Lead Liaison

How to do Database Profiling

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How to do Database ProfilingHave you ever wondered how to build a database profile? If you haven’t, it’s time you start thinking about it. Database profiling creates individual, sub-segmented databases to target marketing efforts and personalize messaging. Dust off the cobwebs and consider tapping into your most prized resource, your database, vs. buying lists and using common “spray-and-prey” marketing approaches.

While driving cross country the other day, I saw a big semi truck with the words “Our most valuable asset sits here” plastered across the side of the truck. There was an arrow following the statement. The arrow pointed to the truck driver! The trucking company clearly feels their drivers are a key asset to their company. It got me thinking, what would a business say their most valuable asset is? Rightfully so, some might say their employees; however, companies would be remiss not to mention their database as one of their most valuable assets.

Databases take time to build and contain a host of crucial information on partners, competitors, prospects and customers making them a rich repository for any marketing savvy professional. Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t able to unlock the true potential of their assets without a database profiling solution. Sophisticated technology is necessary to build rich database profiles, which effectively partitions a database into smaller, more targeted sub databases. Database profiling solutions allow businesses to do two things, segment and score their database. Let’s cover lead scoring and database segmentation in more detail.

Database Profiling using Lead Scoring

Lead scoring allows marketers to prioritize their database by assigning points to each record based on custom criteria. For example, marketers can run scoring programs across the database to give 10 points to people in a target industry. Similarly, assign 10 more points to people who work for companies generating more than $100M in revenue. These scores are examples of demographic lead scoring. Behavioral lead scoring takes into account contacts interaction with marketing. For example, if someone filled out a web form or clicked through an email campaign. The end result is a prioritized and qualified database, something very handy for a sales team.

Database Profiling using Segmentation

Database segmenting is the process of creating individual lists or groups based on select criteria. For example, marketing can create a list of contacts in a certain industry that have interacted with your company in the past 6 months. With a segmented database, marketers can send personalized communications to prospects that are more relevant and topical. Segmented databases are easier to nurture using lead nurturing technology and result in higher lead to opportunity conversion.

Make sure your lead scoring and database segmentation solutions are dynamic, not just static. In other words, make sure the tools you use can build a database profile that applies to your existing database as well as future contacts added to your database. Case in point, when a new contact is added to your database that fits specific segmentation criteria, the contact should be automatically added to your list. Likewise, once a lead scoring program is setup and defined future contacts should be scored based on your criteria.

Database profiling is easy when you have the right tools to segment and score your database. Fortunately, Lead Liaison delivers solutions to help you statically and dynamically profile your database. Don’t forget to market and re-market with relevant material. Start getting the most out of your shiny new asset today! Maybe the “most-valuable-asset” arrow might get pointed at you!

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s database profiling solutions please contact us.

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Lead Liaison

What is Lead Scoring?

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What is Lead ScoringWhat is lead scoring? Lead scoring is the process of using technology to automatically qualify leads for sales. Many organizations are flooded with inquiries and/or have a large database of contacts collected over time. Lead scoring helps businesses filter through inquiries and contacts and start prioritizing leads for sales.

What is lead scoring similar too?

When building a lead scoring model, make sure you look at scoring like dating or getting married. Your score should take into account criteria from both parties, not just one. Is the prospect a good fit for your business? Equally important, is the prospect interested in buying? Categorize your scoring into different ‘buckets’. Develop criteria for what you consider a good lead such as industry relevance, company size, and target buyer/role. Then, come up with a set of criteria that your team feels is indicative of prospects intent to purchase. For example, if a prospect visits your pricing page, visits 5 or more pages or makes multiple website visits within a certain period of time – all examples of online behavior that technology can automatically detect.

What is lead scoring without..?

Opposite lead scoring

For every positive lead score consider using a negative lead score. For example, visiting a web page on pricing might be a good sign; however, visiting a page with job postings might be a bad sign and deserve a negative score for that specific action. In summary, make sure your lead scoring solution allows scores to be incremented and decremented.

Limits

Make sure your lead scoring solution doesn’t have limits, such as capping at 100. Having a cap limits differentiation of one lead against another, making it more difficult for sales to figure out whose hot and who’s not.

The ability to score your existing database

Make sure your lead scoring solution allows you to statically score your existing contacts. For example, run a set of scoring rules across your CRM leads and/or contacts based on criteria. Being able to score your database as well as future inquiries makes sure your scoring program is consistent across past and future leads.

