May 2012 – Lead Liaison

ActiveConversion

May 31, 2012/0 Comments/in Marketing Automation, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Looking for an alternative to ActiveConversion? If yes, then we welcome you to learn more about Lead Liaison by clicking the button below. ActiveConversion is a strong point solution and focuses on a few areas; namely, lead scoring and visitor tracking. They leave sales prospecting, email marketing among other capabilities to third parties. They have a few other nice features but ultimately, that’s where vendors in this space fall short. B2B companies want integrated solutions, not disparate features. Unfortunately, vendors (and consequently many businesses) have fallen into a trap. “Marketing automation” is the me-too phrase in the industry. It’s the buzzword that vendors and consumers have latched onto. Many vendors claim to do “marketing automation” – why not, it’s gets them the exposure they need. We’ve said it many times – no one wants to automate marketing but everyone wants to generate revenue.

We’re Different from ActiveConversion

Lead Liaison is not following the me-too model. Since the genesis of our company in 2008 we’ve focused on extending our Revenue Generation Software™ platform. The operative word is “platform”. Marketers need a holistic solution to generate, qualify, nurture and manage leads. CRMs such as Salesforce.com serve as an excellent accounting system for leads, contacts and accounts; however, they don’t give businesses the structure they need to truly perfect their lead management process and cultivate an environment around revenue generation and sales and marketing synergy. We’re the revenue engine for a business that unifies sales, marketing and executive teams. We’re different from competitors and companies like ActiveConversion because of our focus on delivering solutions to sales and executives in addition to marketers. Our integrated solution also sets us apart. Instead of relying on 3rd party email marketing services that don’t delivered a closed-loop experience, we’ve developed our own professional-grade closed-loop email marketing system running a world-class email engine under the hood. We’ve tightly integrated CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com into the DNA of our product. We’ve also spent thousands of hours on the user experience. If we can automate a feature, make a drag-drop component or in any way give our users the visual experience they need to simplify their job then we do it. Add our “no-limit” business model on top of the aforementioned benefits and you’ll see why our solution is so attractive to businesses. In summary, here are a few reasons why you should consider Lead Liaison over companies like ActiveConversion:

We’re highly adaptive to our customers needs. We don’t create our products, our customers do.
Hands down, the easiest solution to use.
We’re a platform, not a product.

We invite you to see a different solution from ActiveConversion and encourage you to learn more about Lead Liaison by speaking with one of our Revenue Success Managers. To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button.

Pardot Competitors

May 24, 2012/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Pardot claims to have only a few competitors; however, in reality they‘ve got more than two. Pardot’s competitors range from small visitor tracking only solutions to marketing automation vendors. Small to medium sized businesses typically gravitate toward Pardot because of price and the attraction to the buzz around “marketing automation”. Don’t miss out though, take a look at Lead Liaison – we’re not just marketing automation, that’s a feature to us, we’re revenue generation software that drives your business. Don’t get us wrong, Pardot offers a great solution for most companies; although, if you’re in the market for more than software that automates a marketer’s job then check out Lead Liaison. There are a few things we do better than our competitors at Pardot; namely, ease of use, sales prospecting, real-time technology, a focus on revenue generation and a better, simpler business model.

An alternative that focuses on what’s important

Pardot focuses mainly on marketing automation whereas we focus on revenue generation. Which one does your business care more about? See our article on The Marketing Automation Mistake which outlines the downfalls of vendors tying their brand to “marketing automation” and focusing solely on automated marketing. Unfortunately, marketing automation is only a feature. Lead Liaison focuses on solutions for sales, marketing and executives that bridges the gap in organizational alignment and helps businesses rapidly grow revenue. People care about revenue generation, not marketing automation. That’s why we trademarked Revenue Generation Software™ – we own it, we live it, we do it.

Unlike all Pardot Competitors we also offer a true real-time solution that allows us to provide real-time, live B2B visitor tracking. Our unique technology also allows us to provide native real-time chat capabilities for inside sales to engage live with the hottest prospects surfing your company’s site.

Don’t leave sales out in the cold

Sales prospecting is another feature that sets us apart in the industry. With our solid foundation of sales experience on our staff we understand the challenges both inside and outside sales people face on a daily basis. We responded to those challenges by adding sales tools commonly used for prospecting such as professional contact searching of more than 35M people and business searching of more than 200M businesses. List building, which helps sales people create regional sales strategies, rounds out our sales prospecting feature set. It’s important to note this capability is built natively into our platform whereas Pardot and Pardot’s competitors send users to third party sites. We keep our functionality within our platform – under one roof.

Our business model is also very customer friendly. We keep it simple by eliminating number of emails sent per month, number of users or number of contacts in a company’s database. Pardot and Pardot’s competitors typically have limitations such as number of emails sent per month, number of landing pages, number of forms and more. It’s no wonder why analysts suggest users of “marketing automation” software face adoption issues and typically use only about 20% of functionality. There’s not much you can do when your hands are tied behind your back. Lead Liaison keeps it simple and prices our software based on four editions. You can’t get any simpler.

