April 2015 – Lead Liaison

The Biggest Obstacles to a Successful Marketing Automation Implementation

April 30, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Good marketing automation implementation strategies with the help of marketing automation software such as Lead Liaison can give your company’s marketing department a significant advantage in lead generation and in the bottom line for sales. However, in order to give your company’s marketing department maximum benefit, these strategies must be implemented correctly and completely. Below, we’ll tell you about some of the biggest obstacles businesses encounter when attempting to implement marketing automation strategies, and what you can do to avoid them.

Strong Sales Can Prevent Marketing Innovation

One of the most obvious ways for your company to fail to receive the benefits offered by marketing automation is by simply not having a strategy at all. Businesses that already generate strong sales feel little need to suddenly implement a new system. After all, if it isn’t broke, then don’t fix it, right?

The problem with this mindset is that marketing automation strategies are intended not only to improve sales, but also to ensure that your sales team is maximizing all potential leads at all times. The Internet is a constantly shifting environment, and every company should have a vantage point that keeps them become aware of the newest innovations in marketing automation and how their company can take advantage of them.

Partial Marketing Automation Implementation Can Keep a Marketing Team From Operating Efficiently

Another common problem experienced by companies that are not getting the most out of their marketing automation strategies is partial implementation. This can be one of the most frustrating situations for companies, because they may be putting a great amount of effort into one area of marketing automation, such as content creation, but are not seeing nearly the results that they were hoping for.

This is one of the great strengths of Lead Liaison’s marketing automation software, as our tools are a comprehensive approach to marketing automation to ensure that all of the data and information you are gathering about potential leads is being properly coordinated, and that all necessary data is constantly being communicated to the sales team.

Large Companies Face Large Organization Problems

In larger companies, the sheer scope of implementing a new marketing strategy can bog down the process to the point that marketing automation implementation is never accomplished. It is easy to observe these kinds of difficulties and mark them up as symptomatic of the politics that can gum up the workings of larger companies. However, it is really a problem with the company’s executives. These are the people who need to be aware of the value a strong marketing automation strategy, and responsible for the successful implementation of it.

These are just a few of the larger, companywide problems that can keep a company’s marketing department from boosting sales with a comprehensive marketing automation strategy. To learn more about other challenges of marketing automation, and to learn more about the marketing solutions that Lead Liaison can offer your business, visit us online and check out our marketing automation resource blog.

Sales Success for Startups

April 28, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Looking for some sales success for startups? Startups face unique challenges from a sales perspective. Typically these challenges include:

Lack of name recognition
Lack of education about the problem that your product or service solves
Lack of confidence in prospective buyers, who don’t want to be burned by being early adopters
Limited sales and marketing resources

How can your organization compete with a competitor that has years of experience in your industry, 100X more money to spend and a staff that is at least 10X the size of yours?

From my experience, you need to follow three pieces of advice:

1.) Don’t wait for everything to line up. The most successful sales organizations are also the most aggressive leaders in adapting to guerilla techniques such as the use of marketing automation. This makes even more sense when you consider that every day that you delay is an opportunity for your competitors to exponentially increase their advantage on your company in the market place.

2.) You need to either find a tremendous amount of funding to catch up to your competitors; or you need a brilliant alignment of sales and marketing strategies that leverage technology and eyeballs to pay attention to your messaging.

3.) Find your differentiator and champion that message so that you can rapidly gain sole position as the industry leader in that area.

In the last two years, I have seen some impressive results from marketing automation alone. While many lead marketing automation providers do not even use their own technology; I will provide you with some insights into what we have produced internally with our own software:

171% increase in revenue year-over-year
632% better brand recognition amongst those surveyed
980% increase in engagement with prospects
Our close rate went from 13% to 38%
28% of our existing customers upgraded in 2014 as a result of our education programs

This all occurred without increasing the size of our sales staff. We maintained the same budgets +/-10% in all other categories. Of course these rules go for established companies as well. Are you losing market share? Not growing as fast as you would like? Feel like your cost of growth is too high? Feel like your company is unable to compete without additional funding? If so, we’d love to talk with you and share our experiences to see if they might help you.

