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Lead Liaison

Automatically Distribute Leads to Sales

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Automatically Distribute Leads to SalesMany businesses are able to generate leads and inquiries but have no way to automatically distribute leads to sales in a systematic manner. Companies make huge investments to generate leads from the internet, which warrants responses at internet-like speeds. An interesting article from Harvard Business Review highlighted the benefit of responding to leads quickly in a study of 2,241 U.S. firms. According to the report:

– James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, and David Elkington / Harvard Business Review

The article suggests three root causes of slow lead follow up:

Three Root Causes of Slow Lead Follow Up

1. Retrieving leads from CRM systems’ databases at one time throughout the day vs. continuously, in real-time, without a way to automatically distribute leads to sales
2. sales teams are focused on generating their own leads rather than reacting quickly to customer’s online behavior and inquiries, and
3. rules for distributing leads among based on geography and “fairness.”

Lead Liaison’s software platform solves the aforementioned issues with a simple solution that can automatically distribute leads to sales. Here’s a short summary of how we help our clients quickly respond to high priority leads:

Use Technology and Alerts to Automatically Distribute Leads to Sales

• Qualify leads using various lead qualification metrics including common buy signals, lead score and a measure of the prospect’s total activity.
• Distribute leads in real-time based on sophisticated lead distribution rules based on region, company name, number of employees and annual revenue. Distribute leads in round-robin or directly to a sales person and add leads to a “hopper” (a queue) if no rules match.
• Send real-time email and text message alerts to sales to urge response.
• In depth lead tracking and lead capture solutions to build complete profiles of visitor’s online behavior, a key indicator of a prospect’s interests.

What advantages or disadvantages do you see by automatically distributing leads to sales?

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Lead Liaison

Similarities between Lead Nurturing and the Holiday Season

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Similarities between Lead Nurturing and the Holiday SeasonWith the holiday season coming up it gets most people thinking about vacations, good food and time with our families. For some of us, it’s hard to clear our mind from work and focus on relaxing during this time of the year. For me, I’ve got personal and professional events melding together in my mind; I couldn’t help but draw similarities between lead nurturing and the holiday season.

Lead nurturing systems help businesses start, as well as grow relationships with prospects and clients. These systems use technology to send personalized messages on behalf of individuals. We’re not talking company to company email blasts (what businesses did 10 years ago); we’re talking about tailored, targeted and personalized messages from sales to prospects/clients. The holiday season caused me to think about how sending holiday cards and gifts are similar to lead nurturing. In my situation, I’m fortunate enough to have a wife who helps me out during these buys times of the year. She’s the main reason why I’ve got strong relationships with my personal and professional network.

Here’s why; she keeps a list of friends, family members and co-workers I need to send gifts and cards to. She types out a message with personalized content. For example, “Grandpa – Thanks for sending our daughter the Scholastic book, she really loves it. I wanted to wish you a happy holiday season!” Then, I sign the letter and drop it in the mail. Almost systematically, she does this for holidays, birthdays and other important events. From my perspective, it’s great – there’s not much I have to do and messages look like they’re coming directly from me.

B2B marketers and sales people have a similar opportunity to nurture prospects and clients using lead nurturing technology. Lead nurturing technology runs in the background monitoring activity, looking for important events – just like my wife looks for holidays and birthdays. When nurturing technology detects an important event, it automatically sends a tailor-made message. With my Grandpa in the example above, we thanked him for the Scholastic book. You could tell your prospects thanks for watching our webinar on XYZ or thanks for learning more about our latest widget. Your sales people will save time and build bonds by responding to important events, as defined by your processes. Finally, nurture messages are personalized. It would look strange if my wife signed all the letters – my family and friends would think I do nothing (boy, if they only knew). Instead, I sign the letters so it appears it came from me. Similarly, lead nurturing messages are sent from the lead owner.

Thanks to my wife’s efforts, I’ve built stronger relationships with family, friends and colleagues. I’ve received more from them in return than I ever could imagine. Think about the impact of building better relations with clients and prospects and what that will do for your business. Sales automation, shorter sales cycle, better operational efficiency and more revenue are just a few benefits. Hopefully you can draw parallels from your own personal situations to lead nurturing to better understand how effective this technology can be in a business environment. Good luck to you (or your significant other) sending letters and gifts this holiday season!

