how they’re notifying and if they’re notified.

At Lead Liaison, we’re getting rid of the complexity in traditional marketing automation and helping marketing automatically identify buy signals for sales. Feel free to contact us to learn more about how we can help you solve your sales and marketing problems!

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Automatically Qualify Leads for Sales

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

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

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

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?

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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