Lead Liaison Expands to UK

Lead LiaisonDallas, Texas – Sales and marketing solutions provider, Lead Liaison expands into the UK to meet escalating demand.

“Twenty-seven percent of 2017’s revenue came from clients in Europe, Middle East, and Asia (EMEA),” says Ryan Schefke, Customer Success Manager at Lead Liaison. “The amount of business we were generating in the region increased by around 65% year-over-year for the past several years. It was logical that we needed to open an office there, and staff it with great leadership to continue to grow our international presence.”

To support the expansion, the company appointed Richard Nightingale as Director of EMEA Sales. With over 15 years of experience in sales and marketing, Nightingale was the perfect fit to head up the expansion. “I’m extremely excited to be leading the efforts in Europe, especially at such an interesting time for this industry,” says Nightingale. “Our company is growing at an unparalleled rate and EMEA is a big part of that growth.”

The new UK location is part of the overall global growth strategy for Lead Liaison. The new location validates their ongoing commitment to foster relationships abroad. The EU expansion also ensures Lead Liaison has a local presence for clients and partners.

Nightingale is a key hire for Lead Liaison considering their footprint in the region and their local expertise in privacy management. Their Consent Manager provides many capabilities to help companies execute and manage data privacy, such as those set forth by GDPR. Companies can collect consent, update visitor/contact privacy settings in real-time, manage data subject requests, and much more. These privacy measures help satisfy many GDPR requirements for companies doing business with residents or citizens in the European Union.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s support for GDPR, or to speak with a representative, contact them here.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Sales Enablement

The Importance of Integration in Sales Enablement

Sales enablement – a strategic, collaborative discipline, designed to add value to customer interactions and improve predictable sales results – is a business function that has grown rapidly over the past few years. In fact, when CSO Insights began its annual Sales Enablement Optimization Study in 2013, just 19.3 percent of organisations had a dedicated enablement function or programme, and that figure reached 59.2 percent in 2017.

In the end, sales enablement is about ensuring that salespeople, marketing staff, customer service reps and business leaders all understand how they can help meet customer expectations and maximize the amount of revenue the organization generates. In this article, we look more closely at the role that integration plays in enablement and explain some of the steps organizations can take to align sales, marketing, and customer service.

Setting Shared Objectives

For an enablement strategy to work, it is important to understand that, while different departments will have different individual aims and objectives, the primary objective of the sales organization is to maximize sales effectiveness, help customers and improve sales results. Ultimately, for sales enablement to be successful, the individual departments need to share those objectives and understand the role that they play in helping to achieve them.

This means that sales reps need to be equipped with the skills and knowledge to maximize success, the customer service staff needs to adopt best practices to deal with problems quickly and keep customers happy, and the marketing department needs to generate interest in the organization and highlight the company’s merits. Enablement leaders must then ensure all of those things happen, but that departments never lose sight of the core objectives.

“One of the major reasons sales enablement is so challenging is due to interdepartmental misalignment and a lack of ownership for enablement initiatives,” says Alyssa Drury, writing for Seismic. “Marketing plays an integral role… but it is often thought of as a sales responsibility, causing tension between the two departments. This alignment is [also] impossible if marketers aren’t thinking about how they support the sales force.”

Connecting Sales Coaching

While it is far from the whole story, a significant part of sales enablement is sufficiently training and coaching sales staff, so that they can carry out their role to the best of their ability. However, this requires integration, because sales reps need to be taught how to make use of content created by the marketing department and how to make use of CRM software, which links with the customer service department.

For sales leaders to achieve this, it is best to formally align their sales coaching and sales training processes to their sales enablement framework, so that all aspects are covered.

Yet, according to the CSO Insights 2017 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, only 11.3 percent of organizations have a dynamic coaching process in place, where their sales coaching efforts are connected to their enablement framework. Nevertheless, when this does occur, average win rates stand at 66.1 percent, compared to the average win rate of 51.8 percent, representing a 27.6 percent improvement.

What this demonstrates quite neatly is that an integrated sales enablement strategy pays off in terms of enhancing sales effectiveness and improving business results. However, it requires leaders within the organization to take the time to connect coaching frameworks to enablement frameworks. Additionally, it is imperative that organisations take the time to equip sales managers with the skills to carry out that coaching.

In addition to coaching, the use of solutions to automate processes for sales staff, like Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution for prospecting, free’s up Reps time to be focussed on the activities that they can really add value to.

Establishing Buyer Personas

Finally, one of the best ways to make sure different departments are integrated with one another and on the same page when it comes to sales enablement is to establish buying personas. Essentially, these are generalised representations of your sales organisation’s customers, and these can be used to teach staff about why customers choose to buy your products, services or solutions and what affects their decision throughout the customer journey.