How can you integrate trade shows and other industry events into your automated marketing?

April 23, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Regardless of the industry you are in, trade shows are a great opportunity to gain new leads and meet potential new clients. Regardless of whether you plan to have a representative at the event or not, trade shows represent a gathering of individuals interested in the type of services that you provide, and interacting with them is always a positive experience. And since it is nearly impossible for most businesses to have a real presence at every relevant show, using some of the marketing automation tools provided by Lead Liaison can greatly increase your company’s visibility to attendees and the industry in general.

Social Media and Marketing Automation

One of the most straightforward ways to utilize Lead Liaison’s marketing automation tools to interact with trade show attendees and other individuals who are interested in what the show has to offer is to utilize the automated social media tools in Lead Liaison.

With a little bit of planning, your marketing team can quickly schedule LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook posts to automatically post as the event approaches. With strategic use of hashtags and other markers, your company will become a part of the online community interested in the event, introducing you and your services to new clients naturally.

Social media automation doesn’t stop there either. During the event, posts about significant events can help attract attention to your company’s social media feeds, but even more effective are interactive posts that prompt community discussion. Social media posts that quiz attendees about favorite products and questions directed at attendees can all be scheduled in advance, generating create feedback and exposure.

Make New Connections and Keep Them Interested With Lead Liaison’s Lead Nurturing Tools

If you do have a representative at the event, be sure that they stay in tune with social media, but don’t neglect the face-to-face network opportunities inherent in events such as trade shows. You want to meet as many prospective clients as possible, but don’t let this be your only goal. You aren’t simply trying to sell – you want to be receptive and listen to what your new contacts are interested in.

After an event has occurred, enter any new client data obtained from the event or social media into Lead Liaison’s client database, and let the program qualify all prospective leads. Make sure to integrate any leads that may not pay off right away into Lead Liaison’s lead nurturing system – and also remember that trade shows offer you great opportunities to send a message to anyone already in your lead nurturing system.

Trade shows are fun events that bring together lots of disparate elements of any industry, and treated properly can yield fantastic information and lead generation. With a little planning and good use of marketing automation, you’ll be amazed at the difference even the most basic levels of interaction with these events will have.

Visit our revenue generation and marketing automation resource blog to learn more ways to use marketing automation to expand your client base and build your business with Lead Liaison.

Database Segmentation Can Be Easy

April 21, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Management, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Database segmentation is a crucial element of allowing your marketing and sales team to communicate effectively with leads and customers. It becomes even more important as the overall number of leads and customers grows to ensure that you are able to remain in contact with everyone. However, it is equally important that the communication you send to your customers is relevant to the individual, and that you are not spamming leads with unwanted information, potentially turning them away from your business. Lead Liaison features many intuitive automated tools to help you manage your growing database of customer contacts.

Different Methods Of Data Segmentation

One of the most important features of Lead Liaison is the ability to dynamically create lists in order to quickly and accurately send emails to your relevant leads. Lead Liaison has over 65 preset attributes to segment your database and help you communicate the correct information at the correct times to your leads. Those categories can broadly be defined as related to lead strength, helping you access customers when the Lead Liaison database has determined they are most ready to purchase your services, and personalization, so you can send communications based off specific relevant information gathered about your customers.

Segmenting customers according to the strength and type of leads helps you connect with customers when they are ready to purchase your service with the correct level of service appropriate for their needs and budget. Lead grade is an attribute that is defined in the Lead Liaison database based on how well an individual fits your buyer profile. This helps ensure that each customer is being approached with an appropriate level of service by your sales and marketing teams. Lead score is an attribute that is determined by a customer’s interaction with your website, sales team and marketing. This attribute helps you know how interested a customer is in your service and when they might be most likely to buy.