The end result of a solid lead scoring program is a hyper-efficient lead management process that produces higher quality leads for sales and allows marketing to make revenue contributions. Marketers get a stake in the sales process and get to work closer with their sales force, creating a more cohesive organization.

What do you feel is important in a lead scoring model? What is lead scoring to you?

Contact Lead Liaison to learn more about how your business can benefit from lead scoring with Lead Liaison’s proprietary technology that uses a three-prong approach to lead qualification.

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Lead Liaison

Automatically Track Web Form Submissions

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Automatically Track Web Form SubmissionsWhen businesses automatically track web form submissions they get crucial insight into prospects interests. Three types of web form tracking are possible; we’ll cover each type in the details to follow. Regardless of type, we recommended web form submissions are tracked and matched with a prospects profile to provide sales with valuable insight on key buying behavior.

Automatic Web Form Tracking

Requires no configuration and converts unknown leads (no name and/or email) to known leads (name and/or email) by automatically identifying a website visitors name, email and company after a web form submission. Automatic Web Form Tracking integrates with company’s existing web forms but has limited operational advantage as this method only captures specific form fields.

Hosted Web Form Tracking

For a more flexible approach, marketers use hosted web form tracking to automatically track web form submissions. Using this method, marketers visually build web forms by dragging/dropping fields into place. Web forms are embedded into landing pages, which can also be built using a visual interface. Marketers spin up new, targeted web forms in less than five minutes to easily support specific campaigns.

Existing Form Web Form Tracking

Marketers that have a host of existing web forms on their site can redirect web form submissions to our servers. Lead Liaison’s engine captures lead information enabling marketers to augment a form submission with operational activities. Example operational activities are: automatically responding to leads from the lead owner, adding people to lead nurturing campaigns or automatically qualifying a lead.

All three levels of automatic web form tracking synchronize results with CRMs, such as Salesforce.com. Synchronization records a web form submission event along with the type of form submitted and can optionally automatically create a new lead along with key company profile information (revenue, description, industry, etc.) in the CRM. Additionally, historical information such as email opens, email click-through, website visits and more are attach to a leads activity history resulting in sales-ready leads.

Contact Lead Liaison to learn more about how your business can automatically track web form submissions.

What advantages or disadvantages do you see by automatically distributing leads to sales?

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Lead Liaison

Automatically Distribute Leads to Sales

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Automatically Distribute Leads to SalesMany businesses are able to generate leads and inquiries but have no way to automatically distribute leads to sales in a systematic manner. Companies make huge investments to generate leads from the internet, which warrants responses at internet-like speeds. An interesting article from Harvard Business Review highlighted the benefit of responding to leads quickly in a study of 2,241 U.S. firms. According to the report:

– James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, and David Elkington / Harvard Business Review

The article suggests three root causes of slow lead follow up:

Three Root Causes of Slow Lead Follow Up

1. Retrieving leads from CRM systems’ databases at one time throughout the day vs. continuously, in real-time, without a way to automatically distribute leads to sales
2. sales teams are focused on generating their own leads rather than reacting quickly to customer’s online behavior and inquiries, and
3. rules for distributing leads among based on geography and “fairness.”

Lead Liaison’s software platform solves the aforementioned issues with a simple solution that can automatically distribute leads to sales. Here’s a short summary of how we help our clients quickly respond to high priority leads:

Use Technology and Alerts to Automatically Distribute Leads to Sales

• Qualify leads using various lead qualification metrics including common buy signals, lead score and a measure of the prospect’s total activity.
• Distribute leads in real-time based on sophisticated lead distribution rules based on region, company name, number of employees and annual revenue. Distribute leads in round-robin or directly to a sales person and add leads to a “hopper” (a queue) if no rules match.
• Send real-time email and text message alerts to sales to urge response.
• In depth lead tracking and lead capture solutions to build complete profiles of visitor’s online behavior, a key indicator of a prospect’s interests.

What advantages or disadvantages do you see by automatically distributing leads to sales?

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Lead Liaison

Similarities between Lead Nurturing and the Holiday Season

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Similarities between Lead Nurturing and the Holiday SeasonWith the holiday season coming up it gets most people thinking about vacations, good food and time with our families. For some of us, it’s hard to clear our mind from work and focus on relaxing during this time of the year. For me, I’ve got personal and professional events melding together in my mind; I couldn’t help but draw similarities between lead nurturing and the holiday season.

