Simplify your Database for Sales

Simplify your Database for SalesIn an article last week by Mark Wicka on the B2B Lead Blog he talks about the challenges of prioritizing a company’s database. Mark describes how his company used an “opportunity grade” to create a snapshot of a prospect and prioritize the lead for sales.

“When you have a database of thousands upon thousands of names, how do you help your team easily and effectively prioritize who to contact?” – Mark Wicka, B2B Lead Blog

The challenge Mark’s company faces is all too familiar for many businesses. It’s imperative to simplify your database for sales and marketing effectiveness. Fortunately, technology can help automate snapshots and create opportunity grades across your database. Lead scoring technology helps businesses grade their database based on various demographics, interests and behaviors. Lead scoring is included with most Lead Management Automation (LMA) software packages. When using lead scoring marketers can create lead scoring programs that grade their existing database as well as future leads added to the database. Lead scoring programs can be run in a one-time-only mode or setup to run continually based on the needs of the business.

Some lead scoring systems allow marketers to create multiple types of grades/scores; for example, a “Fit Score” or a “Behavioral Score”. A Fit Score grades a prospect based on how they match up against your ideal buyers profile wherein a Behavioral Score grades a prospect based on their online behaviors or overall activity (whitepapers downloaded, forms submitted, pages viewed, etc.). Additionally, select vendors provide a snapshot view of leads with the highest grade directly from within a CRM system such as Salesforce.com. Having a consolidated view helps sales and marketers know where they need to spend their time and how to manage their day.

For a glimpse into Lead Liaison’s LMA software and an overview of how we help companies automatically grade their database and simplify their database for sales effectiveness ping us!

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Strategic Marketing Tools

Strategic Marketing Tools

Millions of marketing teams struggle finding the right strategy to market their solutions. Marketing tools help marketers do their job more effectively and efficiently; however, finding the right set of strategic marketing tools can be a bear. Fortunately, we’ve compiled a list of strategic marketing tools for you and encourage you to help us build upon this list. We categorized each tool into its respective marketing bucket. If your marketing team doesn’t have these tools to support their campaign, go get them! Note, we’ll keep this list dynamic and continue adding tools to it over time. What are your favorite strategic marketing tools?

Finding Professional Business Contacts

Data.com
Hoovers (primarily executives)
LinkedIn
Lead Liaison
ZoomInfo
NetProspex

Finding Companies

Hoovers
Lead Liaison
Data.com (limited company search)

Social Media

TweetDeck
AddThis
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Radian6 (owned by Salesforce.com)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEOMoz
SeoQuake (+ plugins for Firefox)

Analytics

Google Analytics
Adobe Online Marketing Suite (Omniture)

Revenue Generation Software

Lead Liaison
• All the other wanna-bes

Email Marketing

iContact
Constant Contact
Vertical Response
Lead Liaison (closed loop)
ExactTarget

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Salesforce.com
SugarCRM
Microsoft Dynamics
NetSuite
Maximizer

Press Releases

PRWeb
PR Newswire

Disclaimer: Lead Liaison has no affiliation with any of these tools, except our own ;-)

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Automating Business – The Buick Way

Automating BusinessOne of our founders recently bought a Buick Enclave. Most of the folks on our team are not car experts. Needless to say, we knew little about Buick Enclaves. When we heard she bought a Buick, we thought – “that’s an old man’s car”. Buick Regal, Roadmaster, Park Avenue, LeSabre – the list of old school Buick’s goes on. Why wouldn’t we formulate that opinion? Several of us got to take a spin in her new Enclave. Let’s just say this; it was a real eye opener. It reminds me how one can be so ignorant about new things. After all, you only know what you know. It got us thinking, if Buicks have evolved like this how has business evolved?

Business, in particular sales and marketing, has evolved considerably. Similar to what technology has done for Buicks, technology has given business a boost. For example, consider our founders Buick Enclave. The vehicle is OnStar equipped. Our co-founder showed us the OnStar iPhone app. We were amazed she could remotely unlock, lock and start her vehicle with the press of a button. And check this out – she remotely started the vehicle and it adjusted the climate control inside the vehicle based on the temperature outside. Wouldn’t it be nice if one could automate business with the press of a button?

Guess what, we can! Sales and marketing is no longer the old school Buick. Marketers have an opportunity to “OnStar-their-business”. Businesses can take advantage of software that automates common marketing processes. For example, with a few button clicks marketers can automate lead nurturing, or drip campaigns, lead qualification, lead distribution and alerts that highly benefit sales. Let’s draw from another analogy in the spirit of Buick/OnStar. While having the iPhone OnStar app up, our co-founder showed us how to find a place using Bing, say the closest Indian restaurant, and push that destination to the in-car navigation or turn-by-turn system. When she jumped in the vehicle her Buick asked her if she wants to go to the Indian restaurant.

That’s similar to configuring an automated marketing campaign and pushing it out to your business. With marketing automation software marketers can configure their prospects route, navigating them through your business and driving them forward along the revenue cycle. Marketer can send automated emails and other actions as part of an automated program and either run/activate the program or schedule it to start at any time in the future.

It’s time to harness technology and start automating business.

For a demo of OnStar and Lead Liaison ping us!

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