These buyer personas should be based on real research and the actual customers you attract and want to attract. Once credible buyer personas have been drawn up, these should be shared with all departments, so they can all gain a deeper insight into the different stages of the customer journey and better understand the role that their particular department plays in bringing a customer closer to making the decision to purchase.

“Essentially, a company must establish a buyer persona and then share that persona with all key players in marketing and sales,” explains David Reimherr, a content marketing expert and the founder of Magnificent Marketing, in an article written for Social Media Explorer. “That allows people to understand the stages of where their customers go for answers, what influences them to buy, and so on.”

Moreover, the marketing department and customer service department need to consider how they can help reps to improve their sales effectiveness. This may mean creating higher quality content, which is more likely to appeal to customers, or sharing customer information through CRM software, which could be used to make sales more likely.

Author Bio:

Monika Götzmann is the EMEA Marketing Director of Miller Heiman Group, a global sales consulting firm, helping organizations to create effective sales enablement strategies. Culturally savvy, she has years of international experience in B2B marketing on behalf of dynamic, world-class enterprises. She likes to share her insights achieving sales effectiveness.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s solution for Sales Enablement as a strategy, click here.

Lead Liaison Press Release

MarTech Up-and-Comer Lead Liaison Now Offers Standalone Solution for Sales Enablement

Dallas, TX – Sales and marketing solutions provider, Lead Liaison, announces they now offer their most recent add-on solution for sales enablement as a standalone license.

Lead Liaison’s sales enablement solution was launched in December 2017 as an add-on to their marketing automation suite. While its popularity has grown exponentially over the last 6 months, the solution was never offered independently until now.

“We saw the need to offer a software solution dedicated to salespeople,” says Chris Kipgen, Technical Communications Manager. “It’s our mission to be able to offer value across all aspects of sales and marketing. Sales Enablement is a core strategy that complements our existing offerings but also benefits companies as a standalone solution.”

Companies continue to seek to improve their sales teams’ productivity. In 2017, there was an increase of 81% in organizations that reported sales enablement functions, programs, and titles over 2016 (registration required). And it’s not just about sales teams – sales managers seek empowerment as well. Lead Liaison’s sales enablement solution offers the tools needed to build repeatable processes and gauge performance of team members, thus enabling sales managers as well as their teams.

Lead Liaison knew they had a winner on their hands after surveying the competitive landscape. Companies offering similar standalone solutions lack the additional pieces required for a complete solution. They don’t offer an ideal integration with a CRM or marketing automation system. All the cornerstone pieces of a sales and marketing stack are still very disparate solutions. Now, Lead Liaison is able to offer companies a standalone solution for sales teams with the option to upgrade their marketing stack with one partner.

Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution is powered by Rhythms™, which can be succinctly described as sales automation. Reps can build out prospecting plans that help book more meetings and create more conversations.

Additional features of Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution include task management, email automation and two-way email sync. Two-way email sync allows reps to see all of their emails sent from any device in the timeline of a contact’s record. It supports all major email providers including Exchange, Gmail, Office 365, and more. Lead Liaison hosts the industry’s only unique combination of online and offline sales capabilities, like postcards and handwritten letters, which can be included in prospecting plans alongside scheduled tasks, SMS communication, and more.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution, visit this webpage.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

customer relationships blog

5 Sure-Fire Ways to Strengthen Customer Relationships

customer relationships blog“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” These wise words from renowned business author Michael LeBoeuf fit perfectly well into the modern-day business scenarios. Whatever a business does revolves around one significant factor i.e. customer relationships. 

An article on Fox Business says that customers are the lifeblood of any given business. If you have managed to build trust and establish strong bonding with your consumers, there is no looking back for you. However, to see it coming, you will need to focus on the quality of your product as well as customer service. Your loyal customers always remain with you. They publicize you through word of mouth.

This post underlines some the best practices that an emerging enterprise can follow to develop solid customer relationships.

Listen to Their Complaints

Whenever you meet and greet your customers, try to listen and understand what they have to say about your product. If you will genuinely show them that you want to listen to their concerns and experience about your product, they too will respond well.

Never make a complaint a prestige issue. Instead, take it positively. A complaint is chance to improve the quality of your service. Once improved, you know you are never going to lose that customer who had raised a voice in the first place.

Sometimes, they might have a suggestion for you. You can use their complaints and suggestions, and study their behavior to offer a one-level-up customer service. Do not close their complaints until they seem happy with the steps taken.

Rewards

Loyalty Reward is the term for bribery in the language customer service industry. You will either need to be a superhero or have a cohesive customer relationship management system that can remember how long a customer has been your customer. All you have to do is to take care of your old, returning customers with some loyalty rewards, which can be anything such as a personalized gift or a thank you card.

