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Lead Liaison Webinar

Event Lead Management: What You Need To Know Before Your Next Live Event – Webinar Transcription

Summary

Learn how to make the most out of your next live event with proper event lead management. We’re talking about planning, lead capture, and post-event nurture.

Presenter

Chris Kipgen, Lead Liaison

Transcription

*Please note that this content was presented in first-person live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.

Slide 10

So we’re gonna go into a little bit of Event Lead Management and why it matters right now. Why we should be using this live events and why it’s very important that you have something on the backend to help you manage the events as well.

Slide 11

And when we’re talking about live events we expect to have- if I’m gonna have people in two kind of major brackets right now: Business to Business and Business to Customer. B2B, B2C. A little bit of a different purpose for the live events but we’re basically doing the same thing at each one. This is about face to face interaction. It’s about generating excitement. So B2B- we’re gonna be working on some Prospecting. So we’re trying to find our influencers, maybe gatekeepers while we’re out there. We’re now working, we’re finding out who else is in our industry. We’re getting awareness of our brand out. In some extent we might actually also be talking to some existing accounts. This is a good time to do some relationship building with those existing accounts and of course generating more revenues – the end goal of all of this. For B2C, it’s a little bit of a faster sales cycle and B2C live events are actually really fun and really exciting. This is where you gonna have product demonstrations. We tend to have handouts for everyone. I always love getting the freedom of knickknacks [inaudible]. Customer interaction can be huge at these B2C events if they’re public events. But of course let’s not forget that we also have the possibility of vendor relations. So this could be an event where you’re going and you’re meeting with your vendors for your organization as well. And that can also apply to B2B a little bit there as well. Brand awareness is gonna be huge for B2C and again generating revenue. So these are a few different reasons why you might go to a live event. These are the areas where live events tend to be most effective compared to other types of marketing like emails or even physical media.

Slide 12

So just a couple of things to be aware about live events. So first off let’s talk about Social Media a little bit. Social Media is one of the biggest ways that marketers are trying to spread brand awareness right now. Especially in that B2C field but also big end B2B. And based on some recent sales we actually found that 98% of attendees to a live event or a trade show generate some kind of social media content. A lot of those are photos. So if you do have a set up there, if you’re attending one of these live events and if you have something that catches their eye, there’s a good chance that that’s gonna end up on social media and that doesn’t hurt anyone. 72% of consumers say that they positively view a brand after a quality event. So if they go to an event, it was a great event and they thought yet a good presentation, they’re going to view you more positively. And in fact 84% that do make a purchase from you eventually are going to repurchase after that first purchase and that’s if they’ve attended a live event first. So we can’t really underestimate how important this is.

From the marketing point of view, 44% of marketers claim to experience a 3:1 ROI from live events and what all this come down to is you’re dealing with a lot of people face to face, you’re building rapport. If you can just close a few of the deals you get out there, you’re going to make your money back on it. And in fact, 85% of marketers say that events accelerate the buying journey so you can skip some of those earlier steps on the funnel. So there’s a lot of really great reasons to attend these live events. This is just barely scratching the surface but I wanted to give you an idea of how big this numbers can be. But there’s kind of another side to this…

Slide 13

For a lot of organizations, you get to lead and that’s where a great marketing could go home, they could give the sales team a lot of prospects but at the end of the day, recent studies have found that 85% of event leads are never followed up with which is crazy when you think about it which is crazy when you think about it. And if you don’t follow up with this leads they’re probably not gonna come back to you. In fact, especially in that B2B marketplace, it’s very rare that you have someone reaching out to you like, “Hey! I met you there I thought you’re gonna send me stuffs?” They’re probably just gonna move on to a competitor. So it’s huge that we have some way of managing what happens to this leads after the event is over. 22% of companies say that they have no way to track ROI from one of these events which again is very crazy. I’ve actually seen several of our clients where they’re throwing money into live events but they have no idea if they’re making anything back from it or not. And that’s one of the things that Event Lead Management or ELM can really help with.

And finally, only 14% use event management software. Now it kinda depends on which bracket we’re in. About 22% of companies in B2C will use Event Management Software. But only 9% in B2B are using Event Management Software. And really that’s not a surprise. When you look at those top two numbers: the 85% not followed up on and the 22% of companies not being able to track ROI, well it comes down to this bottom number. There’s just not a lot of penetration out there. People are not taking advantage of the tools that are available. So we’re gonna show you how you might be able to use an Event Lead Management tool today and we’ll be showing off our platform a little bit in the ways we can help at. Hopefully, we’ll give you some good ideas for your next event on how you might want to handle it.

Slide 14

So the Event Management Process- I’m gonna break that down into really three major areas. There’s the planning stage which happens before the event, the attending stage – that’s the event and following up which of course is what happens afterwards and that’s the really key important part. That’s gonna be where you make your sales.

Slide 15

So talking about planning a little bit. The first thing we need to establish is a way of tracking ROI, a way of tracking our lead sources and getting our content organized together. So I’m gonna show you real quick an example of how Lead Liaison handles campaigns and a lot of ELM software. You’re gonna see something like this and you’ll see the importance of it.

So I’m here in our platform and this is our campaign’s area – these are our marketing campaigns, and I created a campaign. I called it the 2018 Webinar Trade Show because I’m not ultra-creative. So here we are one of our webinar, we’re talking about trade shows, there we go. And with this campaign, I’m able to associate a cost to it and so this cost might initially be what we’re estimating the cost is gonna be once the event is over we know we’re gonna have expense report, we’re gonna have all the things. We can go back, we can edit this cost and adjust it as necessary to whatever the trade show ends up being or conference or whatever live event we’re talking about.

The importance of this is any content I create like my webform that’s gonna be set up for our lead capture device, any automations I have ran that are doing nurture, all of those are gonna be associated with this campaign. And we’ll see at the end of the presentation, as people come in here, we’re gonna be tracking our cost per prospect, we’re getting opportunities from this or we’re getting wins from this or we’re gonna show you how we’re can convert this number into a full ROI and in addition to campaigns we also have a concept of what’s called programs so you know this campaign is in our trade show program. So each individual trade show or event is gonna have its own cost, its own people, its own content but the overall umbrella that is under trade show. So this is actual way of tracking how events or trade shows, in general, are doing for your company and that’s a really key part that people miss.  You might have one or two events that are doing really well but then you have 10 others that really aren’t doing so well. So your overall program isn’t as efficient as it could be. And again that’s a big area that we wanna help you out with.

So just to start out we wanna make sure that anything that we create is associated with the campaign and it’s in those campaigns are associated with the programs and that’s really gonna pay off later on we’ll see on the following up side of the presentation.

Slide 16

Now in addition to planning and setting up our campaigns and programs, we also have to decide who to invite. I’ll tell you in this day and age it’s really not enough to just show up to a trade show. If you just show up there to a conference event trade show, and you’re just standing behind your booth, you got your nice pens that you’re gonna hand out to people and some physical brochures, you’re gonna be that really friendly person who’s standing in there smiling in the corner with no one in their table.

So it’s important that you start generating some people to come and meet you at these events. So who are you gonna invite here? Some great sources that we’ve identified. If you have a newsletter, you know talking to your newsletter subscribers can be a great way of doing that. They’ve opted in so they’re interested in your company in some way.

Anyone who’s a current opportunity. So if you’re in a middle of the sales process with someone, then go ahead and invite them out. This is a good time to see them face to face. And of course prospects that may not currently be opportunities, maybe you’re just in the initial stages of that sales pipeline, get them going too. Or maybe they’re even former prospects. We had someone where for one reason or another the deal didn’t close. I mean if we’re amicable with them? If we parted on friendly terms and we kinda understand why we lost that deal. Yeah let’s invite them out! You never know someday down the line but not a customer today, they could be a future customer. So it’s a great time to invite them out as well.

Slide 17

And for the invitation process, we really do recommend going with a multi-channel approach. So what we see most of the time and industry-wide it’s about 63 to 70% of these invites are going to be done directly through email and that’s great! Email is easy to put together. You can reach a large number of people, but email isn’t always the most effective way of getting people’s attention. We do also have the ability to send things like postcards or handwritten letters. You can also take advantage of pay per click advertising and landing pages. And the idea is to start pulling people in from this different channels – social media is obviously another place where you’re really going to want to start inviting people to come in and that’s gonna really fall into the same category with the PPC and landing pages. You have your social media accounts, you’re getting them into the landing page to throw out ultimately the form. And this is actually similar to how this webinar setup was where we send out this invites to you. You went to a landing page, you filled out your information and that registered you for this webinar. It’s the same thing except with an RSVP form for an event.

I wanna show you real quick. And if we go in here, this is an automation that I just had set up beforehand. So this is an example of what an invitation automation might look like. So we’ve identified the clients we’re looking for, we’ve made our list, we’re targeting this list and I’ve put a couple things in here. So first off we’re sending them an email to invite them into an event but we’re also gonna be sending out a postcard and what’s cool about our system is when we do a postcard you can create the postcard in Lead Liaison and those postcards can all be personalized down to individual data points. So when you send the postcard out, it’s not just a generic “Hey! we’re gonna be at this event. Come see us.” It’s a “Hey Robert, we’re gonna be at this event. We love working with [the name of your company] (whatever that company is). “Why don’t you come out and visit us at this table?”

And this is really a good way to get people’s attention. And from there, we’re going to actually tell the system to wait until a certain date. In this case, I’m saying May 2nd but you might wait till maybe a week or so before your event. And then we’re gonna send an email again but in this case I’m using a condition. And I’m telling the condition to look out for if someone has filled out our event registration form. And there’s a few ways they could have gotten to this form, so it could’ve been through the email or the postcard. But if I’ve been running my pay per click ad campaign through adwords and they come back to my landing page and they caught the form that would also qualify them here or if we did through social media that will also qualify them here. But what I’m telling the system is if they’ve submitted the form, we’re not gonna send them another email, we’re not gonna bother them. But if they have not submitted the form, we’re gonna go ahead and send one more invitation just to remind them “Hey! if you haven’t RSVP-ed yet, go ahead and RSVP. We’d love to see you here!”

And this is a way of basing the communication around their interaction. If they’re already showing interest. If they’re already engaged, we don’t wanna bother anyone. But, otherwise, we can continue to try to get their attention and  this is where we can also get more creative and do things like send a second postcard if they haven’t filled out the form instead of doing an email. So several ways of handling this.

This is just a quick example though how you might have that set up.

Slide 18

So back in here with the planning there’s a few other things that you gonna need to decide what data points you wanna capture. And this is where it’s really going to affect your sales team as well as any marketers or any representative that you’re gonna have on the floor. So this is where things get really important and we’re gonna go back into Lead Liaison here.

I’m just gonna show you our form builder just so I can give you an example as we’re talking here. So I have a form that I’ve set up here and I’ve identified a few areas that I might wanna capture information so. I’ve left an area for my sales people to capture business card. I’ve given them a [inaudible] for their name, email, phone number, their company. Pretty standard contact fields. But I’ve also made some custom fields. So I have this one field called VIP.  And this would be if we have a sales person who feels like this is a really qualified lead we really wanna to talk to them a lot.

We have area of interest so we can decide “Hey are they looking at marketing sales, public relations and other…” Just an example from our Verticum. I even have a checkbox field here for Product of Interest. They can select multiple products if they need. And of course I’ve left an area for notes for them here. And I’ll show you just what this looks like on the front end. This is the actual trade show app. So this is what we would be running on your devices at the event.  And let’s say I just look in here at this particular form, you can see that it’s been captured from here. So here’s my name fields, email, VIP etcetera. So this all transfers over.

Another new thing with the Event Lead Management software, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if you’ve used those scanners at trade shows before, you know kinda how you can scan the barcode and move from there. What’s great about this is the customized ability. So I have those custom fields but I can also make changes on the fly. So you see an example here I’m just gonna go ahead and add an image field into this so maybe they just wanna be able to take a picture or save a picture from their device. I’ve saved that and I’m gonna go ahead and reload my form here in my device. My device says it syncing right now cause it already received that update. If I’m going to capture, you can see that we  have that image element down there already at it. So we can add things in real time if needed.

But I tell you what? The best way to handle this is to make sure you have the form ready to go before the event is there. And again, marketers sit down with your sales team. Find out what information they feel they need  for a qualified lead. Sales – sit down with your marketers and find out what information do they need to be able to support you later on.

Slide 19

So back at our presentation here. We’re gonna talk about actually attending now. So this is gonna be the part where we’re capturing the leads and there’s a few common ways of doing this that you’ll see at different events. One can just be a simple form submission. So I’ve seen companies with clip boards. You can actually use a device like we have for GoCapture that’s our form submission application. Barcode scanning is increasingly popular especially in the United States where you can just go up scan their barcode on their badge and you’re good to go and then Business Card Transcription is something that’s really taking off and transcription is really unique. And then say that being in the computer trying to guess what the appropriate field is there. I’m giving you about 70% of the way there an accuracy. Transcription is done by a live person. It’s guaranteed 100% accurate so you know you’re getting good data as it comes through.

And of course, we also have the old-fashion way of passing business cards around. I’ll tell you without a system to really help you capture those leads and  upload them immediately you’re gonna start losing things.

So let’s look back at GoCapture real quick. Let’s look into are forms. So I’m here on the form screen of Lead Liaison. I’ve got GoCapture opened here. I might just give you an example where I could fill out this information and go through. Put in the name, the email. We’re gonna talk about this VIP field, in just a second. But if this is maybe a B2C event or an event I’m hosting, I might actually know who some of the attendees are already so I can also attach a list to this field as well and just select their name from a list.

Doing that, the system will fill that in for me automatically, which is really great. Maybe I’ll say this person’s a VIP and they’re interested in the sales and they want site engage and Event Lead Management. We can leave some notes and then I just hit ‘Submit’. And that’s really all there is. That’s lead capture at its most basic. I’m gonna go in here. I’m gonna review that submission. If I need to, I can check the submission make edits. I could block it if this is with someone from another vendor. They’re trying to sell me something. I just wanna be polite. Taking their information, scanning their badge. I could block them and not upload it. But I want somebody to upload. I’ll just click this upload button and it immediately goes back to Lead Liaison. Infinitely, this can also be set to auto-uploads so the moment your representative hits that ‘submit’ button, it’s gonna go to our back end.

And if I refresh the page here in our web app, you can see that that submission has already gone through. And this is where event capture tools are so important is you’re getting that information immediately. Nothing is getting lost out or falling between the cracks and what’s really important using a solution more like GoCapture is that its instant transmission. Unlike where you go to the shows, you have the scanner and you get a list later on at the end of the day. That’s not bad. But when we get it instantly like this, there’s a few other really cool tricks that we can do. Now before I move on to the nurture in the other piece, I’m gonna show you here. I do also want to mention barcode scanning. Because like I said before, that’s gonna be a huge way that people capture leads at these events right now.

You can use an Event Management software solution like Lead Liaison’s Event Lead Management and you can still do your barcode. So with regards with the trade show tells you most of the time, you don’t have to use their scanners. They will have some kind of software developer kit that solutions like Lead Liaison are able to use.

So I have some sample barcodes here and I’ve got an identical version of the form with the barcode reader. And you’ll notice one thing, I’ve put all of the contact info down at the bottom here and here’s really what the idea of this. I’m gonna move this over since it’s a little close to my phone here. I’m gonna choose to scan the barcode and the device will recognize it. What it’s gonna do is it’s gonna make a call back to the barcode provider and then you can see down here. It’s actually filled in that contact info for me. So if I’m at a really busy event, I don’t wanna have to stop and type everything. I can just scan that code. And I put this custom fields at the top, so I can just fill those in really quickly. And we’re done. I click ‘Submit’. And the submission’s through. I’ve moved on for my next person already.

So if you want your representatives to love you, give them a shortcut like that where they can just scan a barcode and fill in those custom fields. Now where things get really important with event management is the nurture during the show. This is something that not a lot of places talk about. They talk about pre-show nurture and post-show nurture. We’re talking about nurture during the show.

So this is another automation that I have setup here and this is something where we can just start getting people excited during the event. So my representative has used GoCapture. They’ve uploaded the form immediately. So I already have their data in the system just seconds after they captured it. What’s gonna happen with this automation, it triggers as soon as the prospect is submitted and I’m telling  the system to wait five minutes and then just send a ‘thank you’ email. And this email will just say something like, ‘Hey! We really appreciated you coming by our table. It was wonderful to meet you. We were really excited to learn more about your company!” And again, we can use merge fields to actually insert the name of their company.

By the way, here’s a few things that have coming up or we have a link back to a special landing page with an offer that they can try to go to. So basically we are trying to get them re-engaged and back visit our website. It’s just a nice little thank you to send them. Now remember in the form, I have that VIP field and so if I’m the representative there and I feel like this person is a really good solid lead. I might say that, “Yes! They are VIP!”

And I have a condition down here, that if they are already VIP, we’re gonna use one of our Webhooks with Twilio to send out a text message and this text message will say something like, “Hey Jennifer! Thank you for coming by our booth! By the way, we are doing a cocktail tonight at 6 p.m. at the Marriott. Won’t you come and join us?” So I’m actually inviting them out there and recommending that they come back and see me. That’s because this person I feel like they are a VIP. I want to interact with them again as quickly as possible. And you can even go further than that.

