Tag Archive for: Sales Productivity

Lead Liaison Press Release

Event Lead Capture and Management That Integrates with Pipedrive

Dallas, TX – Lead Liaison announced this week that they have enhanced their Pipedrive CRM integration capabilities. Pipedrive is the first platform developed from the salesperson’s point of view. Pipedrive’s goal is to make sales success inevitable – for individual sales people and teams.

Lead Liaison offers a suite of sales solutions including event lead capturemarketing automation, and sales automation. Companies using Pipedrive will benefit from this deeper level of integration, as it makes it easier than ever to streamline and automate key steps in the sales process.

“Lead Liaison’s integration with Pipedrive enables our users to make full use out of both solutions,” says Rob Wyse, Vice President of Public Relations at Pipedrive. “Our users can combine all the rich data that Lead Liaison collects, like website activity and social data, and enrich the Person profiles within Pipedrive. Having everything they need in one place is very important for sales teams, and marketers benefit from it because they can push critical engagement data to their sales team without having to lift a finger.”

Lead Liaison’s partnership with Pipedrive was first announced in September 2016. Before today’s announcement, only limited information could be mapped from Lead Liaison to the CRM, and there were no automation options.

Now, all standard and custom fields can flow from Lead Liaison into Pipedrive CRM resulting in a deeper integration. Salespeople can easily create new lead records in Pipedrive from a variety of areas within Lead Liaison’s platform, including custom fields created to match Pipedrive-specific criteria. Those using Lead Liaison’s marketing automation license will also benefit from additional, Pipedrive-specific, automation actions, “Create Person” and “Create Deal.”

Lead Liaison has gained traction in the event lead management space and a lot of the credit is due to their flexibility and integrations. “We recognize that a lot of the time, we work better together,” says Sam Darrell, VP Product Management at Lead Liaison. “At this point, there aren’t many sales and/or marketing solutions that we don’t integrate with.” Because the company planted their roots in automation, they offer a rare level of support for scaling event marketing efforts.

To learn more about the other enhancements Lead Liaison recently made to their Revenue Generation Software™, such as a new Sales Dashboard full of rich analytics, read their Enhancement Round-Up Q1 2019.

About Pipedrive 
Founded in 2010, Pipedrive is the first CRM platform developed from the salesperson’s point of view. Today, Pipedrive is used by sales teams at over 85,000 companies worldwide. Honored as a leading innovative technology company, Pipedrive has offices in Tallinn, London, Lisbon, New York, Tartu, and Prague, and has raised $90 million in funding. Learn more at Pipedrive.com.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that help businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and sales automation to boost sales effectiveness. Additionally, Lead Liaison is the global leader in event lead management, enabling companies to capture and manage leads from trade shows and events. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible architecture, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality 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). To access our Press Kit, visit http://www.leadliaison.com/press-kit.

Converting More Online Leads: Sales Team & Marketing Team Coordination

Marketing teams utilize online marketing activities to directly impact lead generation. It is no secret that leveraging data from various marketing channels provides companies with the ability to determine ROI and increase sales. Because of the nature of this relationship, a company’s marketing team and sales team should be closely aligned in order to close deals faster and collaborate on the best plan of action to effectively reel in potential customers. Too often, companies maintain a disconnect between these departments and lose out on profits. Consider the following problems and potential solutions to strengthen your business today. 

Problem: Lack of Interdepartmental Communication

Many companies find communication between departments to be difficult, so identifying the communication “pain points” is the first step in the process. You marketing team and your sales team should work with each other, not against each other. 

Solutions:

Funnel Location: The sales team needs to be assured that the marketing team is only passing along qualified, sales-ready leads. When a lead is established by marketing, it is important that the sales team knows what stage of the funnel the user is in. This allows a sales rep to tailor their approach when reaching out and presenting their sales pitch to the end consumer.

Tracking progress: The sales team can also find out the needs of their end consumers using online platforms if they are trained in the analyzation of prospect activity. All data, including emails and chat archives, should be sent over to sales once a new lead is acquired. If your marketing automation platform tracks this automatically, that’s a real bonus. 