Competitors don’t like late entrants

Finally, we stand alone in the category of ease-of-use. Our solution was built from the ground up with the user experience in mind. Agreeably, we did enter the market place later than most companies, including Pardot, but that’s not a bad thing. We watched many companies try to keep up with their competitors and fail by adding functionality as an after thought, creating a spaghetti-like mix of features for end users. Lead Liaison invites you to see a demonstration of our software to see how our user experience is unparalleled and ties together ease of use, sales prospecting, real-time technology, a focus on revenue generation and a better, simpler business model into a single platform.

If you are interested to learn how Lead Liaison can help your company grow revenue then we’re happy to give you a demonstration of our Revenue Generation Software™ platform.

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How to Get More Sales

May 15, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Generation, Revenue Generation Blog, Sales/by Lead Liaison

Identifying how to get more sales is often a struggle for many companies. Whether you’re an early stage start-up trying to meet the pressing demands of your board and/or venture capitalists or a seasoned company stuck in a rut; every business could gain from more sales. Too many businesses put the cart in front of the horse. To get more sales, you’ve got to drive revenue by converting more leads. Our mission at Lead Liaison is to help your company focus on better lead conversion and get your business generating 4X more qualified leads. In the graphic below we highlight five main activities (vertical sections across the bottom row) that identify how to get more sales by nurturing leads, capturing more leads, having better lead follow up, personalizing communications and improving sales effectiveness. The horizontal sections layered on top of the main activities are supportive activities. Let’s dig deeper into the main activities. Here’s a short summary of how Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software technology can help your business get more sales by focusing on five key areas: 5 Principles to Get More Sales

Nurture Leads

How many times has your sales staff disregarded a potential lead or an inbound inquiry? Go ahead, be honest. Experts estimate 70% to 80% of all inquiries are latent demand that will buy within a few years but are lost, ignored or discarded by sales. What’s worse is that 73% of all companies have no process for revisiting leads. That’s a lot of lost revenue and a goldmine of more sales for your business. By using smart technology to intelligently nurture leads via relevant, personalized communications businesses can keep prospects top of mind and accelerate time-to-revenue.

Capture Leads

It doesn’t take a wiz-kid to know that more leads results in more sales. Use several landing pages across your business and embed forms with a minimal (no more than four) amount of fields. Use progressive profiling technology to intelligently identify what information you’ve already collected from a prospect and either hide the field or replace it with a new field that will help your business build a richer prospect profile. Also, use pre-filled form data to keep your database clean. For example, have a “job role” field that only had C-level, VP-level, Director, Manager and Assistant/Coordinator as the choices. When you need to profile your database (how to do database profiling) you’ll be happy you pre-filled forms. Do the same with company names and locations. Lead Liaison can help with that.

Lead Follow Up

It’s imperative companies quickly distribute leads and respond to leads within five minutes to increase lead conversion rates. Research shows that responding within the first five minutes greatly improves the chances of getting the sale. Use automated technology to send email responses from a lead owner. See our article on automatically distributing leads for more information.

Personalize Conversations

Use marketing automation technology to deliver marketing messages that match a prospect’s interests. Furthermore, make sure to create a marketing content map that maps marketing content to industries and buyer personas. Send them material they care about. Don’t generalize your audience. Read our article on email automation to learn more about personalizing communication. Make sure you also close the loop on your nurturing. Traditional email marketing systems do not have the ability to tie in past and future online body language with email activity. Tracking email opens are metrics of the past.

Sales Effectiveness

Sales definitely wants to know how to get more sales. They can do it, they just need to be more effective. Traditionally, sales people would have to keep constant reminders or wade through prospect upon prospect in a flat database. Use lead scoring, lead activities and lead grading technology to help prioritize leads for sales. Build richer prospect profiles by collecting a prospect’s buying behavior (keywords searched, pages visited, multi-visits, etc.). Use alerts to signal your favorite leads or notify lead owners of key buying signals. Help sales do their job by adding technology that takes the guess work out of sales. If you are interested to learn how Lead Liaison can help your company get more sales using the aforementioned approaches and a host of other innovative technologies let us know. We’re happy to give you a demonstration of our Revenue Generation Software platform. To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button.

12 Ways to Repurpose Content

May 8, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Looking for ways to repurpose content? Many companies struggle creating content. Marketing content is important, but pervasiveness of that content is even more important. Much like a spider casts a web far and wide; marketers must cast their content in a similar manner. However, instead of getting worn down trying to create new content for each marketing channel (LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.) repurpose content for each marketing channel.

To start improving inbound marketing create one piece of content. We recommend writing a blog article as your starting point. Keep blogs short and rich with insightful information. Think about who your audience is. Ask yourself, who will read this content and why would they read it? Once your blog article is created repurpose your content on the internet to allow potential buyers to easily find your company. We came across Brody Dorland’s post, A Lesson in Content Repurposing, Infographic Style. Brody provides a very useful infographic with some print instructions to hang the graphic in your office. The graphic outlines 12 things marketers can do to repurpose content and improve inbound marketing. We’ve also pinned it to the side of this post for your convenience. Click on the image to see a larger view.

Finally, close the loop and measure ROI of your content. We suggest using lead tracking technology such as ours to help you automatically scan inbound leads, qualify, distribute and nurture them. Follow these steps to repurpose content and measure content ROI. Your sales team will be chanting your name! Ping us using the short form on this page to learn more about how our technology can help you get the highest return on your content creation dollars.