We’ve actually had a user use the text message feature to say things like, “Hey! are there other people from your company? Send them back our way and we’ll give you a special offer.” And what’s cool is if someone does text back since this is handled through Twilio. Twilio is able to forward that message back again. And again those text messages just like our postcards and emails use data merge fields so we can personalize these messages without having to do anything beforehand.

So really great way to get people engaged in at events. This is the key is getting people jumping back in.

So we’ve kinda gone through attending through this slides so I’m gonna go and skip over this side.

Slide 21

The big thing afterwards is gonna come with the post event nurture.

And so I’ve got one last automation here. And this is for our post event follow up. So this is somewhat similar to what we would recommend when you’re using your event software. So the first thing we’re doing, we might tell this to wait maybe a couple of days so after the event and then send another follow-up thank you email or hover when I handle that. If you’re using a CRM like salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics, you do wanna make sure that your events software is able to sync up to it. We do actually have a direct connection with both of those programs. We also do have ways of pushing leads into other CRMs like Pipelines or SOHO. We even have our own complementary CRM. But in this case, I’m using Salesforce as an example. So once the event is over I can tell the system to sync those leads that we capture directly into salesforce.com and really I don’t even have to wait I could be doing this at the same time so everything’s immediately in Salesforce.

Once it’s in Salesforce, I can add it to a campaign. I can even create a task. So remember when I said earlier on only about 15% of those leads are ever being followed up on. 85% are being ignored. Well, we can use Salesforce, our CRM, to make sure we have a task to these people, are being followed up on.

So this is a great way to make sure it’s in there. Another feature that I’ve mentioned before is are handwritten letters. So let’s talk about VIPs again. These are the people that we invited out to that cocktail party. Well, instead of just sending them the regular ‘thank you’ email and all the rest of it maybe I’m gonna send them a handwritten letter instead. Handwritten letters carry a lot of weight and a lot of value.

So I can send them a handwritten letter. It’s personalized. And when I say handwritten, I don’t mean we’re gonna make you write a letter. We’re going to write a letter for you. So this our handwritten letter template here. You type in what you want the letters to say. [inaudible] right here there’s a merge field. So we’re going pull this from the prospect profile and what’s awesome is you can choose the pin color, the type of handwriting. So if you want female cursive or a male print, that’s not a problem. You can even add a drop in. So here’s an example of a five-dollar Starbucks gift card that we could drop in.  I’ve seen some companies drop in some brochures. I’ve even seen a company that does a send along that we call down here. They were sending t-shirts out to people.

So this is another really good way of re-engaging them with them once the show is over. And again you can handle this towards just your VIPs. So it’s only those most valuable people that you’re getting this letters to go to.

If you wanna make them feel really especially that’s an awesome way to do it. And from there that’s where we gone through our sales process. We have our sales team taking over. What’s gonna be important from the more marketing side of things and the sales management side is okay that’s great that we had all that but where is our ROI. How much money are we making from this?

Slide 22

So I mentioned before that you can put all of these things into a campaign. Well once inside a campaign, we’re gonna start tracking anyone who comes in.

So let’s say that we have our form. The form is a part of the campaign. So anyone who comes in, submitted from that form is automatically added to the campaign. So the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna tell you how many people have actually come in from that and prospects. Prospect- the idea of these two columns. Prospect means we have an email. People means we don’t have an email. But we’ll tell you who’s come in as a result of that campaign and from that we can get you the cost per prospect. Pretty simple so far. But again if you are using a CRM like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics, we’re gonna continue to monitor those prospects once they’re in there and hopefully you’ll eventually convert that lead into a contact and attach it to an opportunity.

And so then we can tell you how many opportunities were created as a result of this trade show and the cost per opportunity plus the value of your opportunities. And then of those opportunities we’ll tell you how many of them are one and how many revenue dollars have come in which then gives us our total ROI for everything coming in from that campaign. And this is huge because the system is doing everything for you automatically. You just let it do its thing. The only thing you have to do is just set it up beforehand and then let your representatives capture the leads, everything else is happening automatically. And that’s the beautiful thing about having event lead management combined with lead management automation or marketing automation.

And like the campaigns, we also track the ROI on the programs for theirs so again I had a trade show as the program. So it would tell you the same data points of how many people have come in as result of that program. How many opportunities? How many wins? And then the same thing for lead source too. So if you wanted to put in trade shows as a lead source, you can get an idea of how effective those sources are in comparison to your other sources. So you might go into your lead source report and realize, “Hey! I actually closed a lot of deals from people who come in from pay-per-click advertising and from social media and I actually don’t get that much revenue from events, so maybe I can start closing out a couple of events.” Or maybe you go in and you realize, “Oh wow a huge amount of my revenue is coming from these events. Let’s really ramp it up!” And you’re not gonna know that unless you’re actually going in there and your tracking the ROI.

Now if these all sounds like a lot to set up and it all sounds a little overwhelming, don’t worry! If you do have a solution like Lead Liaison as I mentioned before you do have the Integration Specialist like me. I would be helping you set this kinds of things up and especially through your through your first few months worth of shows. We’re gonna be there with you. We’re gonna be making sure that everything is working correctly.

So it’s a great tool in general and again, if you’re not using events yet, hopefully you can kinda see by now there’s a lot of value to go into the events. And it’s not that complicated. There’s nothing too crazy about it. As long as you have the right preparations, you can handle the event and you can run them and you can get ROI on them.

So if you do have any questions about that, we’d love to hear it. Now I believe that we do actually have a couple of offers going on today. So I’m gonna hand it back to Jen so she’d be able to talk about for you and then we’ll take some questions.

Slide 23

Jen: Thank you Chris. Yes, absolutely. So I’m going to take over the presentation as well and get you guys over to our special offers here. So our first special offer is if you would like to purchase our stand-alone solutions and as Chris mentioned GoCapture several times at our Events Lead Management solution. That’s powered by GoCapture. If you want to purchase a stand-alone solution, it’s two free months off of your subscription. If you currently have a Lead Liaison license and you wanna add this to your Lead Liaison license, we’re offering one free hour of training, which the training can get fairly pricey. So that’s an amazing offer there. So let us know if you guys are interested in those. Just mention the webinar and we’re happy to assist there.

Slide 24

Now so I’ll go into the questions. Everybody, you should see the question area on your Gotowebinar screen to just so you can type your questions in there and I’ll go through and kind of asked those. We’ve got a couple here and that I’ve seen come in. So the first one is can you highlight some information about the users and the amount of devices that you can have? Is there a limit to that?

Chris: Yeah. That’s actually a really good question. So it kinda depends on the solution you’ll go with. A lot of solutions are going to limit you like 3 or 4 devices and then you’ll pay like an extra 50 or 60 bucks a month per user. I’ve seen up to 200 per month per user. Our Event Lead Management solutions a little different in that we don’t have any limits on the number of users. So it’s a flat rate and if you have 50 different reps, send out 50 different invitations.

Jen: Awesome! Thank you. Alright, we have another question and which lead capture method do you recommend in those or do you see used the most?

Chris: If we’re in the US, the one I see used the most is definitely going to be barcode scanning. That’s just something that became very prevalent in the event industry in the last 10 years or so. And the event industry has been just growing like crazy. So that’s the one that I see commonly used the most. The best thing about it, is like I showed in the demonstration is you can just do the barcode scans so it’s filling in all the important information for you. And then you just fill in your custom fields for your particular organization. Hit submit and then you’re done. A single submission takes less than 10 seconds. You can just go through one after another.

Next I would probably say the next most common would be the business card transcription. We have a lot of companies where they’ll just say, “Hey go out there and take a picture of the business cards, then they hand the business card back to us. We transcribe them and do the rest.” But most used in the US, that’s gonna be barcode scans. In Europe, we tend to see more business card transcriptions.

Jen: Wonderful! Thank you Chris. Alright, let’s see one other question here. What information can be included or captured on the form?

Chris: Yeah so, the information that you can capture is pretty limitless. So you can create any number of custom fields for our forms. So you saw that I had some fields in there for VIP or for product of interest. Those were all fully-customized forms. I created those fields myself. Put in the possible responses. If you’re currently leaves on client, it’s almost identical to our web form builder. For some who’s new with Lead Liaison, it’s a simple drag and drop builder. Generally for me it takes less than 3 minutes to put a form together even with custom information. The custom fields you can have is a single line of text, a paragraph of text, a drop-down menu, checkboxes which is your multi-select field and then a radio button which is kind of a true or false multi-select with only one answer kind of thing.

Jen: What is an absolute no-go when in contact with leads at events?

Chris: A no-go. Well, one thing like in all cases when it comes to marketing and I’m assuming with that no-go, you’re talking about what are some things that you’re just not supposed to do. One if you do have an automation setup on the background, if they haven’t opted in to email, you don’t wanna start putting them on to Marketing lists. It’s generally fine to send a thank you email or something like that because that’s considered transactional. But you do wanna be careful putting them on some marketing lists. Beyond that I mean be general trade show etiquette. But if you kinda meant something different with that no-go, just let me know and we’ll circle back to this question. But really there’s not much that I would say that you just can’t do with a lead from an event especially since you’re face-to-face with them. You can talk with them. You can build those expectations. Email marketing is the only area I really say to still be careful on. Depending on your country, text messages, as well. So yeah. But if you need to clarify that more, we’ll go in a different direction with that. Let me know.

Jen: You said that this is also available as a standalone solution. How does that work if I do not have Salesforce?

Chris: Yeah so the Salesforce connection that we showed there, that’s an add-on that you can do. We have that because a lot of our partners out there, they use CRM like Salesforce or like Microsoft Dynamics. We actually have our own CRM that you can use as well. So if you’re also wanting to save the organization level and whether there’s deals or opportunities, we actually have our own CRM that you can actually add it for free to event lead management so it’s another just add-on. If you don’t already have the CRM, then we’re happy to provide that for you. And really, we can also work without a CRM altogether cause we’re still gonna store the prospect records for you. We’re still gonna store all the submissions but if you’re in a little bit better in organization and you don’t have anything else or if you’ve been looking to make a change on your CRM, that free option is actually a really nice CRM with everything you’re getting. So it’s stand-alone. If you have Salesforce, we’ll integrate with Salesforce. It’s a very deep integration. If you have Dynamics will do that and if not we can work with you as well.

Jen: Alright! Thank you very much! I believe that wraps up our questions here.

Slide 25

Thanks everybody for those. So that is the end of our presentation. Everybody keep an eye on your inbox, I will send in the recording like I said from the next week and there will be a survey that pops up after we close the webinar. So we’d greatly appreciate your insights on that. In that way it can help shape future webinars as well. So thanks everybody for joining today. I appreciate your time. Hope you learned a lot. Let us know if you have any additional questions afterwards and have a great rest to your day.

Lead Liaison Webinar

An Introduction to Sales Enablement – Webinar Transcription

To watch “An Introduction to Sales Enablement” in its entirety, click here.

Summary

Lead Liaison provides an introduction to sales enablement. Learn the definition of sales enablement, why companies use it, and how it can help your business. We also compare and contrast sales enablement vs. marketing automation and break down how these two technologies complement one another.

Presenter

Ryan Schefke, Lead Liaison

Transcription

*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.

Slide #2

So let me cover three buckets.  Bucket number one would be your company might be using email marketing.  So maybe you’re using MailChimp or constant contact, or your even using marketing automation, which in a way it’s like version 2.0 of email marketing.  But with number one, you might be sending out a bunch of emails. We just talked to client the other day, and they’re shooting a bunch of emails out through Mailchimp, and their sales team is hoping for people to respond and email them back, and their sales team is even following up on people that have just click links.  That’s how they’re measuring engagement, just a link quick and taking action on that. So we like to say that those kinds of company, they’re just sending out email blasts. They’re doing very basic marketing around email but they’re blasting their database. But sending a generic message to your entire database, you’re not segmenting people.  Bucket two is really companies that are using marketing automation for both sales and marketing purposes. Definitely sales can benefit from using marketing automation. A good philosophy there is that marketers are producers and sales people are consumers. But what you don’t want if you are falling on bucket number two, you don’t want to be using marketing automation to do your prospecting and do your sales outreach.  You don’t want to be running your cold contacts through your marketing automation system. Bucket number three is where you carve out marketing automation and you dedicate that for marketers, and then you have a sales enablement suite, and your sales people use that. So ideally you want to be in bucket number three, and in that way, sales and marketing can kind of work in harmony.

Slide #3

What is killed enablement? Again 24%, 1 out of every 4 people here don’t really know what it is.  So I’m going to throw a definition out there to everybody. Sales enablement means continually increasing efficiency of your sales ecosystem through the use of strategies, tools and process.  What does it mean to be continually increasing? Well the main thing is that you can’t stop improvement, you can’t stop changing, You know, if I look at our own company, Lead Liaison, as an example of that, we introduced marketing automation in 2014.  So four years ago, we rolled that out. Obviously, we want to be using our own software that’s how we’re growing our business so rapidly. So we like to say we drink our own champagne. We never say we eat our own dog food. I don’t like to eat dog food or be blasted, like I mentioned earlier.  So the key is always continually improve. We’re using our own software, but we’re always making changes, we’re changing our qualified lead flow, we’re changing our messaging, we’re always refreshing the content, for tweaking how we do prospecting. Never rest on your laurels. Never be complacent because if you get complacent, I think that will lead to failure very quickly.  So you’re continually going to make changes. Efficiency, well what does that mean? You got to really be using automation at the core to be efficient. You got to be really organize. So that again, you can scale your business. And in these last three words, I’m going to touch on the next slide about strategy tools and concepts, I’ll explain that. And by the way, sales enablement, you gave a lot of definitions out there today.  You may have heard of sales enablement as sales automation, sales intelligence. It’s really all the same thing in our crew. It’s a bit subjective but it does have different means.

Slide #4

So you’ve got to have a strategy.  You got to figure out, are you going to target certain accounts?  Are you going to focus on specific industries or regions, and you really got to know who your ideal buyers are, that’s very important.  Lead Liaison actually offers a particular document, it’s on our website under our resource library. We call it an SOA, Service Level Agreement.  It’s a really good tool to use between your sales and marketing teams. It’s treated down those. You can get that again from our website. But here, just have an agreement or a template, define your buyers, define your sales plan, know who you’re going after, identify, you know, what is a qualified lead, what is the lead, define those things, make sure both teams really agree there on what that is.  But, again, you’ve got to have a strategy. The tools, right, so again sales enablement is a bit subjective, but remember in the definition, I talked about providing solutions for that failed ecosystem, helping sales with everything they do, everything they touch. You got to have a CRM. It’s great if you have meeting automation. Send out a link, schedule a meeting, you could use solution bud call away.  We’re also working on something to help automate the scheduling of meetings. But instead of going back and forth and working out availability for parties, send the link, they can click it, see their availability schedule. You really need stuff like visitor tracking that’s a great sales enablement tool to help identify businesses and people that come to your website, and give you key sales intelligence. And again sales automation engagement, sales intelligence, whatever you might refer to it, that’s kind of part of the suite, which I’ll go over in more detail.  And then you got have a process. You got to document what you want your sales team to do. It could be in Google Docs. Within Lead Liaison we use a solution from atlasin, it’s called Complements, its kind of a Wiki. We use that for our public documentation and internal documentation. And then you got to train your sales team. So all of our demos, our client meetings, on boarding, we record everything. So we use notes, we use GoToMeeting, record everything, upload it into YouTube, make it unlisted, so that you can just pass out links to people as needed. But use that material to give back to your sales people to train them, to make them more efficient.  And then the last thing is measure. It doesn’t get measured. It doesn’t get docked. So you have to have these strategies, tools and process to really do a good job at sales.

Slide #6

What you’re looking at is what I would call a super graphic, right, not just an infographic but a super graphic.  Taking sales enablement tools is really difficult. By the way, the super graphic is provided by Scott HYPERLINK “mailto:Brinker@chiefMarktax.com” Brinker@chiefMarktax.com, want to give the proper attribution there.  There are 5,381 solutions on the super graphic from 5,000 companies that is a lot. Can you imagine if, you had to pick from this 5,000 different companies. It’s impossible. And there’s several hundred just in sales automation which you see in that red box right there.  In the blue box, on the bottom left, you see marketing automation. Lead Liaison fits into both of those buckets, we deliver solutions in both areas. The key is you want two things to be working together. You don’t want these to be dispersed solutions. Now, what you see here, this is from 2017.  In 2016, there were less. So you know, so 2017, there were 39% more solution. So the sales and marketing ecosystem is just getting more and more complex. The good news is that I’m going to simplify that for everybody in our discussion here.

Slide #7

I’m really going to focus on sales automation and marketing automation.  So just the automation piece. Number one, I’m going to give you again five differences, number one is really the obvious, which is the people, you know, marketing people should be using marketing automation, salespeople should be using sales enablement.

Slide#8

The second difference is where should these solutions be used.  Now, what you’re looking at here is a very primitive funnel, suspects, leads, opportunities, clients.  Your funnel could be more detailed, which is fine, but at the highest level, you have what we call suspects.  What that really is, is basically just a person. They have no idea who you are. You got them from a list, you pull them out of the phonebook, it doesn’t matter.  They are suspect. A lead is somebody where you may be engaged them, you’ve generated interest. They now know who you are. The difference here is in that minty color, sales enablement is at the top of the funnel.  And by the way, this is not just the sales funnel. The world is moving to sales and marketing funnel. So you got both groups within a company contributing to your funnel. But sales enablement is at the top of the funnel.  It’s really geared around booking more meetings, filling the top of the funnel. That’s the goal of sales enablement. On the other hand, marketing automation is, you can see, as you, in more areas of the funnel, it’s used to help nurture your lead.  It’s used around opportunities, upsell, cross sell, things like that. And a lot of people just forget that marketing automation is really, really applicable to clients. It’s not a lead gen tool. Marketing automation’s purpose is to help you shorten the sales cycle, to drive bigger deals, and you do that for building strong relationships by communicating in a very relevant way.  That’s what marketing automation can do is help you segment and communicate and have conversations, not blasting people. The key takeaway from this slide is that they need to complement one another. Again, earlier in the poll, we heard 5% of the attendees used marketing automation so they feel they don’t need sales enablement. It’s a little bit of the wrong approach there.

