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.

Lead Liaison Announces New User Experience for Marketing Automation

Lead Liaison has announced a simplified version of their user interface giving businesses a “Google Apps-like” experience when setting up marketing automation assets and strategies

Lead Liaison, a software as a service company that helps businesses improve efficiency in sales and marketing operations, announced today a major improvement in user experience with a redesigned user interface. The new user interface builds on Lead Liaison’s industry position as the easiest to use and easiest to buy marketing automation platform. Although the company sees marketing automation as a strategy, not software, and brands their platform as Revenue Generation Software®, it’s feature-rich platform stacks up to other industry leaders delivering only marketing automation. The company expects to accelerate adoption of its platform because of its new, innovative and improved user experience.

The new user experience gives customers a “Google Apps-like” feeling when inside the application, making it easier to navigate. Working with the software is more intuitive than ever. The company has grouped capabilities into four logical areas: create, process, manage and administer. The user experience is also highly configurable and customizable, unlike anything to date in the industry. Other systems, such as Marketo, require full-time admins, or even 3rd parties, to setup and manage the system. Having dedicated resources on these types of systems just inflates total cost of ownership, which reduces the return on marketing automation. With a more intuitive and elegant UI, users will shorten their learning curve, save money and be more satisfied overall.

In a follow on release the company plans to release a tagging feature. Tagging is a modern way to stay organized. By tagging prospects, marketing assets, Lead Liaison Campaigns and Programs and other components in the system companies will be able to more easily locate important items. Combined with their highly configurable, and easy to use software Lead Liaison continues to distance themselves from competitors that move in the opposite direction by overcomplicating the user experience.

About Lead Liaison:

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert, and close leads. The company markets to small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on providing a user-friendly and innovative Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their software delivers powerful solutions that accelerate sales, improve efficiency and build stronger relationships with prospects, customers and partners through the use of automated processes.

Press inquiries:

Amber Turrill
VP, Corporate Communications
corporate(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

Marketing Automation for Agencies Just Got Easier

Lead Liaison introduces a powerful, yet easy to use marketing automation for agencies solution with frictionless go-to-market options.

Lead Liaison has released an enhancement to its marketing automation solution for agencies. Marketing agencies of all sizes can now boost their digital service offerings with a professional-grade marketing automation platform at the core of their business at affordable prices.

According to manta.com, there are close to 135,000 Advertising & Marketing Companies in the United States alone. Now, all of these companies have an ideal sales and marketing automation platform to help manage their customers multi-channel marketing across a variety of online and offline channels in a very targeted way. Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® helps agencies automate web, email, direct mail (postcard), social media, SMS and promotional marketing using a drag and drop interface that’s simple, intuitive and powerful.

Lead Liaison’s marketing agency solution is vastly different from competing solutions offered by other marketing automation providers like Marketo, Eloqua or HubSpot. First, Lead Liaison offers a disruptive business model. Instead of gouging customers with various editions and escalating prices Lead Liaison delivers a single platformwith cost predictability – helping agencies go to market with less friction. Second, Lead Liaison provides the best value-per-dollar with enterprise-level software at small business prices; usually a fraction of what a marketing agency would pay another vendor for similar services. Marketing agencies can take a deep breath knowing they’ve got lower total cost of ownership with an easier solution to manage, lower fees, better digital marketing services and ultimately, peace of mind.

The catalyst for the enhancement is a new feature from Lead Liaison that makes it easy for marketing agencies to manage multiple accounts. A marketing agency administrator can dynamically switch between multiple end-customer accounts, just like switching between email accounts using Google Mail. Marketing agencies can also favorite accounts to have them appear below their login and selectively assign accounts to account managers, making it easy for account managers to work with their client pool.

On the short-term horizon is even more good news for marketing agencies looking to dive into marketing automation. The ability to white label, also known as private label, Lead Liaison’s software to keep tighter control of their customer base and retain brand experience.

For more information see Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation for Agencies page.

About Lead Liaison:

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert, and close leads. The company markets to small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on providing a user-friendly and innovative Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their software delivers powerful solutions that accelerate sales, improve efficiency and build stronger relationships with prospects, customers and partners through the use of automated processes.

Press inquiries:

Amber Turrill
VP, Corporate Communications
corporate(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

Consumer Engagement is Key to Brand Success

Consumer Engagement is Brand SuccessConsumers aren’t just looking for you to hold their hand throughout the transaction process – they are looking for consumer engagement, the core concept in making trusted transactions happen for your business. Keeping consumers engaged is all about providing them with an experience that they can find informative and trustworthy. That experience should also hold their attention.