What personal situations remind you of lead nurturing?

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Lead Liaison

The Quintessential Small Business Marketing System

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Quintessential Small Business Marketing SystemMost micro and small businesses have two things in common; they lack resources and need to grow revenue. In this article we help B2B business with minimal resources understand the building blocks of a small business marketing system necessary to grow revenue.

A quintessential small business marketing system is made of three components – CRM, inbound marketing and revenue generation software. All three components are cost effective as they run in the “cloud” – meaning they’re accessible through any web browser, based off-premise/off-site and have little to no maintenance costs.

Small Business Marketing System

Components of a Small Business Marketing System

First, the core of a small business marketing system is a CRM solution. Lead Liaison uses Salesforce.com as our database of record. It’s an affordable way to help us track accounts (partners, customers, and vendors), leads, contacts and opportunities. Salesforce.com enables our business to stay organized, monitor activity and plan for growth. It’s a nice data repository but unfortunately lacks operational solutions to satisfy our sales and marketing demands – revenue generation software fills this void.

Second, create a marketing presence with at no cost – except for sweat equity. Small businesses need to get noticed without pumping in hundreds of thousands of dollars in outbound marketing campaigns. That means a paradigm shift in how marketing is typically done. It means foregoing trade shows, direct mail and email blasts. Instead, have an inbound marketing strategy to attract interested prospects. But don’t be confused, inbound marketing is very different from outbound marketing. Inbound marketing means developing content and strategy to get found on the internet whereas outbound marketing is very targeted directly towards contacts or individuals. Effectively, inbound marketing is like building a spider web for your business. Develop an inbound marketing strategy by having a consistent presence in social media, blogging and SEO. Create “miniature webs” to catch interested prospects that inevitably end up on your website. To do this, spin up numerous landing pages and web forms on your website – once again, revenue generation software fills this void.

Third, bring in revenue generation software to complement your CRM and capitalize on results of your inbound marketing efforts. Revenue generation software helps businesses overcome resource challenges by automating a number of common sales and marketing tasks. It helps businesses build relationships by creating relevant and timely conversations with prospects and customers, nurturing them through the sales cycle, generating leads and serves as the foundation for your marketing campaigns. It’s the engine of a small business marketing system.

All three ingredients, CRM, inbound marketing and revenue generation software work together to form a cohesive small business marketing system. Content used for inbound marketing can be leveraged and repurposed with revenue generation software while revenue generation software enriches CRM with useful lead qualification criteria.

We’ll gladly help your company build a small business marketing system by coaching you through the process and providing you with best-in-breed revenue generation software. Let us know if we can help!

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Marketing Automation in CRM

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Marketing Automation in CRMAdding marketing automation in CRM will help your sales team be more efficient. In today’s information age, it’s not about how much information you receive, rather, it’s about how you receive the information. Most CRMs cobble together leads and contacts into a few buckets, offering no way to separate hot leads from cold leads. Without a systematic way to prioritize leads, opportunities get lost in the shuffle, important opportunities get buried in the database and important leads are masked as yet another database record. Businesses finally have a way of differentiating their leads and optimizing sales people’s time with marketing automation in CRM.

Lead Qualification in Your CRM

Most solutions offer a host of additional marketing automation features in CRM. Adding leads/contacts to a lead nurturing campaign, sending an email campaign and customized dashboards are a few examples. One key area of integration is lead qualification. With marketing automation in CRM, vital lead qualification criteria is extracted from the marketing automation system and injected into the CRM to streamline access to high priority leads.

Various industry methods exist to prioritize leads. Lead scoring, buy signals and total activity are just a few examples. When CRM records are enriched with lead qualification criteria sales people can easily plan their day by running prebuilt dashboards and reports to expose highly qualified leads. The best part about these processes is the automation. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it model. With marketing automation in CRM, data is bi-directionally shared between both systems in real-time (usually every 5 minutes). Changes to data in one system are automatically updated in the other. With both systems in harmony, sales people only need to access marketing automation data in their CRM – simplifying the number of tools required to do their job.