Slide #9

The third difference is in email. So again, I’m largely speaking about automation.  The third difference is in how emails are delivered. Marketing automation is going to send your email through the provider’s network.  Those emails must have an unsubscribed link, because you want to be can spam compliant, etc. Those emails will not show up in your sent box.  The difference is that when you’re using sales enablement or sales automation, those emails are going to go through your own service provider.  So it could Gmail, could be Exchange, Office 365. It’s basically just like going into Outlook or Google mail and sending an email from your email client.  You’re going to see then your sent box. You don’t have to put in unsubscribe link in there, and you’d probably do get better deliverability of your emails.  So the way that emails are sent are very, very different.

Slide #10

The fourth difference is in reply management.  So your sales enablement tools are going to automatically manage replies.  Again, it’s sales automation, it’s for sale people. So we really want to keep it very simple.  If somebody engages or replies, you want to remove them from your flow, whereas marketing automation is more manual.  You’re going to have to pull them out or set up some automated processes to remove them

Slide #11

And then the last thing is you know, simplicity right.  We got to keep sales automation, sales enablement, very, very simple.  We can’t make it complex.

Slide #12

Going back a little bit marketing automation.  It is going to be more, I think difficult to use, right, because you just, you’ve got more options.  So it can be confusing for some people. Those technical marketers I think really get it. But again, you got additional business logic.  You can wrap around things. And so again, it’s more complex, more actions.

Slide #13

So why do sales reps need automation?  Well I’m throwing some very quick stats  out at you, and these stats by the way are furnished by the TAS group or Task Group Marketing doughnut and brain shark.  So 67% of reps don’t hit their quotas, 2 out of every 3 reps miss their quota. Half of all sales teams don’t have a playbook.  You got to have a playbook. The third point here is to take an average of 8 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. My take away there is cold calling really doesn’t work these days.  You know, for me, I really don’t answer my phone. I do screen and I see the caller ID, I don’t answer. You got to try different approaches. The last point here is it’s very tough to on-board people.  It takes about 10 months for new reps to really be productive and get up to speed. So that the key takeaways here are reps are increasingly unsuccessful, especially if they do not have a plan, and it’s very hard to reach people and ramping up new reps is difficult.

Slide #14

So what’s the solution?  It doesn’t matter what your sales role is.  Now you probably fall into one of these two buckets– account manager, business development reps.  Now, some companies call them account managers, some companies call them major account managers or outside sales reps.  The bottom line is you’re the person that probably build the relationship a little bit more. You might be traveling. You might be focusing on your 50 or 100 top-tier accounts for your business.  You might be doing what they call ABM or Account Based Marketing, just focusing on specific accounts. You might be in that bucket or you might fall into the business development rep bucket, where again, you could be called a biz Dev rep, a sales development rep or an inside sales rep.  There’s many names but you you’re typically in one of those two buckets. The key thing is you got to have a plan. You can’t just be calling. You got to have unique, multiple touch points, and you really have to create messaging across your organization that’s consistent so that you can, what we call plug-and-play with your reps.  So if your reps leave, which that happens in sales, you get a lot of turnover. You want to pull in your new reps, you want to be able to plug-and-play and have them pick up where your reps left off, and have all that messaging be consistent. So Lead Liaison, to tell a real quick story here, we evaluated a number of sales enablement solutions.  You know, we looked at various players out there, but we really found three problems. Number one, nothing was integrated with marketing automation. That’s kind of our history, we started visitor tracking and marketing automation, but we found sales enablement was really disconnected. You have to copy and paste data from one system into your marketing platform, and they just weren’t integrated.  They were also a little complicated. Again, you want to keep them simple. And they were not multichannel, everything is just email only.

Slide #15

So I’m going to show you on our app what some these things look like, but I’m going to give you some screenshots.  This is from LeadLiaison. Now, what this is sales automation. Other providers in the market, they might call what you’re looking at a sequence.  They might call it a cadence. They might call it a flow. It doesn’t matter what the name is. For us, Lead Liaison, we call it a rhythm. We chose that name because sales is about getting into a rhythm.  It’s establishing your momentum, your flow but diving and getting into that rhythm, getting used to things, that’s what it’s all about. You want to have that rhythm to really be your second thing. A few key things, you see on the left, when we designed this, we said, “Man, we got to make it multichannel.”  What I mean by multichannel is not just email, right, but have the ability to send a handwritten letter. Have the ability to send a postcard, to schedule a unique task in the time. That’s really important. Make it multichannel. The next thing that’s really important is give the reps options. You want to have some multi-variant testing, not AB testing the ABCD all the way up, multi-variant, try different things but don’t make it too complex, if then, logic and things like that.  We also want to be able to very easily add people into your rhythm. That’s important. We are working on, and integration with zoom info, we’ve partnered up with them. So that’s the key thing, you know, you want to be able to find and kind of target certain people, and then add them into your flow to then create that rhythm.

Slide #16

One more thing you really want is you want to make sure you’re organize, right, and as part of your process.  So the most efficient reps these days, they stay organize. So you got to have a really good task manager. You want your reps coming in and not say, “What should I work on today?”  You want them to click a button and “Hey, these are overdue. I got to make these phone calls or here’s what’s due this week.” So you want to have a really good task manager. We built that into Lead Liaison.

Slide #17

And then also, you want to make sure you can measure.  If you remember what I said earlier, if it’s not measured, it’s not done.  So in this case, how many people were added, finished, and how many people are engaged in your particular sales automation or your outreach.

Slide #18

So that that’s really about, again, those flows, those rhythms, those sequences, again, whatever you want to call them, but there’s really more to sales enablement.

Slide #19

Here I’m showing you on my screen, on your screen, sending an email from an iPhone, from an android device, from Outlook, from Google mail.  You know what you really want is you don’t want to have to use an email address and put that in your BCC field so that it gets stored in your CRM.  About six, seven months ago, Lead Liaison released a free CRM. It’s called OneFocus. The essentials are there to create deals and tasks and so on so forth.  But one thing we realized is let’s not make it difficult for reps. We just want to make sure that no matter where they’re sending an email, they’re on the road, and God forbid, sending an email from their phone while they’re driving, they’re at their desk, wherever, it doesn’t matter.  We want to make sure that email goes into the CRM. So that all that information can be shared in a central area.

Slide #20

This is what we call a prospect profile for us, but it doesn’t matter where those emails are sent, you want them all to be threaded, and in line, so that if another rep checks out this page, or the marketing person, everybody knows what is going on.

Slide #21

Here is sending an email from the application itself.  So this is just native email. There is a bunch of different capabilities in there to help make reps more efficient.  

Slide #23

This is the interface, you know, you can build out these different actions, I’ve mentioned these actions here on the left.  Again, you want to make sure you’ve got different versions, if you will. You can add that. So either you’re different variants here.  You want to make sure, again, that you can measure things again– added, finished, engaged.

Slide #24

Ryan Schefke:  So here we can see, you know, how many individual prospects you are putting in, what’s the stag, or what steps are they at, and your overall flow.

Slide #25

Looking at your emails only, so you want to be able to take all your different action types and just may be drill down a little bit, and see how things are performing.

Slide #26

You also want to know what tasks have you set up for yourself.  So you can see a tasks tab over here.

Slide #27

And then you got different settings.  So again, when people reply, you want to remove them.  These are called suspect statuses, but based on what happens, what you want to set their status to be, you want to set some goals, things like that.

Slide #29

It’s giving you a preview of what we’re doing here with zoom info.  So you might want to pick from your own account, inside Lead Liaison, certain companies, certain named accounts that you might have or maybe do a general search, you want to find those people, put in your criteria, and then once you find them, add them into your rhythm.  So making it easy to insert people in there to fill the top of the funnel.

Slide #30

I just want to quickly compare and contrast here, marketing automation.  This is an example of marketing automation from us. So you can see these individual actions, you got way more actions, changing data values.  You don’t just have sending an email or sending a handwritten letter, things like that. You’re tagging, your moving things around inside the system, you’re adding different conditions around your actions.  You are creating your business logic. So it’s much more complex with these kinds of system. And you’ve got different pipes typically. So you can see here, we offer, four different variations. So much more complexity, if you will, but with the complexity comes more power, more options in things that you can do.  

Slide #31

This is the task manager. So if you’re a rep, you come in, you want to make sure, “Hey, I got my path.  I know what I’m working on.” Maybe you get an email reminder that you got overdue task. But the key is, pick your task, pick the start button—

Slide#32

–begin working on your tasks, you can see one through four, and this is your task manager, that entire timeline right in here of what’s going on all the leads or the prospects engagement here and the actions—

Slide #33

–the ability to take quick action—

Slide #34

–you want all that your sales enablement system.

Slide #35

Also to keep it simple, you know, depending on again, if you’re an account manager or if you’re an inside sales rep, you know, maybe you want to build your rhythms or your sequences, whatever you want call them, and then keep them in a certain folder.

Slide #36

You might have like an industry folder, whatever that might be or your top 50 accounts—

Slide #37

And you want to put your rhythms and keep them organized and put them in certain folder.  I do want to highlight again the two-way sneaking stuff that I talked about. Here’s an example of a profile inside Lead Liaison.  You can see that in the timeline here, this is a two-way email thing. It doesn’t matter where these messages are sent from, you know. We want to basically take all that communication automatically put it into the system, inside the profile, and that way you can see the entire contents of your message.  And that can be shared with your team. And then also, you can take direct action that you could reply, and do something on that message, if you needed to. So let’s say I’m in the profile, to give you a quick example, you got different options when you’re sending email. And again these are built to help the salespeople.  So maybe you talk, in this case, I talked to Mike, we have a great conversation and he says, “You know what, let’s just touch based in about two months.” Well, probably I’m going to forget or I’m going to get busy and I won’t come back to it. So the key is, right after I get off the phone, I can write my message, I can schedule sort of a certain day, in a certain time, and then I can set it and forget it.  I can send it out. So I don’t have to worry about that. So let’s just send later future. By the way, there’s also an undo. So maybe I sent something and I go, “Oh oops, I shouldn’t have said that or I should have added something,” There’s the ability to undo. You might have those plug-ins inside your email, client that we build out, they can write into Lead Liaison. You can add a reminder. So maybe if the person doesn’t reply after a certain number of days or after a certain time, have your system send an email or create a tasks for you, again, that you could manage in your task manager.  You want to be able to create sales template in the platform. You know, create your messaging ahead of time, and then insert those easily, put in snippets. For example, if I wanted to insert a little snippet about your company, now that’s a great used case to be able to insert that so that everybody is consistent. And then you got option two, you know, have dynamic signatures, put those in, so you have merged fields to track your open, track your clicks. That’s all sales enablement here, again, having the ability to send email from a profile and then having these different options to make things efficient for you.

Slide #38 and 39

How do these systems need to work together?  So what you’re looking at here is what Lead Liaison calls a lifecycle funnel.  These are the different lifecycle stages right. I mentioned earlier, sales enablement, kind of on the top, you know, marketing automation towards the bottom.  We have these fixed lifecycle stages. You see suspect on the very top. If we were to take the suspect stage, and we were to expand it, and sort of blow it up a little bit-

Slide #40

Then you might have these different status.  New suspect statuses. So as you’re working with your sales automation system, you know, you’re putting people into those rhythms that I talked about, depending on what happens, if they reply, if it bounces, you want to automatically update their suspect status.

Slide #41

One of the keys here is that you are managing everybody you know all your prospect in your town pace marketing, that’s happening in that suspect stage.  But when somebody engages, they move automatically to engage. And that’s where your marketing automation system can kick in, and maybe nurture those people for the long run. That’s really again where the two systems complement one another.

Slide #42

Once you have that again, you got harmony between marketing and sales, sort of bringing everything together.

Slide #43

I do want to give you a couple of references here.  Number one, we do have some training which is open to everybody on sales enablement.  So you can access that training by going to salesandmarketinguniversity.com. You can learn more.  There are three particular lessons in this training course, and you can apply. So just click, once you go to salesmarketinguniversity.com, click that apply for course, one of our trainers will accept it, and then you can go ahead and watch some of those capabilities to reinforce the learning here today.

Slide #44

Ryan Schefke:  The other thing I mentioned is I’m starting—we start a service level agreement.  So you can get that from the resource section on our website.

Slide #45

Ryan Schefke:  Here I am on our website.  And here if you go into resources, resource library-

Slide #46

And free tools, you’ll see the SLA over here.  And then again, here’s the courses here in sales enablement.  You just want to click on that, and then click

Slide #48

This is our pricing.  I figured this was just easy to show to this to everybody, not trying to push Lead Liaison here, just trying to help you understand how we group things.  The last two columns, these are really the sales enablement solutions. We do have sales pro-user seats. You see the rhythms that I talked about. Those rhythms are not available yet.  They will be released at the end of March at the current plan. But you know, we do have all those other capabilities, that two-way email think, scheduling emails later, the undo, all of those things in that particular package.  Inbound is really about visitor tracking and picking up more sales intelligence for your team. But again both of those solutions are sales enablement.

Q&A

Q: When is the Lead Liaison search email available?  

A: We do have sales enablement today, again, you’re going to get a lot of those features, which will be that two-way email think, again, no matter where you’re sending emails, they’re going to show up in that timeline and be shared with everybody else.  You can send later, you can undo, you can use sales templates, you can use the snippets, there’s going to be tracking of all those emails—all of that is available today, right now, from us, and again, end of March is when we expect to be GA, which is general availability, with our rhythms.

Q: Sales enablement really for business development managers or account managers?

A: Yeah, it’s really for both.  If you’re doing business development, you’re probably targeting more people.  Now, you know, the important thing is, even though all of those emails are sent through your exchange server or through Google, or Gmail, you still need, there are limits right.  So you can trip thresholds and you got to be careful. We’re actually building in some throttling capabilities to throttle that. But again, if you’re more of a biz that person, you might be dealing with a larger volume of leads wherever you got those.  But I think it’s still important to really not focus on quantity but to focus on quality. So our rhythm feature is really meant to allow reps to be very hyper-focus in a certain area. It’s typically a best practice to be jamming contact through the system.  You know, I would say the smaller the better, the more targeted, it’s definitely quality over quantity there. You know, if you’re an account manager, you are probably dealing with major accounts. Like I mentioned earlier, you might have 50 accounts, 100 accounts, but this is perfect because with the rhythms, you know, keeping an account manager, is like I mentioned earlier, not just making those phone calls because it can take eight phone calls before you can reach somebody. I’ve actually seen stats that have better double that.  So 15, 16 phone calls. You know, for me, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over. So we don’t want to just be doing phone calls. You know, your reps are going to get tired. They’re going to want to quit. So you got to have some variation. You got to have that multi-channel. You got to sprinkle in some personalized communication. You got to sprinkle in postcards and handwritten letters. If you’re an account manager, you’re probably focusing on bigger size deals, high value, tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps.  And why not spend $6, $7 on a handwritten letter to really make your attempt at penetrating an account very effective. So there is the difference. It’s really, they’re intended for both account managers and business development reps.

Q: How does sales enablement work with Salesforce.

A: We also have that for Microsoft dynamics.  We do in integrate with I’d say another half a dozen CRMs.  Of course I mentioned we have our own essential CRM, some of the basic things in there, and we’ve got back, you know, that had allowed us to integrate with a bunch of other CRMs.  But going back to the question, really sales enablement should be focused, you know, in the platform itself right. As I mentioned earlier, the two systems do complement one another because sales enablement is filling the top of the funnel.  We really don’t want to do is you don’t want to, you know, load a bunch of stuff into salesforce and just, you know, muddy the water and have a bunch of contact data. You just want to be working these individuals through your sales enablement system.  I do understand that, you know, that requires a rep to you know not use salesforce but to use a system like ours or something else, but you know, uses the sales automation system because it offers all those capabilities. When somebody becomes engaged, at that point, that’s when marketing automation takes over and marketing automation can help automate that process of pushing people, you know, into your CRM, like salesforce.com and then kicking in nurturing and things like that.  So I’d say really, they work together very well, but it’s really about just making sure that you put qualified, interested people, people that engaged into the CRM.

Q: Can I use sales enablement on its own, so without using other like marketing automation?

A:  So at the moment we do not provide sales enablement standalone.  You do need to be using marketing automation from us, at this moment or some of our other solution.  So at the moment, we do not offer sales enablement standalone. We might be changing that in the future.  If we do, we probably will require a minimum number of users, you know four or five, something like that to get rolling.  Those are the things that we definitely are considering, just because we’ve had a lot of demand it in terms of what we’re doing so far.

 

Lead Liaison Webinar

PPC and Marketing Automation, Webinar Transcription

To watch “PPC and Marketing Automation” in its entirety, click here.