You can easily find an eCommerce company that offers to create customized labels for gifting purpose. You can get your thank you message written on the labels, and wrap those labels on the packaging, send or give those packages to your customers and make them feel special right away. This way also, you are going to make strong, never-ending relationships with your loyal customers.

Coupon Codes for Shopping, Restaurant Dining Vouchers, Baseball Match Tickets, Basket of Fresh Fruits, or your product, or anything you can think of can be a great reward idea for your loyal customers.

Make Them Feel Special

Despite the fact that making an existing customer happy is less expensive than searching a new one, you cannot always invest in gifts as this practice may cost you a fortune over time. There are many other ways you can make your customers happy.

With the help of your customer relationship manager (CRM), you can easily keep track of their birthdays and special occasions. A simple phone call from you or any of your representatives can make them feel special.

Why is it even important? Because, a happy client will most likely spread the good word about you and services. An article on Forbes.com insists that you as a business have to treat your every customer as your most important one, because you never know who they know or whom they can refer you to.

Employee Training

Train your employees for better customer service. Specifically if you are a B2C business, which is visited by a large number of customers on a daily routine, employee training on customer service is important.

An article on Choron.com advises, “Implementing customer service training with employees requires a solid understanding of your customer’s needs and expectations as well as being able to meet and surpass those needs and expectations through consistent, positively reinforced training.” For this, you will need to weight up your employees’ skills.

You can assess your employee’s skills from the feedbacks of your customers, and also by taking your employees through a customer service skills assessment.

Social Media

We are living in the age of social media. It is regarded as the fifth building block of the society we live in. Every business, including your competitors, makes an effective use of social network to promote their business, products, services, offers and events.

Why are you shying away from social network? You can create a group or a fan page for your business on Facebook, asking your customers to join you there. This way you can stay close with your customers virtually.

However, Facebook may not be a suitable tool for just any kind of business. That’s the reason why it is important to figure out the best suitable social media platform for your business.

Have the Best Customer Relationships

Your business is not just about doing your business. It is more, rather solely, about your customers. Nicholas Chachula, the founder of iCustomlabel, says that keeping your customers happy will help you lay the foundation for the future of your business.

Which are those two factors that bring a business success? The answer definitely has to be the quality of products and customer satisfaction level a business offers. Apparently, both the factors are proportionally related. Meaning, with a drop in the quality of your product, you shall see a drop in the acceptance of your product. Therefore, while you work on improving your customer service, you should not lose the quality of your products.

To learn more about how to manage your customer relationships, check out our Customer Relationship Management solution.

company shirts

Company Shirts: Pros, Cons, & Tips

My office just received an order of company t-shirts that we intend on giving away to current and prospective clients, as well as wearing ourselves. It’s not the first order, and it won’t be the last. But, it got me thinking. Company shirts are a pretty standard category of “swag.” And, rightfully so. They can be used for employees (in both B2B and B2C businesses), current clients, and even prospective clients. But really, are company shirts worth the investment?

The “Pros” of Investing in Company Shirts

A well-designed company shirt can be extremely versatile, but the end goal is to create brand awareness. There are several avenues of creating brand awareness. While much of marketing’s focus is on your prospective clients, brand awareness is also important for your current base of clients and even your employees. Everyone wants to be a part of something great. And a t-shirt is an easy way to make a statement – heck, it’s a walking billboard! Company shirts can create a sense of unity amongst your employees, make new clients feel like a part of a really cool family, and spark interest with your prospective client. The more your prospects see your brand in day-to-day life, the more they will trust your business.

Local screen printers are easy to find, and your choices for a designer is not limited to your area. Our designer lives more than 800 miles away from our screenprinter. We live in a modern world; we are not limited by the location of our partners and vendors. Find a designer that fits your company culture (if you don’t already have one on staff), then choose your screen printer based on the quality of shirts they have available in addition to their reputation. And if you prefer to do everything online, companies like UberPrints.com allow you to design your own t-shirts in their online studio. They also offer free shipping (bonus!). We have lots of experience with thier work, and it’s great quality.

Company shirts, or marketing shirts specifically, can make you moneyI love this article by Sujan Patel, in which he explains how giving away t-shirts made him over $500k in revenue. Patel says, “I posted to Facebook to see who wanted a few shirts and was surprised when I ran out just a few hours after I put up the message. Clearly, there was a demand for my shirts! Since my supply was short, I put together an email list of people who were interested and started sending out the shirts with personalized notes. Not only did this allow me to help capture people’s physical addresses for use in future t-shirt giveaways, my friends were so excited that they personally thanked me on Facebook and started wearing the shirts around town.” He goes on to explain how giving away all of those shirts made him money. The project helped him strike up business conversations, it helped him get into larger companies, and it helped him grow his brand recognition.