By creating lists based on personalization attributes, you can contact your customers with services that are specific to their location, needs or ability to interact with your services. One of the best ways to use this is by creating lists based on geography, so you can quickly communicate with your leads in a specific region with relevant information. Another important factor is a customer job title, since an owner or vice-president can make purchasing decisions that individuals lower in the hierarchy would not be able to. Past purchases is another important factor to consider when segmenting your customer database, so you can inform your customer of services that could be repeated or inform them of a complementary offer.

Use Data Segmentation To Maximize Efficiency

In addition to accessing customers to inform them of relevant opportunities, you can also use data segmentation to help reduce waste. Attributes such as delivery bounce, do not call or do not email all help to ensure that your marketing and sales teams aren’t wasting their time contacting someone who is uninterested in your service.

These are only some of the ways that Lead Liaison’s automated data segmentation services can help your business, visit our resource blog to learn more.

Marketing Automation for Beginners

April 16, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Thinking about marketing automation for beginners? Are you a marketing automation newbie? Marketing is a fundamental operation of your small business: attracting new customers (as well as retaining current customers) is the key to profits and expanding success. Without marketing your business goes stale, contacts dry up, and your customers will look to your competitors to meet their needs. But many of the marketing tasks that you have can be automated and can guarantee positive results for your team and your bottom line.

Much of the marketing responsibilities you have are repetitive and wasteful activities that are simple tasks which can be easily, quickly, and affordably automated. Lead capturing, managing relationships with your customers, creating captivating and personalized content, and email campaigns can all be automated. It also gives you quick and easy ways to quantify the feedback received by your customers, allowing you to make adjustments as needed. Focusing on fine-tuning the marketing process while pushing your customers successfully through the sales funnel will be much easier once you automate your marketing.

When considering marketing automation for beginners, the easiest way to begin to automate your marketing is with automated follow up. Quite simply, when a potential customer expresses interest in your product, your marketing automation software triggers an email response – generally this will be a reply thanking them for their interest and welcoming them while giving them information about the product. If the customer has signed up for a freemium trial of a product that automated message will contain information regarding the trial period and what to expect after the trial expires. Automating the nurturing process can shorten the life cycle of your sales, which will unveil new opportunities for your sales team. Once your automation process is set up, it’s almost an entirely self-sustaining system but you can always make adjustments, add more features, and test new actions.

Marketing automation also gives you the opportunity to align your sales and marketing teams – which will save you money and resources – while strengthening both processes. This will create steady, predictable growth in your business while increasing efficiency. Moreover, you will get specific tools and help from your marketing automation provider who will become a legitimate partner in your success, enabling your small business to compete with larger companies.

Let Lead Liaison help you get started with marketing automation for your business. Click here to contact us.

Keep Your Social Media Current With Real-Time Event Integration

April 14, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Revenue Generation Blog, Social Media/by Lead Liaison

Keep your social media current with real-time event integration and you’ll start impressing your prospects. Using Lead Liaison’s powerful tools, you can quickly set up an automated schedule to maintain multiple healthy and vibrant social media profiles, greatly increasing the visibility of your company to potential leads. However, to get the most out of your social media presence it should include not only relevant details about your company, but be responsive to events and news that involves your field. Real-time event integration is a key strategy in today’s fast paced world of social media communication, and should be an essential component of your social media strategy.

If your marketing has already set up an automated schedule using Lead Liaison, then that’s good – they’ve laid the framework for a healthy social media presence. Your customers are informed of what is happening with your company, and that’s important. Real-time event integration isn’t something that exists beside a long term social media automation strategy, the two are intimately related and equals parts of one singular goal, becoming part of an active, engaged community. Let’s use the example of a trade show related to your company to see how real-time integration can reach a broader audience and stimulate new leads.

Reactive Real-Time Event Integration

If there’s an important trade show approaching in your industry, hopefully it is already being planned for as a part of your marketing team’s social media automation strategy. Announcements leading up to are a great way to demonstrate activity on various social media platforms. Once the event begins, make sure you are participating in the conversation. If you have a marketing representative attending, have them take pictures, and never forget the importance of hashtags to become part of a larger conversation. If a big announcement happens, be a part of it. Even if the announcement isn’t directly related to your company, it never hurts to be a part of the buzz.