Follow-ups: To be certain that no lead falls through the cracks, both departments should create a plan of action to follow-up with any lost leads identified throughout the online lead generation process. This should be completed on a monthly basis and can often be done by using a CRM tool.

Problem: Lack of Engagement on Social Platforms

Sales teams do not usually engage with leads through social platforms. It is imperative to teach the sales team to pay close attention to social media outlets and engage with possible leads when appropriate.

Solution:

Utilize LinkedIn and Other Online Social Tools: Both the sales and marketing teams should network with potential leads and current clients online. In addition, these platforms can be an effective way to gather information about a lead and add more ammunition to the sales pitch. Solutions like our social append allow for social data to enhance prospect profiles. Salespeople should also track one-on-one social engagement as notes in their CRM

By effectively synchronizing marketing and sales teams’ efforts, companies are bound to see an increase in ROI from online campaigns.

Author Bio: Tracy Julien is the VP of Marketing for GuidedChoice, a leader in retirement investment planning. Tracy received her Bachelor’s degree from Ohio University in 2000 and her MBA in Marketing Management from DePaul University in 2006. She has over 15 years of experience working for multi-national companies. Tracy specializes in consumer marketing, focusing heavily on marketing strategy, global brand management, customer experience, and product innovation.

Improve the Efficiency of Your Sales Team

Improve the Efficiency of your Sales TeamIf the primary function of your business is to provide a product or service to customers, you must ensure that you improve the efficiency of your sales team.  No matter how top notch your products or services may be, if your sales process is incompetent, eventually your business will suffer or fail.  We’ve collected and compiled some top ways to improve your sales processes.

Sales Pipeline Management: A Key to Success

Measuring your sales pipeline and its ROI are a challenging for any business.  But it’s the first step in the process of making sure your sales team is working smarter and not harder.  First, make sure you’re delivering attractive content to generate online traffic.  Keep track of metrics and data to track any stagnation and to calculate how long you expect each of your prospects to spend in your sales pipeline.  Identify each type of customer in your sales pipeline – this way you can tailor up-sell offers based on a prospect’s individual behavior.

Lead Sourcing

Make sure you’re spending time tracking which leads are likely to close.  Training your sales team on the three primary ways of calculating lead sourcing can lead to a more successful sales process:

  • A conversion rate will tell your team which sales sources are converting leads to opportunities.  Using a simple formula will assist you in comparing current sources with ones you hope to use in the future.  If you find that sources aren’t working for your leads – strategize with your marketing and sales team as to why this is the case.  Are you approaching the leads from this source in the wrong way or is this simply a case of the source being unattractive to the right customer?
  • Figuring out your lead to close length will give you information on how long a lead source takes to close.  Each source that you’re using will bring your company leads at different steps in the purchasing process.
  • Average value per lead calculations will tell you which sources provide you with the best customer fit, for the best value.  Do you want several smaller sales per month or one or two big sales?  Average value per lead will help you start devoting your time and effort into sources where the best leads are active, providing you with the type and frequency of sale that you want.

Sales and Marketing:  Working Together for the Best Leads

Collaboration between sales and marketing teams takes more than just a few monthly meetings.  Encourage your sales team to give marketing feedback on the leads received on a regular basis.  This will give your marketing team the chance to make adjustments to their marketing automation program.  Products marketers should share new product features with the sales team – this will make your sales team more knowledgeable on the products.

Pinpointing deficits in your leads funnels, using metrics to measure your lead sourcing, and ensuring that your sales and marketing team are working well together are all vital ways to ensure your success.

Increase Sales Productivity with Lead Management Automation

Increase Sales Productivity With Lead Management AutomationWe’ve been frequently asked by our prospects: how does marketing automation/lead management actually increase sales productivity? Here are a few ways your sales team can become more productive through the implementation of an automated lead management platform.