Summary

Google Ads Premier Partner, Ben Herman, and marketing automation expert, Chris Kipgen, team up to cover how using AdWords and marketing automation together can get you more conversions at the same or lower cost per acquisition.

Presenters

Ben Herman, Mad Fish Digital

Chris Kipgen, Lead Liaison

Transcription

*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.

[Ben Herman:] The benefits of PPC and marketing automation includes covering the basics. You can quickly deliver a lot of traffic to test CTAs. So those are calls-to-action. That’s landing page optimization. Getting feedback and data on that and not real time but within about 24 hours depending on how much traffic you’re able to drive.

You’re also able to gather a ton of customer insights these days from AdWords alone as well as all the social platforms. But there’s demographic data, there’s a lot of age data. Things like that. So there’s a lot of ways to make decisions based on the data that comes back from paid search which makes it really great even if you just run small short campaigns to gather a lot of insight on your customers. And then also the ability to hyper-focus brand messaging and then segment your audiences across the board so that you can properly customize or tailor your messaging to each audience.

So the basics of paid search includes your clicks, you’ve got your impressions, your cost, your conversions, and your keyword position when it comes to– This is specific to like AdWords or Bing ads center any time we’re bidding on keywords essentially. There’s performance metrics for each of those. And so the next level of what we call the “Click through rate” the CTR, your conversion rate, and then your cost per acquisition. Those three are the drivers behind the success of any campaign. So we’re looking at all of those on the frontend before data even go in on the Lead Liaison platform.

And then of course there’s quality score and if anybody has managed a pay-per-click campaign, they understand that quality score is a big contributor. It’s part of the Google algorithm on the paid search side to help you get the best cost-per-click essentially. So you can have a lower cost if you have a higher quality score and that’s all based on relevance.

Basic lever for paid search would be click through rate. We approach all of our engagements, all of the campaigns, we optimize and manage on by starting on the simplistic level and then we kind of boil down to getting a little bit more complex. But on the high level, it starts through click through rate. That’s just your ad copy and really what that means is how effective is your ad copy. And the levers there are updating your ad copy or updating the bids.

The levers for quality score, all of it more complex but essentially, it’s going to be your ad relevance. So you can actually get a higher quality score by bidding on less keywords or more specific keywords in an ad group and then making sure that that keyword shows up in the ad headline. Again, not rocket science but time and time again when we go to optimizing campaign, we see ad groups that maybe have too many keywords or they don’t have ads that are relevant. Even if we’re trying to push a quality score from a 5 to a 6 or 6 to a 7, we always just go back to the fundamentals here of looking at ad copy and adjust enough.

The conversion rate. Conversions obviously are what we’re all going for. So the levers for conversion rate are pretty simple. What’s the call-to-action, where’s the placement of the form, what does the form look like? Is it three steps? Is it ten steps? What’s the time of day that we’re advertising? So some clients, the sweet spot between 6:00 AM and 11:00 AM in the morning, we tend to see that in like the healthcare side of the healthcare industries. And it becomes really important to make sure our ads are only showing during those key times of day where there’s a higher conversion rate. It can drop as much as half if you get to like 1:00 PM in those cases and then it’s not as effective for your ad spend.

So your driving conversions but not every completion of that transaction stage of that funnel is a sale, all right? And so what we considered the conversion as somewhere in the middle to the bottom of that transaction stage of the funnel. But we definitely understand that not everybody is going to purchase. So let’s say your conversion rate on a purchase is 3%, that means 97% of your visitors came and they were interested but they left. So what happens to them?

We want to make sure that if it’s not a sale or a purchase, we’re still capturing the data from that conversion. And that brings us to the micro versus macro conversions. And this is where Lead Liaison becomes really important. For the micro conversion, that would be any email or newsletter sign up, a gated content download or request for more information, schedule an appointment. Something that’s a little bit softer than somebody putting in their credit card and basically transacting at that moment.

These are all points where putting people into a marketing funnel and tagging and organizing them correctly is going to be imperative to future sales. So you maybe didn’t get the sale today but you didn’t lose the folks that came to your site. You get a higher conversion rate here. So let’s say you’re capturing extra 10 of these people. That’s 10 potential prospects you could keep warm or lukewarm as you kind of market them through or bring them through or nurture them through your sales cycle.

Then there’s the macro conversion which is what we all want in the end. So you’re trying to nurture people that didn’t maybe make it to the macro conversion right away. You’re trying to get them to the stage if they didn’t already get there. So that’s going to be your purchase. A webinar sign up for example, a request for quote, an account sign up, or a free trial set up. It’s basically considered.  Macro conversions are cash money essentially. That’s when somebody did what you wanted them to do that helps you grow your top line revenue or your sales.

You’ve got all these conversions coming through even on the sales, the data needs to go somewhere. And that’s Lead Liaison. So in this case, we’re sending traffic from multiple marketing channel. So that’s going to be your paid channel, your organic channel, paid social. There’s a lot of different avenues for folks to get to a landing page or parts of your site these days that becomes really important that you got your data organized correctly.

After the click, data sent to Lead Liaison and Lead Liaison does a great job. We like it for connecting visitor back to what’s called, “Their current session” but that’s basically somebody’s been navigating through a website and the correct tracking them in place, you can actually see in Lead Liaison what page has somebody viewed prior to the transaction as or conversion as well as what maybe they came back to your site later. So future sessions are really important especially for those long sales cycles. You can see who maybe signed up for some information today, and then when they come back in the future which makes it really great for kind of prioritizing prospects for a sales team.

Organizing the data up-front, it’s almost just as important as driving that traffic in the first place. We recommend every single client that we worked with that we make sure everybody’s using it – Google Tag Manager. It’s super easy to use. It’s one code snippet and then through tag manager, you use your analytics and any other tracking. That’s how we use Lead Liaison as we embedded it into the tag manager tag. And that allows basically non-programmers on our end to non-developers to interact in that tags to website and get the tracking in place. It saves a lot of cost to our clients because we don’t have to incur dev time. We don’t have to get on a dev schedule and there is almost little to no testing that needs to happen once basic tags are added.

There is still some check and balances that need to be there. It’s not just code it and load it. Google got the process streamlined. We use a methodology for labeling or naming your campaigns. It needs to have multiple kind of data points and a campaign name for you to bring it back to the importance or the contribution that that campaign is making to your overall lead funnel.

We always put the campaign name, the funnel position. Was it top, mid, or bottom? Right? If you think of that ACT example. Awareness would be top consideration and mid and then bottom is going to be the transaction. So that’s how somebody found you essentially. So were they doing a branded search? Somebody is searching for a brand name of your client then the bottom is typically where that person comes in. But if they are searching for a non-branded term, just a generic keyword that then brings at prospect to your brand for the first time. That’s going to be the top. So we consider that awareness. These are very important when you’re labeling your campaigns so you can organize the data when you’re tagging and sending follow up emails and nurturing people through the full process.

Geo target and focus of the campaign are important as well. For different national campaigns, it’s a little bit easier but when you start advertising or having different messaging or different campaigns running in different cities, especially like the higher education realm, it becomes necessary that those are properly labeled as well so you can identify back where this person came from. Maybe you didn’t capture that data bit on the landing page, maybe when they filled out the form there wasn’t a dropdown for what state are you coming from or what city or something like that. You want to be able to easily go back in the future and send messages to these people based on a certain geo area. Your campaign name is a great way to do that. And there’s some other tools in Lead Liaison that let you do that as well. But on the front end, this is what we recommend.

The benefits that we get from marketing automation and connecting it back with paid search campaigns, we can nurture long and short sales cycle, we can keep prospects. Basically keep the brands of our client top mind for their– For leads, prospects, for whoever their target audience is that they’re trying to get in front of. Cross promote products and services that works great for kind of even after the transaction, even after somebody has bought something with the number of services or new product that’s available that either complements or matches what they purchased.

And then it greatly improves the sales team’s efficiency so when we talk with sales reps and folks in the past they’ve talked with a lot of prospects that were not ready to transact with them or they weren’t far enough for long. They need more information and they’re kind of repeating a lot of efforts. They’re sending them the same info all the time. There’s always processes that they’re doing which are completely automatable in a sales conducive way. There’s still that personal touch to those emails that can be accomplished.

And so building a list that evangelizes your new site content, that’s great for you if you’re doing a lot of new blog post. You could send out the list to your people every week of like, “Here’s kind of a run down or our weekly digest.” We do things like that for our own clients just to stay in front and we get such positive feedback about that. Because people are just excited to hear what’s going on at the end of the story.

Healthcare, higher education, events and conferences are some of just the easiest one to wrap our heads around when it comes to marketing automation. You can also use it in sports parallel marketing. Marketing automation fits to just about any B2B or B2C sales cycle even if it’s short, even if it’s long.

In healthcare, it’s  great way for announcing new location, new services, and new specialists. Higher education, it’s great to keep top of mind because folks tend to be researching multiple colleges or advanced degree programs when they’re looking online. And so keep it in front of your folks that have expressed interest without having to use a lot of the rep’s time for follow up, can be really key for kind of nurturing people through each year cycle in some cases.

And then announcing campus visits, we see that all the time. It’s really nice when a rep is going to be going to a certain area and they don’t want to mingle around campus or set up a booth. They can do that but we want to let people know that they’re going to be there and it’s a great way to kind of take it from just the click to actual human contact there.

And then at events and conferences, you could be very flexible. And one of our favorite features is being able to streamline cross-device messaging. Which is fancy words for saying and utilize push notifications and text messages as well as email. When you let and people know everything from upcoming speaking events to room changes or breakout sessions. Different things that kind of happen along the way.

[Chris Kipgen:] For Lead Liaison, one of the first important points are pay-per-click and visitor tracking. So really what happens once they click on that link, it comes back to your website or even just click on a link in general in the case of Google AdWords. We’re also going to talk about ways that we could start to nurture the people who are coming from these ad clicks. There’s a couple different ways to do it and there’s several different ideas that we have. And therefore, so a lot of you are really getting into that automation keys.

Whenever the visitor clicks on the link in your paid advertisement, it’s going to redirect into our site. In the case of Google AdWords, we’re fully integrated with AdWords. We have a tracking URL that you put in to AdWords and that basically marks that link clicked and lets our system know that, hey someone has clicked on this particular ad. When it takes you back to website, we’re actually going to place that tracking cookie in their browser.

The tracking cookie allows us to remember our visitor from one visit to another and in just a second, we’re going to see how we’re able to remember someone whether they visit a geo six months ago, six days ago, and from the time that they come to your site to the time that they finally convert. And hopefully, eventually, we’ll actually get a sale or a demo or something equivalent out of that.

As they keep going through the cookie, we’re going to track every engagement that they do on your website and we’re going to put that into a really convenient timeline. You’ll see in just a second. But when they first get to our website, there’s a couple of things that we get just right off the bat. So using your reverse IP address lookup, we can get detailed information about the prospects location. In many cases, if that IP address is connected to your company, then we can also tell you what company is searching your site. And that’s really valuable to one of those organizations where you’re still doing a lot of outside sales and outside prospecting. It may at least give you a good idea of which company to start targeting. We can also tell you the type of browser and the type of device, if you’re kind of curious. We have more mobile users, we have computer users. We can see all of that just from their visit.

In the case of paid searches, we also capture the keywords. And in fact, we can even capture keywords from some organics or just depending on their search settings.

In Lead Liaison’s visitor tracking page, we just make sure that we have the right audience here on. With my example, you can see my visitor record that was on the page a little bit earlier today. So the system remembers me. We have me marked just as an employee type. That’s the purple dot is. As I go through here the page, you can see that we’re tracking things like the original lead source that came in firms so paid search would be what you would see from an ad click when they come in. In this case, this is PPC from Google, the internet service provider. I can see things like the site search terms that are in here and again, the state and country.

We actually have quite a few other pieces of information that we can choose from as well. If we’re connected to your CRM, we could tell you if they’re CRM or not. Their city. We do actually have a link for LinkedIn so it’ll actually take that prospects based on their company, their name. You can go to LinkedIn. Try to figure out who they are.

So a lot of really cool information that’s in there. You can also look into a  general overview of that visitor record. So when a visitor first comes in, they’re going to look like this. This is an anonymous profile. So on the visitor tracking page, they’ll be listed as anonymous. That means that they clicked on the ad and made it to your website. They just haven’t done anything to identify who they are.

When it comes down to it, there’s no magic sauce. A reverse IP lookup isn’t going to tell us who they are. But this is where we’re going to come in and start helping you figure out who they are piece by piece. So this is the webpage. We’ll first look at our first visit. So we have things like the company, we have the original lead source that’s in the record, we know the general location of the prospect as well. A cool thing I can do is I might want to see what they’ve been doing on my website once they came in. So I can see the website visit and their timeline here and if I wanted, I could actually get a quick instant replay to actually see the steps that they took on my website.

So they started on homepage and then they moved through a couple of product pages and then finally, the Contact Us page. So I can get an idea how serious is this person, how long was he spending on each page. It’s a nice little feature that we have in there.  Where Lead Liaison comes in, is going to be getting this anonymous profile to what we call, “a known profile”. So as they continue to stay on the website, we’re going to continue to track these engagements. In this case, you can see the anonymous profile.

He saw a few dialogues while he’s on the website. So a dialogue is a model or a kind of the old-fashioned term for that is a pop up that may come. In this case, this one says, “Hey sign up for our marketing automation playbook.” And this other subscriber engagement is a newsletter sign up. So just little things as he is browsing, going from page to page. We’re trying to get his attention and pull him in. And very briefly we’re going to switch back to the presentation over here.

And this would show you the other ways that we’re able to capture prospect’s information. So we can do that through the form of a one-to-one email. We have a couple plug-ins for Google Mail as well as for Outlook. You could send that email to your prospects maybe a prospecting email asking for a meeting. It’s kind of a first touch sort of thing. We’ll know if they click on the link in that email or not and we can actually pull in their email address and associate a tracking cookie that way. We can associate the tracking cookie through mass email. Classic used case would be a web form. So all of your forms could be integrated to Lead Liaison.

Marketing content in videos, both of these things can have an email that we are going to talk about in just a second. And then we have our product we call, “Site engage”. They’re popping up throughout the visitor’s engagements on the website.

The main thing when it comes to pay-per-click and these conversions is you want to make sure that that ad is taking them somewhere they’re going to convert. So a lot of times, I’ll see an ad taking prospects to the homepage. You can do things like send them to a landing page that maybe has a video about what you’re all about. Videos seem to have a very high conversion rate. Maybe you would take them to a page that has your product that they can download.

But we can use these pieces of content to actually capture the visitor’s information. Email gate and downloadable content is directed straight from our website. So if you were to go to our website right now, and we don’t already know who you are and you’re trying to download one of our web papers, we’re going to ask you to enter your email address received. There’s a couple ways to do this. You can also do a soft gate where you’ll have the option to skip this step if they don’t want to give their email.

So it’ll all going to depend on your client-base and on your general market if you feel like you need the hard gate or the soft gate. But this is a great way to convert someone and to get more information. And you know because they’re downloading your brochure. They’re downloading white paper you know they have some interest in the top they just downloaded. Also, on the right, we have a video with an email view. We have an integration through our partner Wistia.

Videos tend to have an extremely high conversion rate on them. Especially if you put that gate about 15% of the way through the video. So if it’s a 10-minute long video, about a minute and a half of the way through, clip that email gate in there. You’ll tend to have a higher conversion rate. So you get some people that see the first part they’re interested. We can say things like, “Hey if you’re interested, give us your information so we can send you a little more.”

So if anyone goes to our website and wants to view our previous webinar, we would be asking for their email. And the cool thing about it is remember, we actually know who that prospect is. Thanks to the tracking cookie in your browser. So if we have already converted them in the past, if we already know their email address, we’re not going to ask them again. We’re not going to bother them by having them enter their email a million different ways on your website. Once we know them, we know them.

And what would eventually happen with this prospect, let’s say they were to continue on down the cycle. Is eventually we’ll be able to convert them. So here is a converted profile. With this profile, we’ve identified their email address, their one form of capture or another. We’ll be able to capture their name, maybe we’d get that through your form submission but a cool feature of Lead Liaison, is once we get their email address, we’re going to scan social media. And we’re going to try to find their social media accounts that match up to that name. That match up to their email rather. And if we don’t already know their name, we can pull their name from social media, we can pull their job title, and we can pull a lot of stuff from there.

At the timeline, you’re able to see the engagements that they’ve had on your website. Right down to if they watched a video, how much is the video they watched, which parts they rewatched. We can see when they click down links and emails, every visit that they’ve had, what content they’ve downloaded. So it’s a great way of keeping them together.

We also have qualified them for you. We do scoring actions. We can score them every time they come to the website. We can also put in grading list. So based on their job title, based from their location, how much of a fit are they for your company. We can give them a grade from there. That way, to see prospects with the highest score and a high grade, you know that these are going to be worth going after compared to some of the others.

It’s a very valuable tool but through all of it, we’re always going to remember that original lead source, the pay-per-clicks. So even once they convert, even once they give their email and something else, when it comes to our live reporting, when it comes to just finding out where your prospects are coming from, we’re always going to remember the first way they came to your website. In the case of an ad click, we’ll always have it as the pay-per-click. So it’s a great tool for anyone who’s going to be making new set of paid advertisements.