Predictive Real-Time Event Integration

Not all real-time even integration has to be reactive, however. Your marketing team should also design posts that will go up at times when they will be seen by the largest number of potential leads and customers. By creating posts that encourage participation, such as a question about attendees’ favorite moments, a poll, or even a contest related to the show, you can engage lot of new contacts and increase your social media profile very effectively.

At the end of the day, your marketing team should be working on a real-time event integration social media strategy that is both predictive and reactive, and all of this should fall under the umbrella of your larger social media automation strategy. And make sure that all of your social media posts are landing on the appropriate platform, a 40 word tweet accompanied by a hashtag looks a lot more at home on Twitter than it does on LinkedIn.

With a little planning and an effective utilization of the social media automation tools that Lead Liaison places at your disposal, you’ll quickly see the benefits of an active social media presence. Visit our marketing automation blog to learn more about how you can get the most from your social media accounts.

Scheduling Your Social Posts Makes All The Difference

April 9, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Revenue Generation Blog, Social Media/by Lead Liaison

Scheduling your social posts makes a ton of difference. In today’s landscape of digital communication, an active social media presence is essential for communicating with potential and existing customers. In order to create an active presence, however, your marketing team needs to be able to deliver quality social media content on a consistent schedule that is in line with everything else that is going on within your company. This can be difficult to do on the fly, and trying to do so can make it difficult for a marketing team to adhere to their overall strategy. In order to maximize the impact of your social media presence, you should consider scheduling your social media posts, and Lead Liaison’s social media automation tools make this a simple and straightforward process.

A Consistent Schedule Of Social Media Posts Yields Tangible Benefits

What kinds of benefits will you see after pursuing a social media post scheduling strategy? An active social media presence helps establish a connection with potential customers, and reassures your existing customers that your company is actively engaged with the services you provide. In addition, regular social media updates build an online presence by connecting not only with other users but also other businesses, giving your company a wider profile and making it visible to more potential customers. However, achieving these sorts of connections and a large presence takes time and continued engagement, all of which can be easily controlled by an automated posting schedule.

Lead Liaison provides tools that connect to all the major social media platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and allows you to connect multiple accounts from each service. Our intuitive software lets you quickly decide on which platform every post your marketing department creates will be shown, helping you control the voice of each account while ensuring that crucial messages are delivered at the same time across all relevant social media services. In addition, our social media post queue, called the buffer, not only lets you post essentially on auto-pilot, but will let your team know when the buffer is low, helping you ensure an uninterrupted flow of social media activity.

Make Sure Your Team Remains Engaged

While posting on a consistent schedule on various social media platforms is an important part of an effective social media strategy, don’t think it’s the whole game. A crucial part of an engaging Twitter or Facebook account is the conversation that can occur between your customers. Make sure your team is making time to respond to activity on your various social media accounts, and make sure they stay aware of what is happening in your field and the world to make sure that automated posts don’t conflict with any important events or news.

By remembering these basic tenants of social media engagement and developing a coherent, automated schedule for social media postings, you’ll quickly see increased activity on social media and awareness from your customers and community. Remember to start scheduling your social posts! Visit Lead Liaison to find out more about how we can help engage your company on social media and the many other ways we can help automate your marketing capabilities.

Understanding Your Leads With Lead Liaison

April 7, 2015/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Management, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

In order to both market effectively to your customers and enable your sales team to be able convert potential customers, you need to start understanding your leads, both on an individual scale and your lead database as a whole. After all, even the most skilled sales team can put up less than stellar conversion numbers if they are handed too many leads, or are not given the appropriate information to sell to promising leads. Lead Liaison incorporates a wide variety of features to help your marketing team gather information about your leads, and integrates this with features to communicate that information with the sales team.