Lead nurturing systems help businesses start, as well as grow relationships with prospects and clients. These systems use technology to send personalized messages on behalf of individuals. We’re not talking company to company email blasts (what businesses did 10 years ago); we’re talking about tailored, targeted and personalized messages from sales to prospects/clients. The holiday season caused me to think about how sending holiday cards and gifts are similar to lead nurturing. In my situation, I’m fortunate enough to have a wife who helps me out during these buys times of the year. She’s the main reason why I’ve got strong relationships with my personal and professional network.

Here’s why; she keeps a list of friends, family members and co-workers I need to send gifts and cards to. She types out a message with personalized content. For example, “Grandpa – Thanks for sending our daughter the Scholastic book, she really loves it. I wanted to wish you a happy holiday season!” Then, I sign the letter and drop it in the mail. Almost systematically, she does this for holidays, birthdays and other important events. From my perspective, it’s great – there’s not much I have to do and messages look like they’re coming directly from me.

B2B marketers and sales people have a similar opportunity to nurture prospects and clients using lead nurturing technology. Lead nurturing technology runs in the background monitoring activity, looking for important events – just like my wife looks for holidays and birthdays. When nurturing technology detects an important event, it automatically sends a tailor-made message. With my Grandpa in the example above, we thanked him for the Scholastic book. You could tell your prospects thanks for watching our webinar on XYZ or thanks for learning more about our latest widget. Your sales people will save time and build bonds by responding to important events, as defined by your processes. Finally, nurture messages are personalized. It would look strange if my wife signed all the letters – my family and friends would think I do nothing (boy, if they only knew). Instead, I sign the letters so it appears it came from me. Similarly, lead nurturing messages are sent from the lead owner.

Thanks to my wife’s efforts, I’ve built stronger relationships with family, friends and colleagues. I’ve received more from them in return than I ever could imagine. Think about the impact of building better relations with clients and prospects and what that will do for your business. Sales automation, shorter sales cycle, better operational efficiency and more revenue are just a few benefits. Hopefully you can draw parallels from your own personal situations to lead nurturing to better understand how effective this technology can be in a business environment. Good luck to you (or your significant other) sending letters and gifts this holiday season!

What personal situations remind you of lead nurturing?

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Lead Liaison

The Quintessential Small Business Marketing System

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Quintessential Small Business Marketing SystemMost micro and small businesses have two things in common; they lack resources and need to grow revenue. In this article we help B2B business with minimal resources understand the building blocks of a small business marketing system necessary to grow revenue.

A quintessential small business marketing system is made of three components – CRM, inbound marketing and revenue generation software. All three components are cost effective as they run in the “cloud” – meaning they’re accessible through any web browser, based off-premise/off-site and have little to no maintenance costs.

Small Business Marketing System

Components of a Small Business Marketing System

First, the core of a small business marketing system is a CRM solution. Lead Liaison uses Salesforce.com as our database of record. It’s an affordable way to help us track accounts (partners, customers, and vendors), leads, contacts and opportunities. Salesforce.com enables our business to stay organized, monitor activity and plan for growth. It’s a nice data repository but unfortunately lacks operational solutions to satisfy our sales and marketing demands – revenue generation software fills this void.

Second, create a marketing presence with at no cost – except for sweat equity. Small businesses need to get noticed without pumping in hundreds of thousands of dollars in outbound marketing campaigns. That means a paradigm shift in how marketing is typically done. It means foregoing trade shows, direct mail and email blasts. Instead, have an inbound marketing strategy to attract interested prospects. But don’t be confused, inbound marketing is very different from outbound marketing. Inbound marketing means developing content and strategy to get found on the internet whereas outbound marketing is very targeted directly towards contacts or individuals. Effectively, inbound marketing is like building a spider web for your business. Develop an inbound marketing strategy by having a consistent presence in social media, blogging and SEO. Create “miniature webs” to catch interested prospects that inevitably end up on your website. To do this, spin up numerous landing pages and web forms on your website – once again, revenue generation software fills this void.

Third, bring in revenue generation software to complement your CRM and capitalize on results of your inbound marketing efforts. Revenue generation software helps businesses overcome resource challenges by automating a number of common sales and marketing tasks. It helps businesses build relationships by creating relevant and timely conversations with prospects and customers, nurturing them through the sales cycle, generating leads and serves as the foundation for your marketing campaigns. It’s the engine of a small business marketing system.

All three ingredients, CRM, inbound marketing and revenue generation software work together to form a cohesive small business marketing system. Content used for inbound marketing can be leveraged and repurposed with revenue generation software while revenue generation software enriches CRM with useful lead qualification criteria.

We’ll gladly help your company build a small business marketing system by coaching you through the process and providing you with best-in-breed revenue generation software. Let us know if we can help!

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