Adding marketing automation in CRM is near effortless. Most CRMs, such as Salesforce.com, offer some type of marketplace for apps. For example, Salesforce.com’s marketplace is AppExchange. Installing Lead Liaison’s marketing automation in Salesforce.com can be done in less than 10 minutes. Configuration usually takes an additional 15-30 minutes.

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Marketing on a Small Budget

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Marketing on a Small Budget

Are you a small business owner who needs marketing on a small budget? If so, you’re not alone. New businesses are popping up every day. The number of businesses in the US alone is pushing 25 million, many of which are B2B businesses. How do you generate more business in such a competitive environment? Here’s the good news, marketing on a small budget is possible by doing four basic things:

1. Purchase and setup a CRM system
2. Create a systematic approach to content creation
3. Start blogging, with references to your content (or a blog post as your content)
4. Procure Revenue Generation Software to automatically filter hot leads and maximize your first three investments

I remember when we first started Lead Liaison. It was embarrassing to monitor Google Analytics and only see three to four website visitors per day. No one could find us. Since being found we’ve increased our web traffic by seven fold, up 775%! We did it with a $0 marketing budget. To get found, you’ve got to get on the internet. The easiest thing to do is to create a blog system that automatically optimizes your pages for SEO. Create SEO-enabled content by optimizing your page around certain phrase or keywords and watch your traffic sky rocket. In fact, we’re writing this page with “marketing on a small budget” as our keyword. There’s no better way to market on a small budget than to create blog posts, for free!

Continue feeding your blog posts with valuable content. Check out our post, 101 Business to Business Lead Generation Ideas and Tips to get some content ideas. Here’s a quick tip, use an existing whitepaper, “section it off” and blog about each section. Also, use 3rd party content and blog about that – blogs don’t have to be ideas of your own or unique content. Just avoid copying/pasting content. Search engine spiders are smart.

Finally, get the most out of marketing on a small budget by purchasing Revenue Generation Software to rev up your marketing engine. Revenue Generation Software provides CRM integration, email marketing, lead distribution, lead generation, lead management, lead nurturing, lead qualification, marketing automation, sales prospecting and sales force automation in a single package. Most systems can be purchased for the price of a trade show. If you’re struggling to budget for Revenue Generation Software drop a trade show or pull back on direct mail and consider the ROI of Revenue Generation Software. Your team will see a significant boost in operational efficiency, more leads, more qualified leads and adopt a systematic approach to your sales and marketing process – which small businesses usually struggle with.

Let us know if you’d like to learn more about marketing on a small budget, creating a blog that’s automatically configured for SEO and what Revenue Generation Software can do for your business.

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Lead Liaison

EU Cookie Directive

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EU Cookie DirectiveUnder an added amendment to the EU privacy directive, organizations conducting online marketing campaigns in the member states must receive explicit permission, or opt-in consent, to track individuals’ actions online.

The EU cookie directive law requires website visitors are informed if cookies are being used, the purpose they are being used for and the information they hold. Moreover, the big change is that websites should first request and receive the consent of users before using cookies which are not ‘strictly necessary’ for the functioning of the site.

ICO’s Deadline

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is generously giving UK organizations until 26 May 2012 to comply before it starts to enforce the EU cookie directive regulations.

Suggestions

Undertake an initial audit of your site

Undertake an initial audit of your site against the EU cookie directive to analyze the way cookies are being used. The audit should classify the individual cookies based on the role they currently play. The audit should also aim to define how third party cookies and partners are approaching new regulations.

Review your site privacy and terms of use

Review your site privacy and terms of use to ensure details are provided about how cookies are being used. Your site cookie policy should accurately describe how you use your customers’ data as well as the data practices on your site, including your use of analytics software and your advertising practices. Furthermore, the policy should include links to cookie advisory sites such as www.allaboutcookies.org. The privacy and cookie usage policy adopted by the BBC is one of the most comprehensive – including a detailed description of all cookies used and for what purpose. http://www.bbc.co.uk/privacy/bbc-cookies-policy.shtml. British Airways has actually included a stand-alone “View our cookie policy” link on their global landing page instead of simply adding the cookie usage information within their legal information section.