We can use automations in combination with ad clicks in a few different ways. We can send buy signal alerts to our prospect owners. If we have a sales team and inside sales team or even an outside sales team. We can let them know, “Hey, someone has clicked on your ad.” They’ll get the alert right away. They can also know if that come from peak clicks so maybe from a known prospect instead of just an anonymous prospects. We can start tagging those prospects through segmentation so later on you might want to divide and specialized marketing to the people you know clicked on paid ads versus the people who have not clicked them paid ads.

And of course once we know them, once we have people converted, we have things like email nurture campaigns. So this could be your standard campaign where we send the email, we wait a week, we send another email, we wait a week. It’s a classic email campaign. Our marketing automation platform is omni-channel marketing.

We’re not limited to just email, we’re not limited to things like web forms and other inbound marketing. We can actually do things like direct mail, we can do things with hand-written letters, we can even send out text messages.

We also have what we call, “Behavior-based automation.” So this is triggered by the prospect taking new action. And in this case, we can actually say we want this to trigger based on the prospect clicking on an ad campaign. And I can even specify which campaign. These are all pulled in from Google AdWords. So I might say we have a search from 2014, this is a dummy account. Let’s say it’s a search made 2014 ad campaign. If the prospect clicks on the link in this campaign, then I’m going to take the actions well defined on the next page. I can also go down and I can narrow down further. So if I want it to only target people to certain area with a certain job title, with a certain annual income from other company, we have literally hundreds of ways of breaking down their criteria.

And as I get into the automations, I can choose any of the actions like from here. So again, the standard campaign, I can send the email, I can wait. Let’s say in this case five hours. I can send another email but I can do things too like add conditions. So I could say if this first email, say 4th of July email, I could add a condition saying if they click on the link in that first email, I’m going to send an email one and if they didn’t click the link, I’m going to send them email two. Or if I learn something else about them maybe if there are one industry, I send them one email. If they are in the other industry, I’ll send them another.

But these conditions are basically if then statements where we can build different branches into the automation. And heck I can go so far as to say, “Hey, they haven’t responded to the last five emails we’ve sent them.” So instead of sending an email then, I’m going to send a hand-written letter. And the neat thing about the hand-written letter is we actually will write that letter for you and we have really good handwriting by the way. So it’s not something you have to worry about there. Again we could send you alert, we can upgrade.

A lot of possibilities here. The last major piece is ROI reporting on paid search. So this is where we can start helping you on the backend. So it’s great that we’re tracking them. It’s great there we’re sending nurture out to them. But what are you getting out of all this is what comes down to this. This is where revenue appeals.

We have reports specifically based on AdWords ad clicks. The clicks, these are imported directly from AdWords. They know how many people have clicked on that ad. The cost is also directly imported from Adwords. Again, the cost is looking a little different because I think we only turned it on for two when we did this test. We also get the CPC or cost-per-click from an AdWords.

From there, we can tell you how many people in the system are associated with this particular ads. So how many people had visited your website that had clicked on this ad before. And then prospects, this will be people with their known email address. These are people that actually converted and their original lead source was the ad campaign. And from there, we’re actually able to tell you the cost per prospect. So we can take the initial cost divide it by the prospects and there’s your cost per prospect.

A good example of this is when I was working with a client a couple of months ago and he saw that he has an ad campaign. He’d spent roughly $10,000 on over the course of eight months. Added those $10,000 he only had a handful of converted prospects so yeah but 6,000 people visit his website and that’s okay but only a few of them actually converted. His cost per prospect was something to the effect of $80 per prospect. And that was insane to him as it used to be.

Versus a couple down, there was another ad campaign where he had spent a similar amount on it but it had a much higher conversion rate. And this case, he was actually taking them to a different part of his website and his cost per prospect was a much more reasonable $5-$6. So obviously, he pulled one ad campaign and started other ad campaigns instead. It’s great information, its great insight for you.

If you’re using Salesforce.com or Microsoft dynamics, we also have very deep connectors with them into their CRMs. So we can take it a step further and we can also tell you how many opportunities are associated with prospects that would come in from these campaigns. We can tell you the cost per opportunity and the total value and then finally, we can tell you your revenue and your total ROI. So we’ll use the revenue as your cost– Or the revenue likely cost and that’s where you’ll get your ROI percentage from. And the idea here is you want to have a very high ROI. I think we can all agree that that’s the end rule marketing that’s going to get ROI on it.

And we can go a little further than this too. Not only can we look at the individual ads but we can also look at keywords. So in this case, I can see the keywords for the people who are looking– The people that I have my one opportunity with $17,000 here, they had searched for visitor tracking stuff were Egypt. So for whatever reason, I now know that I have people looking for visitor tracking software in Egypt. You know it. I’m getting opportunities out of them.

So maybe I’m going to expand my location in Egypt a little bit more. Maybe I can focus more ad revenue there. Create some personalized content for it. That in a nutshell, are a few of the things that Lead Liaison can do in combination with AdWords. So there’s a lot to it there. Hopefully you saw similarly neat ideas or new– Or come up with something you might want to try a little later on.

Q&A

Q: Is there a threshold for visitor tracking? So how many sessions can it record?

So for visitor tracking, we do not have a set threshold. So we don’t cut it off after a hundred visitors or anything to that effect. We have some clients where we’re tracking hundreds of visits per day and remember, we’re tracking every unique visitors. So even if we don’t know who they are already, if they’re just anonymous, we’re still going to be tracking that. So again, no major limit to it. There might be some stipulations in the license where we’ve agreed on a certain number of visitors per day but that would have been done beforehand when we were analyzing your website for the amount of traffic. So we customize it to your site but we’ll never cut it off, we’ll never stop tracking people, we’ll never say no if you have too many.

Q: In regards to prospect profile, can you manually add it? The score. I think there is this score up there I think the one that you showed was about a thousand. Can you change that based on your business?

Yes. So there’s a couple ways of changing the scores. So first off, you can change the baseline scoring. When I say baseline scoring, I’m talking about each individual engagement that we have in there. So as for example, website visit would be a 10 points normally for your organization, you make it a ton of visits. You might want to lower that to 5 points from the baseline tracking just as one example.

You can change it for a particular prospect just like going in their profile and actually changing the score. And then you can also come up with custom scoring list. You might have a combination of engagements instead of just one engagement that you think has a closer buying signal and you’re able to do that for sure.

Q: Do you track multiple score touchpoints?

Multiple source touchpoint. So we will attribute the original lead source to whatever the first ones they come in on because we feel it’s very important. So let’s say they start with your website by clicking on an advertisement. Even if six months later they convert from watching your video, they’ve have a million different sort of visits, we know that it’s still very important to say, “Hey, this first one is how they’ve heard about you.” But we do track all of their different touchpoints. We do have other reporting or a live report so you can see how your different campaigns and different pieces of content have been effective.

Q: Is visitor tracking IP or cookie related?

It can be either. Normally, it’s going to be through a tracking cookie in the browser. And that’s going to be by far the most accurate way to make sure that it’s the same visitor coming through. We do realize in some locations, we have a lot of European clients. We do realize that cookies are a little bit stricter over there so we do have the option of doing IP tracking only. Which will use a combination of the IP address and browser session information to making connection with the prospect.

Q: With people using a private page on a web browser, are they being tracked as well?

Yes they are. Because there’s no cookies on a private page like for an incognito mode in Google Chrome for instance. Since that is a cookie-free sort of browser, when they come in, they would pop up as a new anonymous profile. However, if they did a conversion action like they put their email address in or anything else, we would then know that that session belongs to that prospect and we will put it into the appropriate profile.

Q: So you mentioned the ability to send text messages. Is that in the automation tab of Lead Liaison?

The text messages are done via a web hook with Twilio. So it’s actually going to be under settings app set up and web hooks you created there. The prerequisite for that is you would have to have your Twilio account and get the web hook information from them. If you would like to set that up or would like more information, you can send an email to support@Lead Liaison.com. They would be more than happy to give you the documentations and detailed instructions.

And then once you get that set up, then you can all as part of the automation. So it would be in the automation area once you’ve completed the set up. Once the web hook is set up, then in the automation there is a seen web hook action. So just like you saw over the emails you just drag over the web hook action and that would tell our system to send the text message over the Twilio and that would send the text out. And the cool thing is, those text do support data merge fields just like emails do so it can be personalized down to the individual person’s name, company, and such.

Q: Can Lead Liaison be used in place of email marketing platform?

Yes. That’s actually a major part of our platform. It’s built into it so when you set up with us through marketing automation, we set you up and records just like you would with a platform such as Woodpecker. We do email templates, we’re able to handle the bulk sending. Some of our larger clients were looking at sending out hundreds of thousands of emails per month. So we’re able to handle that with no problem.

The neat thing about using us for your email marketing is then all of those emails are tracked within Lead Liaison. So the emails opened are tracked, if they clicked on the link on the email, that’s tracked, it’s scored. So it’s really neat, it is for full email marketing platform but it’s combined with marketing automation into one seamless experience.

Q: Who is your target customer for Lead Liaison? For example, what is the typical ad spending out organization size of client who then purchase Lead Liaison?

I would say we take all. That’s going to be a really general question. So I think any customer is a target customer for Lead Liaison. I see ways that we can help businesses of all sizes. We currently and manage a lot of the client relation side of Lead Liaison and we’ve got clients from very small companies to very very large companies. And implementation is about the same across the board and I see help going in all different direction. So I would say there’s really not a target. So they’ve signed on with Lead Liaison, I can tell you from the accounts that I’ve worked with, the accounts that I’ve managed, I think my smallest account, they have something to the effect of like 500 prospects or even that. And they’re sending emails out of it and then I have other accounts where again, we’re talking about sending hundreds of thousands of pieces of content out on a monthly basis.

We have one just yesterday, I was helping them out with something that, email as going out to 75,000 prospects of one. So we really do have everyone from like small small businesses where there is like four or five people in an office all the way up to enterprise level. Where we have huge number of employees so we can support really just about anything there. Of course we do different marketing efforts for those different kinds. But that’s the great thing about marketing automation is it’s no extra work for us. We just put the content in and the system is able to sort it from there.

 

Interested in the solutions that you heard about in this webinar? Request a personalized demonstration today!

 

Lead Liaison Webinar

How Training Companies Can Scale Marketing, Webinar Transcription

To watch “How Training Companies Can Scale Marketing” in its entirety, click here.

Summary

We’re talking about how to scale marketing, pass qualified leads to sales, and how to progress those leads through the sales funnel to revenue.

Presenters

Troy Michels, Administrate

Ryan Schefke, Lead Liaison

Transcription

*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.

Slide 15

Lead Liaison and Administrate have partnered to bring you this exclusive webinar. Administrate is a Lead Liaison customer in addition to being partner. So the topics that we are presenting are the actual solution that each company uses to drive our own business and revenues to use in real life and it works.

Slide 16

So there are a lot of steps to manage when coordinating a webinar. Once the webinar was scheduled, the entire process was managed in Lead Liaison so that we could fully automate and even repurpose the event if we wanted to. Registration information was captured from the Lead Liaison landing page, hosting in Lead Liaison form. As event members status have changed from registered, attended, didn’t show, et cetera, their statuses are and will continue to be updated in Lead Liaison.

We created the invitation, the registration confirmation, the reminder emails, all in our email builder. And additionally, instead of incorporating the email only invitations and follow up, we were able to use multi-channel communication what we like to call omni-channel communication. Which is the text message that you received. Good news is, we are recording this and we’ll send it to you guys after the presentation. So when you [Unclear 00:10:42:07] might have missed it, you’ll still have a chance to view.

So after our presentation, we’ll be able to use Lead Liaison. We’ll be able to use the member statuses – the registered, attended, et cetera. We’ll be able to use that member status information to pull report or segment our database. A way that you guys could use Lead Liaison in the future.

Slide 17

Lead Liaison side will be presenting how to scale marketing and how to pass qualified leads to your sales people. Administrate will then present how to progress qualified leads through the sales funnel to revenue.

Slide 18

How does marketing automation system fit into the overall ecosystem? 83% of people don’t have an experience with marketing automation. These three circles could actually describe where it fits in. So on the far right hand side, you got your database which in this case we’ll call your audience. This could be prospect or leads, this could be customers, it could be partners. They’re over here on the right.

On the far left, you’ve got your CRM. It could be Administrate, it could be Salesforce.com, could be Microsoft dynamics. Whatever it might be. That’s over here on the left. That is sort of your system of record. Right in the middle, you’ve got marketing automation. Now, one important point is kind of a philosophy here at Lead Liaison is, we really don’t see marketing automation as a software or a feature. It’s really more of a strategy. So again, it fits right in between your customers, your database and your CRM.

So marketing automation is used to reach out to your database and your audience. When your audience interact and engages with your company, the marketing automation system itself needs to track all of that activity and be aware of it. And then in the meantime, all of that information should be syncing back and forth and communicating with your CRM. Again, all your system of record. So really, that marketing automation platform should be the engine for all of that communication between your audience.

Slide 19

We actually have three-day training courses on marketing automation and software platforms like this. It can help your company strengthen relationships through better communication. And number two, deliver sales insight. And number three, scale your operations. So obviously, number three is the subject of today’s webinar but I’m going to dig into three of these areas here.

Slide 20

Let’s talk about strengthening relationships. I’m sure everybody has heard about inbound marketing. It’s kind of a buzz [Unclear 00:14:36:29] that’s being created. So really inbound marketing is really about being in the right place at the right time. Outbound marketing, that’s really the opposite of inbound marketing. So that means reaching out to your audience. If we were to breakdown outbound marketing into two categories, we’ll break it down into online and offline. So let me step through these components real quick.

Online outbound marketing that would be email. So if you look at marketing automation platform, the key to very basic is the evolution of email marketing. Sure you probably use systems like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. But this is really version 2.0 of email communication. Outbound marketing is also sending text messages. So very similar to what we sent out for this particular webinar as a reminder.

The third piece of online marketing in reaching out is dynamic content. That mean taking content on your website and making that dynamic whether it’s a block of text, whether it’s an image. Changing that content based on who is visiting your site and what you know about them.

The fourth thing is popups. So based on visitor, maybe you have a visitor in London or at certain area, maybe Texas. Maybe you want to show them a certain popup or content based on their interest and where they’re coming from.

The last piece of reaching out and doing that digitally is sending surveys. So your system should be able to reach out and send polls and surveys to people.

And then the last point here which is offline marketing. So it’s very important to focus on that omni channel marketing. This is not about email only. You know when we say omni channel, its multi-channel. Sending the communication through digital means and through offline means. So postcards, handwritten letters. The power really comes from mixing up these two channels. The online and offline channel. So the key is to strengthen those relationships, use a platform that can help you do the online and offline and automate that and trigger this communication at the right time. That’s the key. And again, that’s going to help you strengthen those relationships.

Slide 21

Sales insight. So I’ll step through these real quick. Engagement history is super powerful to be able to deliver information like what you’re seeing on the left hand side of my screen to a sales rep. When they go to do their follow up and they know who they’re speaking to and what that person’s interests are about. So in this case, here’s a little preview of a profile and the timeline. You can see a website visit, some popups that were shown, and subsequently closed. You can see email. So if somebody is opening your email, they clicked the link in that email. When you’re a rep and you go to place that phone call, there’s nothing more important than knowing the interest of the person you’re connecting with.

The second thing here that can help your sales team and give them insight is who’s on your website? And quite simply, you want to know businesses and people that come to your website. So Lead Liaison for example, we’ll send out daily notifications to let the reps know who’s on their site. So it’s a great tool to help find them new leads and new opportunities.

The third piece of sales insight is buying signals. And it’s super powerful to– Again, you’re doing your outreach, you’re making phone calls, you’re prospecting. You won’t really know when somebody engages and maybe comes back to your website. So a lot of these of platforms will trigger what we call buying signals. And this is really a text message or an email to be both. But it will help the sales person understand the intent and when somebody is actually checking out the website and ready to engage. And those notifications will go to the owner. To the sales rep.

The fourth sales insight piece is lead priority. Most sales reps when they come in to the office, they’ve got a ton of things they’ve got to do that day. So you really need to establish priority and that priority can be done by the system itself by kind of separating hot prospects and showing that in a report or a dashboard. But also other mechanisms that this system use such as lead scoring and lead grading to help a sales rep understand what’s important and what’s not.

And then the last piece is social insight. So in Lead Liaison for example, whenever an email comes in to the system, we’ll go out to social media and we’ll pull in thousands of different data points from social media. So things like their gender. Male or female. Their age, twitter followers. Things like that. You can use that information obviously for marketing but as a sales rep, now you know more about who you’re communicating with. So it’s about getting to know your audience better.

Slide 22

The final piece here, in terms of kind of the essentials of marketing automation is about scaling your operations. A key thing is introduce automation. So if you look on the left hand side, you’ve got your basic funnel. It can be more advanced than this. Most customers here, most companies will have their own version of a funnel. But really you can break it down into these three different stages. You’ve a got a lead at the top of the funnel, you turn that lead into an opportunity, and then you have a customer.

Now on the right hand side, you see a color-coded version. So these are all the different ways an automation can help your business. Now, they’re color-coded for a reason. So the three top items here in red, these are primarily used in that lead phase of the funnel. So rapid inquiry follow up. This is a fact. 48% of reps don’t follow up with their leads. So being able to help automate and assign these leads to your reps and respond immediately, that’s very important. Early bird catches the worm.

And then lead generation. So as mentioned earlier, identifying businesses and people that come to your website, automate that. It’s really like putting a digital sales rep or an inside sales rep on your website. Obviously getting capital is very expensive but adding automation can help expose these opportunities for your sales team.