The right marketing automation software can help you measure engagement, but unless you have a solid consumer engagement strategy for your brand on the whole, automation isn’t going to give back the kind of helpful data you’re looking for. It’s important to incorporate marketing automation into your overall strategy. The automation itself is not meant to serve as a standalone strategy.

Understanding Consumer Engagement

The first step to engagement is to understand the various methods consumers use to engage. Social media is a big one – you’ll want to target areas on the web where consumers are spending a great amount of passive time. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are easily available via desktop or mobile, allowing you the ability to engage with consumers no matter where they – or you – are. Social media also presents ease of engagement, with the ability to chat so quickly back and forth that the flexibility and power of a chat room can be utilized.

The same holds true for blogs and forums. Even if you’re not engaging directly, you can create contextual ads that give customers the opportunity to find out about you and engage with you in other ways. The Google Adwords Display program is a good example of this. Adwords Display places your ad on relevant blogs and news sites. Customers can engage with you via a text, graphic or video ad.

Tracking Consumer Engagement

Once you have an engagement strategy in place, it’s important to let your marketing automation company do the monitoring, then interpret your data. For instance, you may want to measure social media engagement over time based on what time you’re posting. Your marketing automation service can give you an idea as to what the profile is of your average user, what time Tweets or Facebook posts are most effective and how users are getting to your website based on your social profiles.

Because this is sensitive data that can be critical to your company’s marketing strategy, it’s important to select a marketing automation partner with the right tools – a company with your best interests in mind. Lead Liaison helps businesses stay in line with success through marketing automation tools that work for businesses of all sizes. Visit us at Lead Liaison.com to find out more!

Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

Get the Most Out of Your AnalyticsWhat exactly are marketing analytics and why are they so important? First of all, marketing analytics help to put accountable numbers behind your marketing programs. By monitoring the right numbers, you can maximize ROI and ensure your marketing efforts are producing the greatest response. In turn, you’ll be able to get the most out of your analytics through applying the data to future marketing plans.

Traditionally, marketers are seen as the creative types that focus on sculpting an impactful message to drive prospect response. Recently, we’ve seen marketing analytics creep more and more into the marketers’ day-to-day routine. Why is this? Mostly this is because numbers are easily trackable and provide a means for interpreting how prospects interact with your business. Read more about bringing an analytical culture into your marketing practices here.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Analytics

 

Integrate analytics into the rest of the marketing plan.

Utilize marketing automation to track your web visitors’ activity. The data from those reports will show you which landing pages are the most effective and which CTAs your prospects are following. The tracking software will enable marketers to effortlessly integrate analytics into their daily routine and follow up with prospects, understanding where everyone stands in the funnel. A successful integration should reinforce your sales and marketing alignment. Use your marketing analytics to turn your sales funnel into data.

Interpret the data.

So now you’ve got all of this data, how will you interpret it to get the most out of your analytics? You’ll see better ROI when you’re able to more personally connect with your prospects, so a thorough understanding of their activity and interaction with your brand will help marketers get their point across effectively. Interpreting the data will also aid in sales and marketing alignment in that you’ll be able to refine your funnel, maximize the CTAs that work and cut the attempts that aren’t as fruitful. It is important to prune your data—don’t waste time analyzing data that isn’t showing results or giving actionable items.

Review regularly.

Checking the stats once a year won’t create as much of an impact and certainly won’t help you to get the most out of your analytics. Make checking the numbers regularly a habit—have the data available for monthly or quarterly marketing meetings when the whole team is present so that everyone’s on the same page. Lead Liaison has a solution for keeping an eye on visitor behavior and enables you to gather information and metrics as they happen.

Incorporating these simple steps into marketers’ day-to-day will ultimately aid in gauging new marketing initiatives. You’ll be able to monitor unique visits as well as track return visitors to keep an eye on their buying interest and ensure they are qualified appropriately. Tracking the referring sites of your visitors will also help to point out potential marketing partnerships. Use this fact-based decision-making in order to get the most out of your analytics and ultimately the most out of your current marketing practices.

Leveraging the Power of Automated Text Messaging

Automated Text MessagingMany people feel their relationships with their mobile technology – particularly smart phones- is sacred, limiting the opportunity for businesses to use automated text messaging and similar services to market their products. Many businesses overstepped their boundaries with automated text messaging, resulting in unsubscribes and giving text solicitation a bad name.

Fortunately, not all text messaging to potential clients is bad or unwanted. The key to working with bulk text messaging automation is understanding what clients want to see from you as well as proper segmentation. Blasting customers on the same list over and over again with daily texts is sure to get you bounces early on in the process.

So, how can you approach customers with automated text messaging in a way that doesn’t irritate the customer, but creates a conversion opportunity for your products or services?