The “Cons” of Investing in Company Shirts

“Logo shirts” are typically the first to go in a closet purge (unless the quality of the shirt warrants keeping). If you’re going to do this project, you need to make sure you do it right. A high quality t-shirt and a modern, simple design will be the keys to keeping your shirts in rotation.

Predicting the future is hard. How do you determine how many of each size you’ll need? I’ll tell ya – this is probably one of the hardest parts of the t-shirt buying process. It’s hard to straddle the line between staying within budget, but also having enough shirts to cover your potential need. And, if you are buying t-shirts without the wearers in mind (like your employees), it’s impossible to know what size you need. My best advice is to hop on a LinkedIn group in your industry and ask. Also, go ahead and mentally prepare for the fact that your numbers will be slightly off. That’s okay! You can always order more.

Tracking ROI is hard. It’s difficult to quantify the return on investment to expect for each shirt you give away. RealThread.com helps quantify that. “According to the Ad Speciality Institute, the average giveaway t-shirt gets worn 4.32 times per month and earns 365 impressions per month, with an impression being any time the shirt is viewed or seen. Assuming that your t-shirt is kept for even just one year, that’s 4,380 impressions per t-shirt.” So, if your t-shirt cost is $9.00/shirt, your cost per impression would be $.002/impression. Not bad.

Tips

Sizing

Sizing will always be an issue, as I stated before. But it’s important to make an educated guess. The most common t-shirt size for adults is a Large. But this will vary based on your percentage of men vs women. It’s also a good idea to skew the sizes slightly to the bigger size, since it’s easier to fit someone in a larger shirt than it is to fit in a shirt that’s too small. This Quora article provides this simple ratio:

  • Small: 1
  • Medium: 2
  • Large: 2
  • XL: 1
  • 2XL: .5

Design

Keep your design simple and do NOT skimp on quality. You want to appeal to a wide audience with your design, so the more simple the better. This guide from Bonfire gives even more tips and tricks to designing the perfect shirt. Try to keep the sales-y stuff out of your design. It’s 2018 – people know how to search for your business online. They don’t need your logo and your URL and your phone number on their clothing. That’s all too distracting. Remember, your main goal is to create unity and brand awareness. The rest will come.

You want people to be more inclined to actually wear your shirt, rather than wash their car with it. A cotton-polyester blend is pretty common and probably most suitable for everyday use. The cotton fiber makes it easy to care for and clean, while the polyester increases wrinkle resistance. And don’t forget to ask your t-shirt vendor for a sample. Most will decline, but if you call and ask, you might get special treatment. Remind them that it’s better to send a sample, than re-print an entire order because the t-shirt is unsatisfactory. Once you have the sample, wear, wash, and re-wear the shirt. Keep an eye on how much/if it shrinks

Ideas for how to use your company shirts:

  • Lead Generation
    • Offer a free shirt online, in exchange for contact information.
    • Give away a t-shirt as a reward for signing up for a webinar.
    • Use t-shirts to incentivize prospects to fill out a survey or quiz.
  • For Current Clients
    • Use company shirts to keep your brand in the mind of your best customers at all times (they are your biggest advocates, after all!).
    • Make a limited run of shirts that are only given to VICs (Very Important Clients).
    • Give away a t-shirt as a reward for a client completing an educational course on a subject in your industry. For example, we offer free educational courses on our software. We could give a t-shirt as a reward for completing a set of software training courses.
  • For Employees
    • Use company shirts to unite a team in vision.
    • Use company shirts to celebrate an important anniversary or other company milestone.
    • Give your employees a company shirt so that they can rep your brand outside of work.
    • [B2B] Use different color t-shirts to help employees easily recognize team members (the technology department wears blue, the finance department wears green, interns wear orange, etc.).
    • [B2C] Improve customer satisfaction by making it easy for customers to spot the nearest employee to assist them, thus improving their overall experience.
    • Take a group photo of all of your employees wearing the same shirt. This image can be used on your “Meet the Team” webpage, and will help prospective clients feel comfortable knowing that your company is truly a “team.”

An Extra Tip (…and Shameless Plug)

Marketing t-shirts can also be incorporated in your lead nurturing if your company uses marketing automation. Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation (LMA)™ solution allows for direct mail actions to be included in any drip campaign (aka: an automation). This includes the functionality to send marketing material (like t-shirts, company pens, etc.) automatically to key Prospects (let’s say, with a lead score above 900). To learn more about this and any of the other amazing capabilities of Lead Liaison, request a demo here.