Distributing leads. Pretty round robin, could be giving it to a rep who doesn’t have much if they’re working on at that moment or geographical distribution. But these three things again can be automated as part of that lead stage of the funnel.

And then the middle of the funnel, lead qualification. Using concepts like scoring and grading to help prioritize these leads.

And then at the very bottom in green, when you’ve got a customer, you can use automation to help onboard your client. So right when they become a client, send them communications, give them tips and tricks, 30 days before their renewal whenever that might be, send them some notification. However you want to manage that is really up to you but automation can help with that onboarding.

And then the final and I’d say really important piece here, is nurturing. Now you see these, these green– You see these three color codes right here. The red, orange, and the green. Nurturing is the general concept. It’s not really a feature but it’s a general concept where you can use that multi-channel communication that I mentioned earlier. Whether online or offline communication to further strengthen and build that relationship. So whether it’s a new lead, whether it’s an opportunity or a client, nurture them. The best sorts of revenue for your business is going to come from your existing clients. It’s a lot easier to sell to them than to go generate new levels for your business. So use nurturing to help.

Slide 23

Look at this stat. So on the top left here, you see companies that excel at lead nurturing. According to Forrester Research, they generate 50% more sales ready lead at a lower cost. Because of automation and the fact that they can be more scalable, they’re not spending as much money. There is a lot of words in this stat here on the top right in blue. I really want you to look at the top one. I’ve mentioned this. 48% of reps never follow up. That’s horrible. So obviously, you want to follow up. Again, early bird catches the worm.

At the bottom here, you see 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact. Let me say it again. 80% of sales are made on the fifth to the twelfth contact. You’re take away from that should be that one touch is really not enough. Again, you’ve got to be nurturing, you’ve got to use different channels ’cause I know personally, if I got five to twelve emails in a row, I’m going to think it’s totally automated. Right? So it has to be personal which you got to mix it up. You’ve got to use your multiple channel to communicate. But it can’t just be one touch. It’s got to be more than one.

And then at the bottom here, this is really my call to action. You’re on this conference which will look like we got a lot of attendee from around the world. So if you’re a marketing leader and you’re not using marketing automation, you should be. Salesforce reports in their state of marketing, report that 67% of leaders currently use marketing automation. So don’t be the 33% of companies that are not using it because you’re not using it, you’re competition is.

Slide 24

How do you scale your marketing? What can you do? Well first thing is take action. On the left, these are the things that you can do. You can create a bunch of different content right? And get yourself out there. Promote your business. These are things like white papers, blog posts, videos, everything that I’m talking about there.

Syndicate a content. Let me give you an example. We wrote a five series blog post about integrating marketing automation with a specific CRM. So we took those five different blog posts and then we said, “Okay let’s turn that into a white paper so we can then put as a resource on our website. And then we’re going to make a video out of that. We might make five different videos.” So that’s what we mean by syndicating your content. Do it once but then chop it up and use it in different areas of your business.

And the third point about what you can do is have calls to action. It’s pretty self-explanatory but you have a landing page, you now have a call to action, have an offer, have a piece of content to download.

What can software do? So go out, get yourself a system like this, a marketing automation platform. Begin to track all your inbound activity. You could be doing anything on the left but if you’re not tracking it, it doesn’t do you any good. Begin to score your leads, nurture your leads, and then have that sort of a demarcation point where through your nurturing, you’re able to then– You’re marketing is able to hand off these warm leads over to their sales team.

You can obviously do that hand off when there’s a bottom of the funnel action. So what I mean by that is maybe somebody downloading a very key document like a brochure or a case study. Or somebody submitting a form like a general form or a Contact Us form. So those are bottom of the funnel actions. And when your marketing automation platform recognizes those, you want to quickly get that over to sales for their follow up. For their qualifying.

Second thing you could do when you hand off is set up score threshold. And I’ll actually show everybody what I mean by that but establishing value and when somebody goes past that value, then you hand it off to sales. And then the last thing to be what we call a life cycle stage. And a life cycle is really identifying where a potential buyer is or even a client in terms of their overall communication with you through their life cycle.

Slide 25

This is what Lead Liaison call the life cycle funnel. We actually have these seven stages in the platform. So anonymous is anybody that comes in to the system. So visitor-tracking wise, you go to a track website. We can identify that business. We might not know the person but we’ve identified the business so we created an anonymous profile. If you have an email in the system but there’s been no inbound activity, there what we call a suspect. Once we track and identify inbound activity, this could be an email click, a form submission, we say they’re engaged.

And then there is this stage here. Marketing qualified. And that’s an orange for a reason. At that point you might say, “Hey, they’re qualified. Let me send it over to my CRM, in this case Administrate. You could make that hand off at that point.

Slide 26

I actually am going to do a live demo.This would be a brief demo but a little background here. So we’re going to use a set of scoring threshold of 300 points. So when I say scoring, in Lead Liaison we actually score from 0 to a 1000. So what we’re going to do is use a feature, scoring threshold, and say once this prospect goes past 300, we want to go ahead and send them over into Administrate. Which should be the CRM of record in this example

[Lead Liaison live demo screen]

This is Lead Liaison right here where we just got a sandbox account. Now, I’m in the scoring area. So one thing to highlight, you can set these generics scores for all these activities. You can get very granular if you– For example web form submission. Every form submission will be 50 points. Now, you could say a specific form has a 100 points so on so forth. You can see per event because again, Lead Liaison was used to help to manage this webinar. Somebody signs up, they’d get a 100 points. So you set scoring there.

Choose a threshold. So again we set it at 300. Now if I click edit here, basically you can see if the prospect goes above 300, we want to do this thing. So it’s very modular. In this case, we’re going to sync to Administrate. And then we configure different parameters in terms of the values that we want to see and Administrate when we push it over. But you could do other things. It’s kind of like an action template. So if I want to set a life cycle stage as I’ve mentioned, and I want to maybe make it marketing qualified inside Lead Liaison, I could do that. So basically, you run all these different actions when the prospect goes above 300.

So over here we’ve got Administrate. I’ve got a tab open. We’ll kind of see the new opportunity created in Administrate. In Lead Liaison, what we’re going to do is create a new prospect. We’ll just do this from scratch. Tommy Walker. Making stuff up here. Okay. So now we’ll go their profile after we create the prospect. This is a prospect profile here again skipping details in the essence of time but what I’m going to do is go ahead and change their score. And remember that scoring threshold was 300. Notice over in Administrate.

I’ll refresh here, there’s no Tommy Walker in terms of an opportunity. So we don’t see anything there. We see Jane, Thomas, Cammie. So over here, we’ll change that again to say 350. Actually we’ll make it 400 and we’ll hit enter. So now we’ve changed that score to 400 again the score would typically be driven up by engagement and website visit and things like that okay. But we’re just manually doing that again in the essence of time.

So if we come over here, we had refreshed inside of Administrate. We’re going to see Tommy Walker. So the way that we’re recording the opportunity here is we’re putting the score, reporting purposes. And then there’s the individual over there and then again, all the parameters that you’ve configured will go along with that record down here.

Slide 27

So for those of you who don’t know, we just walked through Lead Liaison, a sales and marketing automation solution. None of you have really notice what training management system is. And so I wanted to make sure that people understood what that term meant. Training management system is supposed to run really the core operations of your training company. So that means anything from the sales and marketing process to the delivery of the training, with the reporting, it’s really sort of the backbone that manages the data of your students or instructors, your locations and venues. All the things that go into running the training.

A TMS is really designed to help you grow your business. There’s lots of great tools out there that help with training itself. With delivery of training, with the technology around it. But oftentime it’s very disjointed and not connected back to a central hub. And a training management system acts that central hub.

For our purposes today, we’ll going to be focused on the CRM component of Administrate and so if you’re on this webinar, you’re not a training company at all or you’re not into that space, these concepts are still applicable to any CRM really. We integrate with Salesforce, we’re on their app exchange, we have customers that use that as their primary CRM, and then get it into our workflows from there. But what we’re going to be talking about today is that CRM functionality that allows you to customize a sales pipe flow.

Slide 28

What we’ll be doing is talking about creating a streamlined process. We don’t want to have sort of a big wall between your marketing side, your sales side, and then the delivery side. If there’s anything that gets lost in between, it can create really terrible customer experience. You want them to have one interaction with your company regardless of where they are on this journey. So using Administrate and connecting tools that are purpose-built that can– Like Lead Liaison that can create a single experience for the customer is very very important.

Slide 29

Why would you want to manage your training sales funnel within a training management system? The goal over here really is to take your sales out of the land of just sort of guessing and gut feel and here’s what I think based on the relationships that I have. All that’s valuable inside that your sales people can have but you can’t rely on that in order to really scale an organization. In order to scale sales, you’re going to need to run sales like an operation like you would any other part of your business.

So to be able to set up a pipe that allows you to work through these stages of your sales process in a consistent manner, allows you the ability to start breaking it down and treating it more methodically so that you can see where your leads are, where they’re being nurtured, where they’re not, and how that is progressing. What this does is it provides transparency. You can start to see where your leads maybe falling off. If you analyze this information and start acting on it, you’ll be able to resolve any problems that you have during your workflow. Any areas where you’ve got a nice lead flow coming in and then it just gets stuck or drops off at one point. You can focus your efforts on that area and then resolve that and turn it into a nice predictable flow. At the end of this, you should have what we call predictable revenue and again, that’s a model kind of like the marketing automation is a model. You can create predictable revenue in a business like this using these types of methods.

Slide 30

I will use the same funnel graphic because what we’re saying is that this creates one continuous funnel from your marketing side to the sales side. And effectively, when you’re using Lead Liaison with Administrate, you are nurturing those leads in the demonstration. You are going all the way to marketing qualified.

Sales vetting, you can have the sales team do some initial calls to make sure that they are– Understand the business that they– Understand the needs and they get a proper follow up to them. So at that point you can go down to sales qualified. There’s nurturing that happens at this stage too. Oftentimes we think of this as perhaps being the longest stage of the nurturing. If you feel like you should be able to turn that– Okay we’ve got a qualified lead which you should be able to turn that into revenue right away. Depending on what you’re trying to sell, that could become a much longer process.

And then ultimately, you get down to proposals and winning. So what you want this to look like is a continuous even smooth funnel all the way from the first contact with your organization and constant contact until they have either won or decided that this is just isn’t for them.

Slide 31

If we go to the next slide you’ll see a screenshot of Administrate. The upper left hand corner there. This part of the screen demonstrates what it looks like when you’re working with the system like Administrate to actually push these leads through. It gives us a nice visual workflow of where these leads are coming in. For us, we actually as mentioned at the top of the webinar, we do use lead Liaison as a company and this is actually a picture of our pipe. So we use our own tools and Lead Liaison for our sales processes so we know how this works very first hand. So they come in from Lead Liaison as marketing qualified and they go through these stages. You’ll see the numbers generally go down until they become propose then onto won or lost.

So that’s how this works for us and that’s a very common workflow and you should be able to see very visually where you’re leads are in these stages. So let me go through a few examples.

Slide 32

This one is a slide that says,“Where are my leads stuck?” So when you first look at these numbers, these areas may not jump out to you. But what you’re looking for based on just ratios and based on changes over time are areas in your pipe where leads are not smoothly going from one stage to the next. Now of course you’re not going to have all 250 leads generated become one but you should have a consistent narrowing because what you’re doing is you’re qualifying them, making sure that you are a good fit for their business and vice versa. And making sure you can engage them into the point where they want your services.

So in the first column in column A, you would see that we have a 100 marketing qualified leads and then if they pass them off to the sales team and they actually only considered 10 of them qualified for what they’re going to pursue. That’s probably a red flag. That probably means that there’s some gap between what your marketing department and what your sales department are viewing as qualified and that maybe something that you can work together on to narrow that gap. Maybe sales is overqualified, they’re being too stringent, maybe you’ve got some kind of looseness going on on the marketing side and just sending too many over but you want to be able to close that gap.

Each of these examples has a place where you have something that you can identify and work on. And I will go through each and every one of them but the idea is you want to be able to find these areas, improve them, and this will get you to the point where you can predict your revenue.

Slide 33

So moving to the results slide, this whole process will remove the divide between your marketing and sales teams. One big continuous funnel. Sales and resources should be appropriately used. If you think about it, if you have a gap between these teams or the processes involved, what will happen is you’ll start misusing your resources in creating ways in your business. If your sales people are trying to nurture leads that really don’t have much interest or don’t know who you are yet and then you passed that lead over too quickly and you’re wasting that resources time. And the same could happen in the other direction. If you’re over qualifying, you could be wasting the effort you got to acquire the lead and this could be letting it fall out of your funnel when you could have revenue.

So think of creating this into a very structured process is going to allow you to be highly efficient with your business. So just the key is to analyze those metrics. They will tell you where you can improve, where you can grow, and if you keep your eye on the ball there you will get to that predictable revenue.

Slide 34

And for the 83% of people that don’t have experience with marketing automation and 46% of people that really don’t nurture leads, here’s a great opportunity. So we’re offering two free months on an annual subscription here. So added to your subscription, for any new clients of Administrate. So if you are interested in Administrate, I encourage you to take action and start to use their awesome system. So if you’re a new client or even an existing customer of Administrate, again we’ll  give you two free months of $1,300 value.

In my demo, I did not show the connector but it’s a very straightforward connector and we’ll provide you some complimentary assistance in setting that up as well. So all of that is good through the end of the year. That’s our holiday gift to everybody attending.

Q&A

Q: The first question I have is, if I [Unclear 00:46:50:25] in Lead Liaison conversion form in our website, will it automatically pull through to Administrate? And can that be customized to match specific Administrate field?

A: So you certainly can. Those are formed inside Lead Liaison. All marketing automation platforms should have that capability but to visually drag and drop and build a form or you have an existing form, you know map the form. But once the form is submitted, you can use the techniques that I’ve showed you here. In my demo I used scoring threshold. But you could basically say it’s a form that’s submitted then you could invoke that send to Administrate connector or action I should say which again would push the record into Administrate.

Now this is the first iteration of the integration with Administrate. We do have plans to evolve that based on demand of course but we’re pushing it into Administrate as an opportunity as shown in my demo. So you do have some level of configurability on different parameters in the opportunity. So there is some customization but some of the other field that you might have, maybe like a custom build or something wouldn’t go in to the record inside Administrate.

Q: As a person unsubscribes to communication via Administrate, will the person be auto unsubscribed from Lead Liaison?

A: So I think there’s a little bit of a difference but in terms of the email capability between the two platforms, it wouldn’t really be connected. If your reps saw an opportunity and then they wanted to maybe take action on that, update the record, they could do that. But in terms of unsubscribes, if you are using Lead Liaison for nurturing newsletter communication things like that, we do have our own unsubscribe mechanisms on our platform but that would not update today in Administrate and vice versa.

If they’d unsubscribed during the marketing process, you can make sure that it basically never flows down. In Administrate we have an unsubscribe option too but if you want to make sure that you don’t then hit them back with remarketing, you need to make sure that that gets passed back. That’s not part of the automation that we have today.

Q: You mentioned marketing automation is like email 2.0. Why is that?

A: Well let’s talk about email 1.0 right? I’ve mentioned Mailchimp, Constant Contact, lot of email systems like that. You could send out an email and then maybe you cross your fingers. I mean back in the day people would say, “Oh. How many opens did I have?” or “How many clicks did I have?” But you really have to connect your email activity to your website activity and overall engagement.

So email 1.0, you send an email, you see some email stats and that’s about it. And then also email 1.0, you create an email, you send it to your database, you quote unquote blast an email out to your database and I don’t know about everybody on the call but I never want to be blasted. So marketing automation systems again with the 2.0 version of email, you can really deeply segment who you communicate with. So you’re sending the right message at the right time. And when people are engaging with your email, they open or click and come to your website and download content or submit a form, all that activity is added into their profile. So you really have a holistic view of what that prospect is doing. Way above and beyond just email activity.

 

To learn more about the solutions that the presenters mentioned in the webinar, request a personalized demonstration now!

Lead Liaison Webinar

Video in Email Workflows, Webinar Transcription

To watch this webinar in its entirety, click here.

Summary

We show you how to use video in email to boost your conversion rate by strategically adding them into your email workflows.

Presenters

Margot Mazur, Wistia

Ryan Schefke, Lead Liaison

Transcription

*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.

Slide #7

So video is amazingly human, something that Ryan touched on a little bit earlier.  It’s a great way for you to show your face to your company, to delight your users, and also to make sure that they’re sharing the content that you put out.  So you’ll see here 69% of users say, “They shared a branded video, if they had the information that might be of interest to your friends.” Video is going to be the best way for you to get your information out there.  It’s more compelling than any copy that you could write, and it’s a lot more human, it has you relate to your customers.

Slide #8

It builds brand rapport, humanizes your brand, and keeps folks attention and helps to explain and support.  So instead of writing that giant explanation about this or that feature, you can make a video about it and have folks be really engaged with that video.

Slide #9

We did a really great AB test a few months ago, where we tested eight different emails.  What we did was we cut the copy and the CTA and actually the image exactly the same. All we did was we changed that video thumbnail.  So you got that play button on the image and you got that timestamp on there. So side-to-side, you have the same exact email, one that has that play button and timestamp, the other does not.  We have different categories of email as well. So we didn’t just do only launch emails or only product feature emails. We had plugged emails, we have webinar invites, and we had all sorts of different conversational emails as well.  So same email, same image, except for that play button and timestamp. And what we wanted to learn was, is one email going to perform better than the other? Are we going to get a higher click-through rate with one email than the other?