Split Your List

Text messaging is something you should definitely take it easy on – messages should be brief, concise and sent infrequently. The lack of frequency requires a solid commitment to delivering only the most important messaging. That’s why it’s so important to split your list – make sure that the messaging you send out reaches the right clients.

Segment lists based on special offers, reminding clients when a certain promotion or webinar is taking place or announce contests. Make unsubscribe options very easy for clients to meet federal regulations. Ensuring you deliver the right kind of messaging to the right subscription list will decrease your chances of high unsubscribes.

Also, keep time frames in mind. Customers don’t want to receive texts from you on a daily basis. Avoid texting on holidays when clients may be enjoying time with their families and will only be distracted or annoyed by messaging.

Automated Text Messaging That Works

It’s important to work with a service that will allow you to segment lists and use text messaging for a variety of purposes. You can also create company lists that will allow you to remind employees of important meetings or office functions. You can use bulk texting to broadcast weather updates that affect work hours or keep your employees in the know about any other important happenings.

Bulk text messaging allows customers and even employees to stay on top of what’s happening at your organization. If used the right way with the best service provider, text messaging can provide some return on your investment.

Lead Liaison has partnered with Twilio to offer bulk text messaging, giving even more functionality to your site’s marketing automation back end! Contact us today to find out more.

Social Monitoring: Do You Need It?

Social Monitoring: Do You Need It?Many businesses implement complex marketing automation systems with a goldmine of data coming in – yet never seem to think about social monitoring. Taking a look at how customers behave when they use your website or view your marketing materials can give you a ton of great information, but you’re not always going to get the full picture of a user’s behavior scope.

While you’re confronted with raw data that can inform your marketing plan and increase branding or even sales, you may be missing out on valuable information that puts you in the loop about what customers are actually looking for. By monitoring conversations surrounding your brand and relevant keywords, you can get a better idea of how to craft customized content and engage with your audiences at a higher level.

Social Monitoring: What is It?

In a nutshell, social monitoring is about watching what your customers are tuning into online in order to make decisions about the types of content you put out there and how you represent your brand.

For instance, if you own a tire company and communicate with customers directly on your Facebook page, you may find that a decent amount of customers ask questions about flats – repairing tires, when to buy new tires and how to avoid driving on a tire that is in dangerously bad shape. You see social media conversations on your Facebook as well as web searches asking questions about tires.

However, major news stories are out there highlighting the dangers of driving in various weather conditions without the appropriate tire. Your competitors are engaging in dialogue with potential customers on their own Facebook pages and within various news stories about tire conditions in bad weather.  If you’re not having these conversations, you’re missing out on putting yourself and your expertise in front of customers in a way that would result in brand recognition and sales.

Engaging Socially

The above is a simplistic example, but you can apply it to just about any industry. There are plenty of ways to figure out the kinds of things your customers want to talk about. Check hashtags on Twitter, set up an alert for your core business keywords using http://alerts.google.com, or incentivize customers to complete online surveys that gauge what types of topics they’re interested in talking about. You can also look to click through and open rate in your email marketing efforts to determine what content best engages customers.

Marketing automation is a must for your business, but the more data you can collect from other channels, the more reliably you can determine the best direction for your marketing. You deserve a marketing automation dashboard that gives you everything in a package – from article writing to social monitoring to robust reports and engagement suggestions. Check out Lead Liaison’s dashboard to find out more about how a well-rounded marketing automation tool can take your business to the next level!

Lead Liaison Partners with CodeLaunch Event to Give Away Complimentary Visitor Tracking Package

Code Authority’s annual incubator event sets the stage for an array of unique startup business ideas.

Marketing automation company Lead Liaison, is pleased to announce its sponsorship with Frisco based tech company Code Authority Custom Software to sponsor this year’s CodeLaunch event. CodeLaunch is an annual Dallas-based ‘pitch’ competition that serves as the showpiece in an annual competition that allows select individuals to pitch their startup ideas to recognized area business leaders. The competition awards incubation resources such as investment and startup consultation to selected winners.

In addition to the grand prizes, Lead Liaison will offer six free months of complimentary visitor tracking to winners as part of a prize package totaling over $2100 in value. The addition of visitor tracking allows startup companies to focus on their target audience and potential companies with laser precision, identifying important website visitor characteristics such as business names, geographic location, IP, user behavior, people and other quantitative data that speaks to qualitative business decision making.

Jason W. Taylor, President of CodeLaunch and Code Authority spoke over the weekend on CodeLaunch and Lead Liaison’s sponsorship:

“Lead Liaison is exactly the kind of product that our CodeLaunch startups can benefit from. We are thrilled they are supporting CodeLaunch and the startup ecosystem.”