  1. Sales agents are more efficient because the best leads are being distributed to the most appropriate salespeople. Lead distribution can be managed so the best closers are given the highest revenue accounts or agents with the most experience in a specific industry receive leads within that industry.
  2. Lead scoring provides measurement of lead qualification, interest level, and. Sales agents can prioritize their focus on the most relevant and well-informed leads first.
  3. Automated lead management puts business intelligence in your sales team’s hands without the need to routinely pore through industry sources, websites, and other resources. When leads respond through an inquiry, request, click-through, or web form submission, the information provided is stored and can be organized, sorted, and segmented to optimize lead assignment to sales agents.
  4. Leads and agents can be aligned according to specific parameters. For instance, leads can be segmented by industry so that salespeople who are industry specialists can work on leads within their area of expertise.
  5. Your sales team can send emails, social posts, surveys, and other digital assets without continual interaction. Customized forms, emails, and other assets connect automatically with leads as they proceed through their buying cycles. By using effective content delivered through an automated lead management system, your leads can get educated about your solutions without sales engagement.
  6. With our link tracking function, sales can understand what pathways leads have taken to your digital assets. This makes the team more effective at not only engaging prospects through the right channel but how informed leads are.
  7. Lead management automatically delivers content that can be customized according to criteria such as job title, industry, or location. Leads are then nurtured through behavior-based triggers which indicate specific interests and help determine what content should be delivered as leads move through the marketing pipeline. This strengthens the lead qualification process and prioritizes lead distribution.
  8. Sales agents can engage with a lead earlier in the buying process while the lead is still researching solutions. (Early engagement with today’s buyers should be minimal, such as an introduction with contact information.) When salespeople contact leads, instead of spending time uncovering needs and qualifying prospects, leads will reveal what they’re interested in, whether they are suitable for sales engagement, and, in some cases, when they are ready to buy.

The strength of a lead management automation system like ours lies in its agility. Marketers can adapt campaigns to minimize irrelevant messaging and deliver content that prepares leads to be sold more efficiently and effectively.

Increase Sales Productivity

Increase Sales ProductivityWould you be surprised if you knew your sales people were only selling 11.5% of the time? CSO Insights, who surveyed over 1,800 companies, found this to be true. As a best practice, business should increase sales productivity by focusing sales on selling instead of spending their time traveling, training, researching, prospecting, servicing customers, and handling administrative tasks. This article quantifies the impact of an unproductive sales force and provides suggestions on how you can increase sales productivity.

Sales Productivity

Quantifying the impact of inefficient sales

Let’s say you were a vendor with twelve sales people. Let’s assume the average, fully burdened (benefits, vacation, training, salary, bonuses, stock, etc.), cost of a sales person is $100,000. The total cost of your sales force would be $1.2M. If 11.5% of their time is spent selling, that’s only $138,000 of the sales budget spent on selling and $1,062,000 spent not selling. You’ll never get to 100%; however, what if sales could focus more on selling and less on doing other things to increase sales productivity by a minimum of 8.5%? With 2,080 working hours in a year, 8.5% of that is 177 hours. With a sales force of twelve people that’s another 2,124 hours (177 hours x 12 people) that could be spent selling. That’s a full year! Would you be interested in bringing on a new sales person, at no charge, who will sell 100% of his/her time? You can by improving productivity of your existing sales force.

How you can increase sales productivity by 8.5% or more

Revenue generation software as well as other handy tips will help you increase sales productivity. Here are our suggestions:

1. Prospect more efficiently. It’s usually not a best practice for sales, especially outside sales, to invest time in prospecting. However, it’s an essential part of any lead generation strategy. Use a solution that provides a database of millions of professional contacts and companies to find targeted prospects in a single-click and spare the expense of digging through contacts not knowing who to call. If possible, refrain from buying lists and identify your target individuals. Who are your influencers, technical buyers, economic buyers, and users and what are their roles?

2. Pre-package presentations optimized around the context of a sales meeting. Sales people spend a lot of time customizing presentations to fit their meetings. Build presentations for specific industries, solutions, or audience levels (engineering, executive, etc.). Lowering preparation-oriented tasks will increase sales productivity.

3. Stream real-time web visit alerts to sales. Lead tracking technology exists to identify and surface, in real time, known and unknown leads. We posted a previous article on tracking website visitors that explains this concept further. Not only is this a new source of leads, it tells sales who is interested and when. If a prospect opens an email and clicks a link to your website sales can be notified in real time. This intelligence tells sales a prospect is online and engaged. If a sales person’s outbound call capacity is 30 calls per day and an email campaign to 1,000 prospects shows when 30 of those prospects are interested and thinking about your solution at that very moment, it makes sales highly efficient and they’ll chalk up a productive day. The ancillary benefit is a happy sales person. With less voicemails, calls, and brush offs sales will feel like they’re making an impact.