Determine a method of obtaining consent for cookies

Determine a method of obtaining consent for cookies, which will provide the best experience for users of your website and which will fulfill your requirements. Then put together a plan to implement this. Possibly implement a solution similar to how the ICO does it. See the top potion of their website (look for the light-box with the check-box inside it): http://www.ico.gov.uk/

Lead Liaison’s Approach

Although it is not entirely clear what the ICO’s expectations are for cookies used for “functional uses” and “feature-led consent” against the EU cookie directive, Lead Liaison is exploring a “Privacy Mode” setting which will help marketers’ further address the EU cookie directive. Prior to the implementation of any new features and/or settings, Lead Liaison has documented how our technology uses cookies and what cookies we set.

With a Privacy Mode setting, Lead Liaison’s platform would help marketers further comply with new opt-in requirements by automating the process of requesting opt-in consent from online visitors and automatically updating customers’ databases with contacts’ opt-in status. Lead Liaison users would check a setting in the application to enable the automated process.

Contact Lead Liaison to understand what cookies we set and why we set them.

Resources:

How do you think this will affect UK websites or businesses operating in the UK? What impact does this have on Google Analytics technology in Europe?

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Lead Liaison

Cost of Marketing Automation

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Cost of Marketing AutomationThe cost of marketing automation is about as difficult to figure out as marketing automation itself. Everyone and their mother claims they provide marketing automation. But, do they really offer it? And what is marketing automation anyways? I’m sure these are all the questions you’re asking. For now, let’s focus on the complex cost of marketing automation and how you can find a solution to simplify your life.

Several vendors introduce complex business models that will have you pulling out your hair when trying to calculate the cost of marketing automation. The majority of vendors use the following parameters to tally your fee:

  • Number of contacts in your database (or “active” contacts – same thing really)
  • Number of users
  • Initial training (jump start)
  • Training
  • Good support
  • Email deliverability
  • Dedicated IP addresses

At Lead Liaison, we believe a complex business model is one reason why marketing automation is not widely adopted. Vendors just don’t get it. Customers want simplicity. They want a simplistic solution and a simplistic price to acquire that solution. Limiting usage and charging exorbitant fees for “extra” items increase your cost of marketing automation and is counter-intuitive with increased adoption and revenue growth. No one wants to be limited.

To better understand the complex cost of marketing automation let’s look at three companies in the space. In the table below, we compare their respective business models and highlight how each company introduces pricing parameters that amplify headaches:

ProviderBase Annual Subscription# of Contacts in Your DatabaseCost for TrainingCost for Initial Jump StartPrice for Additional UsersOther Fees
#1$24,00010K, 25K + tiersYes, $2,500+Yes, $8,000+YesLimited email deliverability testing, limited users
#2$24,00010K, 30K, 100K + tiersYesYesYes, $79+“Enablement Packages”, Professional Services, Enhanced email deliverability, dedicated IP address
#3$12,000UnlimitedN/AN/ANoneRestricted to email support, limited automation, nurturing, forms, landing pages and custom fields, no dedicated IP or email preview

Lead Liaison takes a much more simplistic approach to our business model which nicely complements our easy to use software. Since marketing automation is a feature of our Revenue Generation Software, we don’t introduce various pricing parameters around it. Our software is targeted to do one thing and one thing only – increase your revenue. With our revenue-based pricing model we’re able to provide the same set of features/functionality to businesses of all sizes; throwing restrictions in the trash. Any roadblocks that limit adoption and, ultimately, your revenue growth are removed.

Welcome to Lead Liaison and the wonderful world of simplicity!

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Pass Only the Best Leads to Sales

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Pass Only the Best Leads to SalesIf you’re a sales person then you’re likely one of the highest paid people in your company – no shame to that. However, if you’re in management then you know sales people are one of the highest costs in your company. Unfortunately, high costs are magnified especially when sales doesn’t produce results. One way to increase return on investment (ROI) in your sales people is to pass only the best leads to sales.