This year’s CodeLaunch Pitch Day will happen August 21st, 2014 at the NTEC Conference Center in Frisco, Texas. Code Authority will determine finalists and grand prize winners. Applications were accepted through May 31, 2014.

For more information, please visit CodeLaunch or follow @CodeAuthority. More information will be available on Lead Liaison’s corporate website at http://www.leadliaison.com.

About Lead Liaison:

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert, and close leads. The company markets to small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on providing a user-friendly and innovative Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their software delivers powerful solutions that accelerate sales, improve efficiency and build stronger relationships with prospects, customers and partners through the use of automated processes.

About CodeLaunch:

CodeLaunch is an annual concept competition and pitch event for Embryonic Stage software technology startups produced by Code Authority Custom Software and a group of partners and sponsors interested in fostering entrepreneurism.

Press inquiries:

Amber Turrill
VP, Corporate Communications
corporate(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)

Boost Demand Generation through Sales and Marketing Alignment

Boost Demand Generation through Sales and Marketing AlignmentWe know successful deals aren’t created and closed by the sales team alone; there’s significant homage due to the marketing team in their demand generation efforts and kick-starting the funnel. To maximize outcome, the secret is to enable your business to boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment. Don’t get us wrong—this doesn’t mean cutting the marketing team altogether and asking sales to take over (check out this case study); rather, have the two teams work harmoniously to achieve the best results.

Manage the Data

Between the two departments, data should be gathered and analyzed and best practices defined. When determining which strategies have proven most successful, keep in mind the four primary phases of demand generation: awareness, interest, preference, and commitment.

The goals here are to drive awareness and interest through successful inbound and outbound marketing that will enhance the sales cycle. In order to boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment, both teams must be focused on determining the buyer persona. The marketing team gains awareness of and attention from potential prospects (suspects) through understanding who they are and what they want. This knowledge comes through the eyes of the sales team. By having a comprehensive profile of the current buyer persona, marketers can more directly target the audience and create more personalized campaigns, such as email marketing, which in turn drive higher return rates. Gather, analyze, and share the knowledge.

Guide Validation

Once the marketing team has generated demands, the next step is to convince the suspects that your solution is best through generating the leads. The marketing team has a plethora of ammunition to accomplish this: whitepapers, videos, blogs, reviews, direct mail, etc. Re-analyze and reuse the data collected from automated marketing solutions to further personalize each point of contact with the prospect to determine scoring and qualification, and pass only the qualified ones over to sales.

Nurturing the leads to the point of qualification comes when you boost demand generation through sales and marketing alignment. If the demand generation is low, activity in the pipeline is low, close rates are low. It’s key to have a solid grasp of the initial steps in order to maximize flow in the funnel to the closing steps. Implementing marketing programs that work together with a structured sales process will help to build awareness about your solution, remind prospects why your solution is better than others, and convert prospects into customers.

Lead Liaison to Offer Text Messaging Automation

Automated text messaging via Twilio technology creates new possibilities for responsive marketing.

Allen, TX (PRWEB) June 03, 2014 – Lead Liaison, a sales and marketing automation solutions company, announces the inception of its text messaging feature technology via Twilio solutions. Current customers now have the power of texting technology available via Lead Liaison’s drag and drop interface, further positioning the company as the easiest to use solution in the industry.

Twilio is a flexible communications platform that allows users to text in bulk. Texts can be scheduled from within Lead Liaison to segmented lists with specific messaging specified by the end user, personalizing each text message using Lead Liaison tokens. This allows the sender to send marketing messaging based on a desired outcome such as further sales, re-engaging with the company or taking advantage of a specific offer.

The addition of text messaging strengthens Lead Liaison’s multi-channel marketing capability, giving users the ability to send targeted texts along with direct mail (postcards), email and promotional marketing items – deepening their offering around online and offline marketing. The service is intended to be flexible and to add value to current marketing automation properties.

Lead Liaison VP of Customer Success, Alan Page, spoke Monday on the benefits of utilizing text technology: “We’re excited to integrate another marketing channel for our customers. Text messages are like no other marketing method. Instead of traditional broadcast marketing facilities like email, text messaging is a form of narrowcast marketing. People check their cell phones 150 times per day on average. With 98% of all text messages being opened – you can bet our customers messages will get read. When used for very narrow, targeted marketing it’s highly effectively. The good news is that Lead Liaison enables companies to target their customers in a microscopic way, using demographics, social and behavioral information to pair down their audience.”

About Lead Liaison:

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert, and close leads. The company markets to small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on providing a user-friendly and innovative Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their software delivers powerful solutions that accelerate sales, improve efficiency and build stronger relationships with prospects, customers and partners through the use of automated processes.

Press inquiries:

Amber Turrill
VP, Corporate Communications
corporate(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)