Gather Information About Your Leads To Market Effectively

In order to learn whether your leads are ready to buy or receptive to your companies’ services, you need a way for your marketing team to gather information about them. Lead Liaison features many tools to help accomplish that. One of the most important ways to do this is with automatic lead scoring, which will score activities such as web form submissions, page views, video activity, document downloads and many other statistics, all of which can customized. In addition, Lead Liaison will connect to a lead’s social media profiles, pulling any pertinent data and adding it to their profile, helping you understand as much as possible about your leads.

All of this information is compiled into Lead Liaison’s hot lead dashboard, entitled Briefcase. This tool is designed to help your sales team interpret the data that your marketing team has gathered about leads, and will help your sales force be able to quickly access how warm any given lead is. These levels are based on a wide range of qualification factors, such as overall activity, buy signals and lead grade so the software can comb the entire database to eliminate duplicates, ensuring your sales reps never irritates a potential customer with over access.

Maintain A Relationship With All Leads, Cold Or Hot

Leads are not only potential customers when your marketing or sales team first comes in contact with them, and many of your potential leads may not be ready for the service you provide at the moment they enter your radar. In order to maximize these cold leads, and convert them into customers when the time is right, Lead Liaison has automated nurturing tools to open a conversation and keep your company present in a potential customer’s mind for when they do require your services. Our automated tools will continue to track a customer who may not be a warm lead yet, and will inform you if their pattern of behavior indicates that they could potentially become a candidate for conversion.

Lead Liaison offers many useful and efficient tools to help you, your marketing department and your sales team understand all of your leads information in order to help make sales. Visit our revenue generation blog and marketing automation resources page to learn more about how you can increase your business with Lead Liaison, and visit our website to learn more about how our software can help you gather information about your customers.

Integrate CRM And Marketing Automation For Best Results

April 2, 2015/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Think your standalone CRM can drive your business? Try to integrate CRM and marketing automation for best results. One of the great challenges of marketing in the new landscape of online business is the fact that while your prospective customers have every opportunity to inspect your business and services, your sales team has very few opportunities to learn about new leads. Sure, strategic marketing can certainly help you attract the clientele that will gain the most from your services, but unless a customer offers you information, your sales people are sometimes flying blind.

In order to give your sales force information on the customers that they are approaching, one of the most effective ways to obtain information is by using a CRM, such as Salesforce.com. Through these programs, you can gain information such as web visits, e-mail opens and video views to gain some insight into their interests and purchasing inclinations, giving your marketing and sales teams a degree of insight into the character of their leads. However, this still has an issue – all this data can be overwhelming, and isn’t entirely useful in cold, hard blocks. The solution? Integrating your CRM with marketing automation software, such as Lead Liaison.

Lead Liaison was designed from the ground up to integrate with CRMs, take the data provided, and deliver it into meaningful statistical representation of individual leads and your customer base as a whole. Integrating marketing automation software with a CRM means that all the data your sales team needs is contained in one easy to use interface, so your sales team will be able to move seamlessly from accessing the data they need to make sales.

Benefits of CRM and Marketing Integration

It pays dividends to integrate CRM and marketing automation. One of the primary functions of Lead Liaison is to use the data collected by a CRM, such as search terms used and total visits, and record them into a contact record within your CRM. Once this contact information is prepared, an algorithm compiling information such as geography, job title, and revenue is used to assign a lead grade and to tell your sales team how likely an individual is to be interested in purchasing your company’s product or services. This grade is used in conjunction with factors like buy signals on Lead Liaison’s hot lead dashboard, called Briefcase, where leads are given a lead score that helps your sales people make the sales your company needs.

Another great feature that is possible with the integration of a CRM with marketing automation software is lead nurturing. Just because a lead isn’t ready to purchase your services at the time of contact, it doesn’t mean they won’t ever be. Lead nurturing maintains a low level relationship with the customer with automated contact such as occasional e-mails, all while continuing to track the leads behavior through your CRM. If that lead exhibits behavior that indicates they may once again be interesting in your services, a sales member is alerted, so they can contact the customer.

This are just some of the great benefits that are possible with CRM and marketing automation. Visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resources on the web to find out about more.