4. Have sales focus on qualified leads only. Sales analysts report 80% of marketers send unqualified leads on to sales. How can this increase sales productivity? Use lead qualification technology, also known as lead scoring, to automatically send qualified leads to sales. By splitting up a sales pipeline to form a revenue cycle shared by marketing and sales you’ll increase sales productivity. First, start by creating a service level agreement between sales and marketing. Define the ideal customer profile, what makes a qualified lead, and establish a lead scoring program. Make sure to include activity levels (online behavior) and recency of interaction/response of your leads as part of your scoring program.

5. Consider hiring a lead qualification specialist, sometimes referred to by companies as a demand generation team. A lead qualification specialist is an intermediate resource, or liaison, between marketing qualified leads and sales. The concept is that the lead qualification specialist intercepts a marketing qualified lead to further qualify it as a sales qualified lead before handing the lead to sales. On average, about 10% of “sales-ready” leads are sales qualified leads and 16% of those will eventually buy. Try to optimize sales’ time on the sales qualified leads to increase sales productivity. Technology will only go so far to help qualify a lead (the marketing qualified lead). Human intervention allows further qualification that technology typically does not provide such as budget, authorization, need, and time line.

6. Formulate a closed-loop lead nurturing system. Lead nurturing is the process of developing a positive long-term relationship with leads/prospects through meaningful dialogue, and then tracking their development into sales opportunities. Have marketing and sales collaborate to create a lead nurturing program, document it in your service level agreement, and build it using a drag and drop graphical user interface, available in some marketing automation packages. Effectively, you’ll build a formal lead flow system for leads to travel from marketing to sales and back to marketing if necessary. Make sure to use lead nurturing technology that allows sales to pass leads that are not quite ready to buy back to marketing to avoid “lead leakage”. This is a fantastic way to recycle your leads and increase sales productivity.

7. Use offers that setup appointments for sales. When sending out email marketing messages as part of a lead nurturing campaign, make sure to include offers that keep sales busy with sales-centric meetings. For example, offer free consultations, a personal demonstration, or personalized ROI analysis. Having your email marketing program act as an admin will decrease sales administrative tasks and increase sales productivity.

8. Get more out of your purchased lists. At Lead Liaison, we don’t recommend buying lists since the people on the list most likely have no idea who you are. A better practice is to build up your own database of interested prospects or folks you’ve had relationships with (at some level) and nurture your database, thereby leveraging your existing assets. The result is a lower cost per lead as marketers don’t have to pay for new leads. However, if you must buy a list then consider your approach to marketing to that list very carefully. Don’t just send a single email message asking for an appointment or the sale. Focus on building a longstanding relationship with your contact. Start by sending them educational material and increase product-related content as the contact expresses interest in your solutions through their interaction with your website. Over time, you’ll be able to surface who’s interested and who is not and increase sales productivity.

9. Have marketing send personalized emails on behalf of sales. Always, always, always (is that enough) personalize your emails by sending them from the sales person or a marketing contact. Never send a generic email blasted to your entire database. It may work, but you’ll get a much higher hit rate if you personalize your messages. Try incorporating the recipient’s name and company in the message to increase click-through rates. Limiting the number of emails sales has to customize and send manually will increase sales productivity.

10. Reactivate your old leads. As mentioned above, a great strategy is to re-market to your database. First, start by creating a breakdown of the age of the contacts in your database for a period of 3 months each. For example, 0-3 months, 3-6 months, and so on to get a snapshot of the age of your database contacts. As a suggestion, re-market to leads 1 year or older then 9-12 months old, etc. You’ll help reduce the 18.7% of time your sales people spend on lead generation and allocate more of their time to sell.

Contact Lead Liaison to learn how we can help your business with lead scoring, lead nurturing, sales prospecting, lead generation, activating old leads, personalize email on behalf of sales, get more from purchased lists, and track leads in real time with our revenue generation software. After all, we want you to “sell more, do less” with an increase in sales productivity.

We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. What have you done to increase sales productivity?

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