Slide #10

We ended up seeing, long story short, 21.52% difference.  So you’re using a video thumbnail instead of a regular image, can increase your click-through rate by 21.52% on average.  This was an incredible finding as I’m sure you’re also seeing. We definitely thought that it was going to have an impact.  We just didn’t realize how big that impact would be. So this was a super exciting training on our end.

Slide #11

So using video in email, just a word video in your email subject line, can boost your open rates by 19%.  So what we do in here is we’ll say, “Great video in here,” you know, and then continue on the subject line or, video in parenthesis or bracket and continue on to the subject line.  So that will help folks get an idea of what they’re clicking into. It’s really good to have your audience know what they’re getting into in an email. Although those really fun subject lines might seem exciting, it might seem like it can boost your open rate, just telling folks what they’re in for, is going to be a better bet for us, what we’ve seen in the past.

Slide #12

You might be thinking, “Well where do I put video in email?  Which is the right email to put a video thumbnail in?”

Slide #13

You actually have a ton of choices here.  So adding video to a webinar registration page makes it more human, it makes it more inviting.  You may have seen a video in our registration pages in the past, what that does is kind of, creates a human element.  We give a little bit more of our personality in that video, and it makes that webinar registration page just stand out a little bit more.

Slide #14

You can also add video to a landing page of any type, and then use that thumbnail in your email promo.  So if you got an email from us, asking you to register for this webinar, you will have seen that we used the video thumbnail in there, and we generally do that when we have video that plays to that same subject, we use that video thumbnail in the communication.  Folks open up that email, they see, “Oh, there’s going to be a great video in here if they click that, takes it over to landing page, they feel more connected, they’re more likely to register.”

Slide #15

You can also use video for lead generation in general.  So we do have this feature called transdial, essentially what it is, is a lead form that you can put on top of your video.  So whatever video that may be, you can put that lead generation form in there and have folks enter their email to sign up for more content or to view the video in this case, or any other copy that you might want to put in there.

Slide #16

Here’s a good example that we use every once in a while.  We have Santa Barbara Chicken Ranch. They used a turnstile so that video lead generation form on this video to encourage folks to sign up for a free quarter chicken plate.  So essentially, they grew their email as by 800% just by putting that turnstile in there. You could choose a video that folks watch really often, that’s doing really well, that has a time engagement, you can use a fun product video like you see here, or you can use any other type of how-to video, or a case study, or example anything on your site that you think is going to go really well.

Slide #17

So a little bit of eating our own dog food here.  Here’s where we use turnstile. For example, on our webinars page, if you go to wistia.com /webinars, you’ll see a whole bunch of webinars that we’ve done in the past, and when you go to click in, you can watch a little bit of that webinar, and then you’ll see there’s ton of style coming, about 10%, 20%.  So that will say, “Hey, you know, did you like this video, so far. You can enter your email address to view the video and learn more.”

Slide #18

Now you might think, “Well, where do I put that lead gen form?  Do I put it right in front, like that feels kind of weird, maybe folks who see the form, they don’t want to play the video, and if you put it at the very end, well they would watched the videos, so why would they enter their email address?”  We’ve actually done a bunch of test here and we found that putting your turnstile 20% in the video is going to be the best bet. And you might think here, “Well you’re kind of cutting off the content for folks, doesn’t that feel weird for your user?”  I would say, make sure to script your video around the turnstile. So when you shoot the video, you know that you’re planning to put the lead generation form in there. You could say, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch more to talk about. If you want to hear the rest of the conversation, just fill in your email address, and then out comes the turnstile.  That’s going to be your best bet. You want to give folks a little bit of an idea of what else they’re going to hear about—going to want to make sure that those folks are already engaged and then put out that lead gen form, instead of putting it in the beginning or in the very end.

Slide #19

The same goes for calls to action.  So any sort of CTA that you want to put in the video.  Maybe it’s an annotation link that takes folks outside of the video, you might think, it’s better to put it at the end or it’s better to put it at the beginning.  We’ve actually found way higher conversion rates when we put it right at the middle.

Slide #20

And what happens next, you can use video in email in workflows in a really great way.  And I’m going to let Ryan take it over from here to tell us a little bit about that.

Slide #21

So we kind of blow this down into seven steps to help boost your conversions with your video emails.  On the left hand side, you see the four items in purple, which are really about some basic concepts. On the right, these are more advanced concepts.  So on the right, the precursor is that you would have a marketing automation system in place like Lead Liaison, it could be any of those systems. On the left, so these are the things you wanted to do and I’ll speak more about these shortly, but obviously, enable turnstile, like Margot mentioned.  The second thing is you want to have a good landing page tool that could be your CMS like WordPress, could be lead pages, on bounce, anything like that. The third thing is you want to have an email marketing system to send out your email. So it could be MailChimp, constant contact, of course, if you’re using marketing automation, you’re going to have email tools built into it.  And number four, you want to be able to trap engagement. You want to have a good visitor tracking system in place. You can really harness the power of marketing automation to do multiple things to again boost their conversions.

Slide # 21 and 22

So two important things, number one, you want to place the actual video on your website.  So Margot talked about, creating a thumbnail image of your video. And this is important. Basically, email client like Outlook and Google mail, they can’t run HTML and very rich JavaScript, just like your browser can.  So the email client is very different. So you want to put that video so you can use things like turnstile and more advanced tracking, put that on your website. So that’s number one, plays the video on your website. Number two, again, you want to have a good visitor tracking solution.  And you know, visitor tracking is pretty straightforward and easy to use and install. So if anybody is using like Google analytics, it can be installed the same way. You take a couple lines of JavaScript, you put it on your website, in the footer of your website, and then that begins to kind of kick in and do its magic which I’ll speak about in a second.  Usually a visitor tracking system starts around $250 per month, so pretty affordable.

Slide #22

Why do you want to do these things?  Really you want to track the engagement.  So Wistia provides some really amazing analytical tools to identify businesses and the conversions.  But when you have a visitor tracking system in place that allows you to do three things. Of course, you can track businesses that come to your site and watch the video.  You also contract people that come to your site. So even before they watch the video or enter their email that visitor tracking system can monitor what these people do. So the very first time they come to your website that that technology is tracking all of their behavior from cradle to grave.  And all these time, it’s building a very rich profile of that person. So we like to call that, at Lead Liaison, a digital DNA. So it’s kind of understanding their interest and things that they do before they even watch the video, when they watch the video, and after they watched the video. I think, as marketers, we tend to be very in-hammer with this open and clicks, but the more meaningful thing is what do they do when they were on the website.  How much of that video did they watch, how deep did they engaged, and where did they go after they watched the video. So a visitor tracking tool will basically help you track video engagement page views. When people download documents, so your brochures, whether it’s a restaurant menu, or a datasheet, whatever it is, on-site search terms, form submissions that people are clicking specific buttons or taking your call to action. You’re building that very rich profile of people.

Slide #23

So why is this important to really understand the buyer’s journey and what they do, and how does this help and who does it help really.  So let’s answer that question. It primarily helps two people, sales and marketing. So if you’re on this call, and if you’re in marketing, I’m very sure, at one point in your career, you thought to yourself, “Man, you know, I give a ton of leads over to my sales team, and they just don’t do anything with it.”  And if you’re on this call and you’re in sales, you probably think, “Boy, I really wish that marketing could give me better data, give me more qualified leads.” Well the good news is that, if you have visitor tracking and marketing automation, which is going to have visitor tracking built into it, there is kind of a happy media.  So as the marketer, you can help sales people with two things–better timing and then better insight. So when I say timing that tracking solution will help you understand when that person engages. So even though you sent out, for example, your video email, it could be two or three days later before they actually click that video thumbnail, and then watch the video, and then do other things after the video.  So you want to make sure you know when that happened so that sales can be notified of that activity. Also, as a sales person, its better invite. You now know what people care about, what their interests are, sort of like if you’re a car salesperson, right, it would be great to know when that person walked into the lot, what they were looking at on their computer, what kind of car they were interested in, what different features, things like that, and the sales person, when you go to engage, you want to know all of their interest, same concept.  The second benefit here is marketers have more data. So they can make better marketing decisions. And I’ll talk about that in a second.

Slide #24 and 25

The next thing that you obviously want to do, do you want to enable turnstile, so Margot talked about that, and as you do that, you are ready to send your video email.  And from my perspective, you got three options to do that. Option one, don’t have visitor tracking system and just use any email provider, again, constant contact, mailchimp.  You can still send your video email. But today, again, we’re talking about how do you boost your conversions right, how you get more out of it. So having that video in your email, you’re going to get that 21.52% click through rate that Margot mentioned, but how can we do more?  So option two, get a visitor tracking system in place, and use your email provider again, MailChimp, constant contact, but add some mail merge tokens in there. So in your links that you might have inside your email that points back to the video on your webpage, you can put certain parameters on the end of your link so that your visitor tracking solution will pick up that person and sort of build that profile that digital DNA of the individual.  And in option three, send that email with marketing automation. So any good marketing automation system is going to have a really good email tool inside of it to help you build and send your email. It is going to have the capabilities to build a landing page, and then also, it’s going to give you capabilities to implement advanced concepts.

Slide #26

Let me speak about what those advance concepts are.  Really it is about automation, and automation can help you achieve multiple things, but at the highest level, no marketing automation of the platform that can help you with lead qualification, help you with nurturing, and help you with retargeting.  if you’re not familiar with marketing automation, you definitely should be. So, I kind of like marketing automation to how CRM was 10 to 15 years ago. It is becoming very, very popular. Today, if you look at the company and they don’t have a CRM, you kind of scratch your head and you say, “Hey, why don’t you have a CRM?”  Marketing automation is really becoming the same way, and not necessarily a nice thing to have, it’s really a necessary thing to have. So why automation in general beneficial for companies and how can that help you convert more and boost your conversions? Well the data doesn’t lie. According to a new in this group, when you’re nurturing you’re shortening your sales like all by 23%, and you’re also generating bigger deal size, it’s like 47%.  The final point, which is a point by Gardner, they site that automating lead management can help you achieve a 10% or greater increase in revenue in a 6 to 9 months period.

Slide #27

So extremely compelling fact here, why wouldn’t you use marketing automation is really the question.  One capability of the marketing automation system to help you boost those conversion is, again, lead qualification.  So let’s put this into full perspective. You’ve got your video thumbnail, and find your email, people click through.  They click on that image that takes them to your website, on your landing page where they’ve got that full video. Well one click through happens, you can begin qualifying these leads.  And this is great for sales people. So here you see an example of how marketing is really, you know, they’re the producer and sales is the consumer. So marketing is helping to automatically qualify by doing what we call scoring and grading, and serve up these warm prospects to their sales team.  So you might be asking, well what’s the difference between the two? Not every marketing automation system offers both of these. Most of them provide scoring, but just to comment real quickly, scoring is a way to, it’s a number, you know, again, every system could be different, but it could be from zero to a thousand for example.  And it’s a way to identify how interested a prospect is in your services. So the more that they engage, the higher that number is going to be. So the way for you to identify engaged buyers and interested buyer, grading is really a way for you as a company to identify individuals that are ideal match for you. It’s about identifying your ideal buyer.  So in the B2B world, for example, is their job title, so the campaign VP, or are they in a certain geography of the world that would be a good match for you, and where your company does business. So that’s at all about being better at qualifying leads.

Slide #28

The next thing that marketing automation system can do is to help you nurture, and this is really where you’re going to see that boost in your conversions.  So I wanted to give you three tips, you know, tip number one, is nurture interested prospects, and just the simple fact that people are clicking through that video email, and clicking on the thumbnail, that means they’re interested.  You have to assume that. So they’re now taking action. They are engaging. And once they engage, you then want to nurture them a little bit more because they’re interested. So tip number one, don’t nurture random prospects or cold contacts.  Do it with interested people. Tip number two, it’s a really important concept. You know, people don’t just buy right away. Every business is different, but a current B2B to B2C, it typically takes 7 to 13 or more different touch points to generate your sales ready qualified leads, got it, 7 to 13 different touch points.  Again, B2B or B2C could be different. So the important thing, and I don’t know about you all, but you know, if I watch the video, and then I got 7 to 13 different emails, I’d be pulling out my hair and I might hate the company that’s communicating with me. So that’s not what it’s all about. It’s a misnomer that when you hear nurturing, it’s not just about email.  Once somebody watches your video email, and host it on Wistia, and they go through the video, you got to have a mechanism to then nurture them but not just through email. Use things like postcards, use handwritten letters, use text messaging, use different channels, right, so it’s about multichannel marketing. Don’t just be boring and send out, you know, consecutive email.  Switch it up a little bit, and today the advance marketing automation system can help you deliver multichannel nurturing. And then to kind of wrap this up, let’s just take a really simple example. Let’s say that your company offers three solutions, solution A, B, and C. And maybe you’ve got this video in your email, and it’s on solution B. When you send out your email and people watch that video, they click through, go to the landing page, don’t follow up and nurture them with information on solution A, you know, follow-up and engage in nurture them on solution B.  Again, we call that at Lead Liaison responsive marketing. So it’s having that conversation with the person at the right time with the right content. It’s no longer about blasting you know an email to ten thousand people. It’s about engaging, and again, being relevant at the right time.

Slide #29

The final point before I wrap up with some best practices is really retargeting.  I’ve spoken about a good visitor tracking solution to help you identify somebody’s interest and where they poke around on your website.  That’s important. I’ve also spoken about a good marketing automation system to make sure that you can nurture in a very relevant way at the right time. Let’s take the two concepts and put them together, take all that data, take the nurturing, and let’s use it in the right way.  So down the road, once you collected that data, let’s say for example, somebody watches your video on solution B, well maybe six months down the road, you have a new capability or a new feature for solution B. You should share it with everybody, but no longer are you going to blast it to you database of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people.  You can use your marketing automation platforms to hyper target people that had engaged with your video email. So when you know people have watched solution B already and they did that sometime in the last six months, send those people the update because the other people probably don’t care about it.

Slide #30

Retargeting is a way to take all that data, take the capabilities you have with marketing automation, and then hyper target those individuals with the right message.  Number one, I think it’s also a misnomer that people try to use video and email or nurturing just for prospects. It’s really about communicating with customers too. I’d encourage everybody on the phone to kind of think about pivot your pipeline, you know, or flip your phones or turn it upside down.  Marketing automation system, the really purpose built to nurture people better in the middle of the funnel or even at bottom of the funnel.

Slide #31

These video emails and marketing automation, it’s not just for prospects.  It’s about people in your funnel and your customers too. The second best practice here is when you’re creating your content, whether it’s your video itself, and Wistia does an excellent job with this, or your email, or your landing page, whatever it is, try to really think like a professor.

Slide #32

Make sure your content is educational.  Don’t provide a sales pitch. Don’t get up there and talk about your product and features.  Again, try to educate. It’s going to serve you well. The last point here is, and I think this is the beauty of Wistia and their ability to humanize communication is keep your emails free.  I’ll tell a really quick story. We have a client, you know, and they create this newsletter, and it really is eight pages long. You have to scroll from top to bottom. And inside the newsletter, they’ve got crazy things, it’s a car dealership.  And they’ve got things like recipes and just random things, you know. The beauty of putting video inside your email is that it can be short. Everybody on the phone call here today, probably have busy lives, you’re doing a million things, probably you have right now, but you want to, you know, people like small little communication bits, you know, small size.  So strip out all the text, replace it with a video, you’re going to be much more effective, take that extra step to record the video and put that in your email.

Q&A

Q: What is the best way to get people to buy into using video and email, and is it worth taking the time to put forth that extra effort?  

A: Yes, absolutely.  It’s definitely worth that time. I would definitely say, put in that time  It doesn’t have to be this super overproduce, really intense video that you hired another agency out do or maybe you do and that’s great too, but you can start with a smaller, a little more personal video.  So somewhere where you can do that is in those webinar intro video. So for example, if you have a webinar that you’re going to do, pop on camera, you can actually do this right on a laptop or using your iPhone.  We actually have some really great information on making videos like this on our Wistia blogging library. So I highly recommend going to wistima.com/blog or wistia.com/library and checking that out. It doesn’t have to be a giant video, you don’t have to put a ton of effort into it, just try it out and see how it works for you, and then go from there.

Q: Can you explain what turnstile is again?

A:  A turnstile is that lead generation form shows that right on your video. So you can do this by going into your Wistia account, and selecting turnstile, and you can make that copy, say whatever you like, and you can connect it to your MailChimp or whatever you use for email as well, and then of course, into Lead Liaison.  Okay, let’s see. What information can be collected in a turnstile, this is a question from Greg, and where does that collected information gets stored? So you can have your first name, last name or email in a turnstile right now, and you can pass that on to pretty much any email provider that you use, or you can download those into a CSV to use anywhere else. You’re using automation system or even visitor tracking, when people put in their information into the turnstile form that will automatically create a record in one of the systems for you so you shouldn’t have to do any exporting and importing things like that.

Q: What is the ideal length of videos?  