We queried fifteen top sales people across five different industries and asked them one question, “If marketing could pass only the best leads to sales, what would you like to see?” We compiled the top six replies and mapped them to Lead Liaison’s technology.  to help you better understand how we can improve your sales and marketing processes by passing only the best leads to sales.

What Makes the Best LeadsHow Technology Delivers
Highly qualified contactsLead scoring technology to numerically assign custom scores to leads as they engage with your company. Each event carries a score, or weight, defined by your company.  The higher the score the more qualified the lead will be.
Recently expressed interestBy using lead tracking to track the very first time a lead interfaces with your website even before they submit a web form or click a link in an email. Using a date/time stamp on the lead we’re able to determine how recent their engagement was.
Expresses behavior characteristic of someone ready to buyBuy signal technology that automatically looks for the most common buy signal patterns and alerts sales via text or email messages.
If the individual has the right roleBuy syncing titles with CRMs to map a lead’s online behavior with their profile and qualify them further using lead scoring.
Highly active leads who touch many marketing assetsTotal activities, a measurement of inbound and outbound activity.
Someone ready to buy in the short termLead nurturing to add leads not ready to buy into a nurturing process that builds relationships with the lead until they’re ready to buy.

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Marketing Automation Product

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Marketing Automation ProductSearching for the best marketing automation product? If you’re on a budget, looking to accelerate revenue and improve your sales and marketing efficiency then you’ve landed in the right corner of the web. Differentiating one marketing automation product from another is a difficult task – which is most likely why you’re here, you’ve been researching solutions. Many vendors claim to have a marketing automation solution – when in reality, they don’t. They have a piece of the solution, such as the ability to send email campaigns.

A marketing automation solution is much more than that – including features such as lead scoring, lead nurturing and more. At Lead Liaison, we offer the highest return on your dollar by delivering a cost-effective solution, which we call revenue generation software. Additionally, we go above and beyond features in the typical marketing automation product by integrating sales automation, sales prospecting, real-time lead generation and inbound marketing into our platform.

Our platform has lots to offer; however, keep in mind it’s vital to identify your primary needs. Start with a marketing automation product that meets your primary needs and offers you an option to scale features/benefits as you grow. Contact lead liaison to hear more about a marketing automation product that delivers best-in-class ROI and helps business grow from small to large – dare I say “automatically”.

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Automatically Identify Buy Signals for Sales

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Automatically Identify Buy Signals for SalesIt’s almost always the case that sales could use more help from marketing to qualify leads. Marketing is glad to help; however, they’re up to their eye balls in work. Cranking out new content, preparing for the next big trade show, managing the company’s CRM, fine tuning the website and answering to other members of the leadership team to name a few. Wouldn’t it be nice if marketing could automatically identify buy signals for sales?

Now they can! With no effort…it’s all done automatically, behind the scenes using technology. Historically, vendors have struggled getting their marketing automation solutions adopted by B2B businesses. A typical system introduces way too much complexity and an overwhelming number of features; marketers need a simple solution. Case in point, it’s important to make it easy to automatically identify buy signals for sales. Some businesses don’t want to spend countless hours configuring “lead scoring” rules and setting up business logic. Here’s the good news – now they can do it out-of-the-box, with zero configuration.

Lead Liaison allows marketers to turn on/off the most common buy signals. For example, here’s a short list of what can be enabled/disabled to automatically identify buy signals for sales:

  • Clicking through multiple emails in a certain number of months
  • Multiple website visits in a certain number of weeks
  • Web form submissions
  • Total activity (a measure of how active and interested a lead is)
  • Website visitor viewing more than a certain number of web pages
  • Website visitor viewing a specific web page
  • Viewing a landing page

Even better, buy signals can be layered on top of one another. For example, a select number of buy signals could be enabled requiring all buy signal conditions are met before sales is contacted.

Quick lead follow up is also vital. Its imperative the sales person receives buy signal alerts from marketing via a text message (SMS) or an email to reduce delay in lead response time. More importantly, sales should be able to choose how they’re notifying and if they’re notified.

At Lead Liaison, we’re getting rid of the complexity in traditional marketing automation and helping marketing automatically identify buy signals for sales. Feel free to contact us to learn more about how we can help you solve your sales and marketing problems!

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