A: From Wistia’s end, we’ve seen videos do the best when they’re under two minutes long.  If you’re going to use video in email, I would definitely suggest starting at the 32nd mark, something like that, anywhere that’s under a minute.  Because if you use that timestamp in your email in the video thumbnail, folks will look at it and they’ll see, “Oh, 45 seconds, I have that, I’m out of time, no problem, I’ll go click it.  Whereas if you’re video is, let’s say three-minutes long, and they look at that, they’ll more likely to say, “Oh, three minutes. I don’t know, that seems like a lot of time. So I would just suggest start short and go from there. A minute or two is good, and I think the capabilities we’ve talked about today, you know, if you got, I mentioned you know, solution B, right.  So maybe you have that video on your landing page, don’t try to cram everything and find that video. Remember, you now have the capabilities to automatically trigger follow-up communication. So it could be something like instead of a 10-minute video, you could have five, two-minute video clips. So they watch the first video, and you know, more soon or something like that, and then you follow up with those additional video emails, and you can completely automate all that.  So you set up your campaign and let it run.

Q: Any tips for convince your boss strategy for adopting a marketing automation program, can you talked about that?

A:  It’s a lot easier if you are you the boss, but if you do need to convince your boss, you know I think you’d sit there and you kind of look at really two things.  Number one, you look at ROI. So every business is different. Again, it could be your chicken sandwiches like Margot talk about, or you’re selling 10, 50, 100 thousand dollar services.  So you know, if automation can again accelerate the sale or help make bigger purchases, remember those numbers, 47% larger purchases on average by the use of marketing automation. That’s really compelling.  So sit there and do the math based on your business. The second thing that I’d tell your boss is I would say that, you know, automation can help your company be more efficient. Now, that’s oftentimes a hard thing to measure and quantify, but if you can implement processes like this, that are automated that you can continue to reuse over and over, and through doing things like tracking your businesses and people that come to your website, that’s like adding a salesperson into your website.  Again, depending on your business, sales people are not inexpensive. So you’ve got a big expense there. But you’ve got huge efficiency gains in building an automation in your business. It helps your company be more efficient and be more process oriented, and that’s critical when you want to grow your business. You know, you can’t build a business off of a poor foundation. You got have a good foundation. So I’d say to sum that up, look at the ROI based on your business, and then number two, really looked at the efficiency gains through automation, and how do you quantify that.

Q: Should the video thumbnail take the readers to a landing page with a video with another content or just play the video?  

A: What you want you want to do is you want to take the video thumbnail which is that photo of what that video screen looks like with the play button and the timestamp, and put that in your email, and then link that out to either your website like Ryan was saying earlier, or to a landing page, or to your blog or wherever it is that that video may lift.  So that video is not going to play in the email itself. It’s going to link your audience to wherever that video lift. So it’s on a website, your landing page, or blog, your library, wherever it may lift. From there, you’re going to be able to track with Wistia, how do people watch that video, are they watching to a certain point, are they following up in a certain point, are they re-watching, maybe they’re confused about something in the video, or maybe they’re really interested about something in the video.  So you can get your analytics from that. Email clients, right, so when I say an email client, either things like, again, Google mail or Outlook or Lotus Notes, you know, whatever you’re using, many of them cannot play or run JavaScript right which is a coding language. So your browser is the client that really people should be using to watch your video, not the email client. There’s a big difference between the two. I think that really is a misunderstanding, you know, we have a ton of people come to us and, “Oh, we just want to put those video inside the email,” but that’s technologically not a great idea.  Some clients can play it, but for the most part, you’re safer and better off to get that additional tracking putting your video on your landing page.

Q: What are your findings on using animated .gifs in an email to tease a video instead of just a still image thumbnail?  

A: But you know, it’s hard to say when we haven’t the full AB test.  We’ve seen them do really well for us, and I know, I click on gifts when they’re coming at me from a different company email.  It’s just really engaging, it’s new, it’s different, it’s exciting, you can do a lot of really fun stuff with it. I would definitely say test it out.  See how it works for your company. We haven’t done a full AB test so I can’t really say, “Oh, for sure it works really well.” But you know, we’ve seen good things, and we might test it out soon.  So yeah, try it out.

Q: Can I use turnstile if I don’t have an email provider?  

A:  You definitely can, you can just download those emails into a CSV.  You can definitely try it out or you know you can try out a provider for free, like if there’s a free plan or, you know, definitely, the answer short is yes.  Hope you have travel insurance.

Q: Have you seen increase engagement based on the content of the thumbnail image?

A:  So people versus product versus text.  I would definitely say, Christopher, for us, human faces work best by far.  I can’t give you specific numbers because we haven’t—I don’t think we’ve done any AB tests although you can check me on that, and go to wistia.com/blog and see that we have—we definitely see that, putting a human face in there is going to be way better than text.  And I believe in the past better than product photos as well. It’s just more engaging, it’s more human, people want to see others smiling, excited, and it works best for us by far. We usually do photos of folks or video thumbnails of folks waving at the camera smiling or maybe they’re really excited something just happened and they’re like wow, but by far, human faces worked best for us.  

Q: How do you encourage more staff to be a part of videos who don’t feel comfortable in front of the camera or do you encourage one or two staff members to become regulars sharing information for your office?

A:  A lot of people don’t like being on camera.  It’s totally natural. It gets a little bit—it’s a little bit getting used to, mixed up my phrases there.  But actually, if you go to wistima.com/blog, we do have a blog post about how to work with folks on camera, how to make it easy for them.  We have a few best practices that we use. I would definitely recommend checking out. We generally just tell people shake it out, shake out their emotions, jump around, get silly, get weird, and then you know, that helps you get ready for the video.  We take a bunch of takes, so we don’t go all at once, and we also split up the script a little bit so folks feel more comfortable. Lots of different ways to do those. I would definitely check out that blog post. Okay, let’s see. And so I did mention that, and I don’t intend to lead with that always.  But just to comment, it is a full-featured platform that we do offer. I encourage you to check it out. You know, Jennifer, that is a deeper level of conversation, but you know, we’re not a public company. We are private company. So we tend to provide better service and cater more on, you know, to that mid-type company as opposed to just trying to focus on larger enterprises.  Also have some very unique capabilities in the platform. We tend to score really well when it comes to our automation capabilities. We’ve got some advance setting there, and then some cool ways, like I mentioned, to help you convert more people on your website.

Q: From your experience, is there a certain type of video that does better in emails than others?  

A: So, how to videos, humor, emotional, etc.  I’d say that we haven’t tested anything like that and I would say that it’s kind of difficult to tell because you’re just doing that video thumbnail, right.  The video thumbnail generally doesn’t tell you a lot about the content of the video. It’s an engaging piece for folks to want to click into that landing page or wherever it is that you put the video to watch it.  I would say in terms of the video thumbnail, if it’s something that is like overly funny, you know, it doesn’t do as well. We want folks to want to watch the video but we don’t want to make it ridiculous, because then people are like, wow does this really concern me, is this important.  So I would just say, you know, make that video thumbnail engaging, but don’t go over the top, if that helps. Just do one, you know, I think it’s a little bit of a paradigm shift, you know, people are not really used to putting video in emails, but I mentioned earlier, the best practice, try to keep it educational, but do that, but you know, be consistent in your communication for that. Give them something of value, and then, maybe not the first one is a good metric for you, but after you give them something of value and your following up with more video emails, whether it’s an automated way, or just one-by-one, that’s going to be the best thing for you to help drive engagement.

Q: Do turnstiles always require response or is there an option for someone to decline to answer the information and continue?  

A: There is a skip option on turnstile.  So if you want folks to be able to just get the turnstile and not have the option of not entering their email address, you can definitely do that.  I don’t recommend it, because then everyone will skip that, but I guess it does make it especially qualifying for the folks who do enter their email address.  That’s absolutely up to you.

Q: Have you used the skip option before, Ryan?

A: Yes we do.  We do offer that on certain videos.  We put a lot of our training videos on Wistia.  If you see on our website, we have explainer videos.  So we have used that, of course, depending on the video, but one other important point I want to make and not to highlight our capability too much here, but going back to how you can send your email.  You know, we’ve actually built in a feature inside Lead Liaison so that when you’re sending your video email, you obviously know who you’re sending it to through the marketing automation system. And when people click through that video thumbnail and go to your website, we know who that person is.  So there’s a built-in option to not actually show turnstile because you know that they’re engaging you know who it is, and we know that from the immediate, you know, click through on your video email. That’s an optional thing where you don’t have to offer that up to them in the turnstile. You can show it or the technology can just automatically hide it, you know, why ask them, why stop things, just keep the video going.  So that’s a feature inside our tracking system. It’s a great resource, and also really good reason to use Lead Liaison because if you know that person already, you don’t need their email address again. Showing them that turnstile is not the best user-experience for them. So if it’s someone that you already know, use that feature to hide that turnstile.

Q: Is it better to have the thumbnail take the reader to a webpage with just the video or one with the video plus other copy and maybe a registration form?  

A: Take that person from the email to a page with the video with other copy there with a registration form, perhaps, wherever it is that that video lives.  So whether it’s a landing page or it’s your blog post, and the video is just there to enhance the blog post, you can definitely do a page with just the video, but you want to go back and say, “What’s the point of this video?  What’s the CTA for the video? What do I want this person to do once they watch the video?” And from there, I would just take that video and put it where you want it to be. I think that’s subjective in terms of adding, you know, your text in your form.  If you are using a marketing automation platform, then you’re sending the email from the marketing automation system, you’re going to already know who that person is when they click the video thumbnail. So the cool thing is make it easy for the recipient.  So when that form loads up, if you choose to have a form, you can read through that form. So again, save them time. Maybe you don’t require them to enter their information in the turnstile video. Now they can watch the video performance, you know, 90% pre-filled with their information.  They just hit the enter button. So make it easy for people, simplify the process.

Q: When you test the effect of embedding a turnstile in the middle of the video, do you track what percentage of viewers simply build out of the video rather than enter their information?  

A: No, we don’t track that.  We just track the amount of folks who fill out that turnstile, and whether it works better in the middle, better in the beginning, better in the end.  I can, however pull up, just to clarify on that. I can pull up that test that we did. We wrote a blog post about it. I will tweet it right after this webinar using with the #WistiaCast so you get a little bit of a better idea on how that test worked.  I definitely am one of those people who wants to know everything about every test that’s absolutely me.

Interested in the Lead Liaison solutions you heard about during this webinar? Request a personalized domonstration of our capabilities here.

How to Use PPC and Marketing Automation Together, Webinar Hosted By Lead Liaison and Mad Fish Digital

Allen, TX – Google AdWords Premier Partner, Ben Herman, and marketing automation expert, Chris Kipgen, will team up to cover how using AdWords and marketing automation together can achieve more conversions at the same or lower cost per acquisition. The webinar will be held on Wednesday, January 24th at 1pm Eastern. Attendees can register for the event here.

Mad Fish Digital’s Ben Herman has a rich history of using and helping customers implement pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, with a concentration on Google search. He is the President and Co-Founder of Mad Fish Digital, a digital marketing agency based in Portland, OR. Lead Liaison’s Chris Kipgen is an industry expert, who is responsible for providing in-depth training and support for clients using the company’s sales and marketing automation solutions.

“At Mad Fish Digital, our mission is to provide marketers innovative solutions to the digital puzzle. I’m excited to be a part of this webinar because connecting Lead Liaison with paid search advertising platforms does just that. By combining the power of paid advertising with the marketing automation of Lead Liaison, marketers have an opportunity to optimize for the entire customer journey and smoothly facilitate leads through the entire marketing funnel.”

During this webinar, participants will hear how different industries use PPC campaigns, learn best practices and common pitfalls, and learn how to manage PPC campaigns in a marketing automation platform, such as Lead Liaison. Attendees will also learn tips and tricks on how to organize and educate hot leads throughout the entire buyer’s journey. Finally, attendees will gain actionable ideas to help implement these practices within their own organizations.

“AdWords is a great tool to get people to your content,” says Lead Liaison’s Chris Kipgen. “We come in at that point and help our clients identify, qualify, and nurture those Prospects. We can even show you which ads have generated the most revenue and the cost per qualified Prospect. If you want to get value out of your paid ads, Lead Liaison is the way to go.”

To register for this educational webinar, 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).

How to Run a Webinar: Syndicate Webinar Content

How to Run a Webinar

This is the ninth and final installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

In our most recent post in this series, we talked about pre-webinar bonding & follow-up. The last step of the process is to syndicate your content.

Syndicate Webinar Content

You’ve invested a ton of time planning and preparing for your event. Make sure you get the most out of your investment by syndicating your content. Syndication means taking the content and reformatting it to fit other mediums or marketing channels. For example, take your webinar recording and:

  • Have the video transcribed. We suggest using Upwork to hire someone to transcribe your video. It’s super affordable and worth the money!
  • Format the transcription into a white paper. Place the white paper on your website as Trackable Content in your marketing automation system and gate the content.
  • Put your video on an internet video hosting and analytics company like Wistia, embed it in your website, and gate the video.
  • Break down the white paper into smaller blog posts. Schedule the blog posts using your CMS.
  • Include the video, whitepaper, and any other related tools or documents in a downloadable “kit”, which is a fantastic lead generation strategy. Prospects are more inclined to give you their email address in exchange for lots of value.
  • Put the webinar recording in a “Resources” section on your website.

What to Expect

Attendance depends on the factors described in the beginning of this document. About 40-60% of registrants will show up for live viewings, but you can expect more registrants to trickle in and watch on demand over the next few days following your webinar.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this series. If you’ve got an idea for a series, we’d love to hear it! Comment below.

Do you want your own personal copy of the entire guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

 

How to Run a Webinar: Pre-Webinar Bonding & Follow-Up

How to Run a Webinar

This is the eight installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

In our last post in this series, we talked about building a compelling landing page and “Thank You” page. The next step is to get comfortable with pre-webinar bonding and follow-up.

Pre Webinar Bonding

If possible, create further short pieces of content that cover any possible objections and start building more trust with registrants. This can be drip fed via email before the webinar. This content could be short videos or articles or just a nice webinar cheat sheet to download and print off before the webinar. Your marketing automation software can help you build a simple drip track for new registrants prepping them for the event.

Follow Up

Make sure to follow up with attendees and no shows once the event is over. We suggest doing so three (3) days after the event. In your follow up, include a video recording of the webinar. Put it into an email, but only include an image of the video. When clicked, the recipient should be taken to a landing page, separate from your registration page, where they can play the video. Separating your follow up page from your registration page will help you isolate statistics and get better tracking from your marketing automation system. This is especially handy for people that couldn’t attend the event as they can watch the video later at their convenience.

In the next, and final, installment of How to Run a Webinar we’ll talk about syndicating your content.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the entire guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

 

Lead Liaison and Citrix’ GoToWebinar Join Forces

GoToWebinar by CitrixWebinars can be one of your company’s most powerful marketing channels. It is nutritional content that is relevant, up-to-date, and interactive. You have the ability to connect with many clients at once, using one powerful marketing platform. What could be more efficient than that? Lead Liaison chose GoToWebinar because the user experience is very similar to Citrix’ GoToMeeting platform. As of July 2016, a little over 1 out of every 4 companies using webinar solutions in some capacity use GoToWebinar. This means the majority of a user’s audience will be familiar with GoToWebinar, making it easier for them to join and participate in your event.

Lead Liaison combines automation with webinar-planning. Users manage details of the event by incorporating data from Prospects’ information and behavior with its powerful tools, such as landing pages, forms, emails, postcards, gifts, print material, etc.

What’s more, Lead Liaison’s marketing automation platform is responsive to the actions of the participants, much like any other event held using the capabilities of Lead Liaison. Brooke Barnes, Marketing Specialist at Select Energy Services, explains how the software helped her manage their most recent event,  “after we sent [our] invitation, based on how the recipients acted – if they opened it, or if they hit RSVP, or if they had a question – we were able to send follow-up emails based on the information that they needed. I would definitely recommend Lead Liaison to any business that has marketing and sales needs. It is so essential to have a single platform where you can manage all of your marketing communication, all of your content creation, get reports for your ROI, and align your marketing and sales team better. ”

Happy clients aren’t the only ones excited about our advanced integrations. Daniel Waas, Director of Marketing, GoToWebinar at Citrix, says, “Lead Liaison has built a thorough integration with GoToWebinar. Connecting the two platforms provides marketers with a great deal of flexibility in matching webinar content to the right audience through smart segmentation, in personalizing email invitations and follow-up emails to maximize attendance and in scoring leads based on their engagement.”

The ultra-supportive marketing automation company, Lead Liaison, prides themselves on the level of responsiveness and guidance they provide to their users. As a part of their growing Resources Library, they recently released a content-rich white paper titled How to Run a Webinar. This publication thoroughly defines what it takes to make each webinar a success, from defining the webinar guest list and registration process utilizing add-to-calendar features, to sending post-webinar communication to participants.

Imagine being able to manage the webinar process from the moment you send the invitation, through follow-ups and reminder emails, to hosting and then thanking participants, while capturing and calculating important data (such as Lead Score) all within the same application. It’s possible with Lead Liaison’s integration with GoToWebinar.

About Citrix

Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) aims to power a world where people, organizations and things are securely connected and accessible to make the extraordinary possible. Its technology makes the world’s apps and data secure and easy to access, empowering people to work anywhere and at any time. Citrix provides a complete and integrated portfolio of Workspace-as-a-Service, application delivery, virtualization, mobility, network delivery and file sharing solutions that enables IT to ensure critical systems are securely available to users via the cloud or on-premise and across any device or platform. With annual revenue in 2015 of $3.28 billion, Citrix solutions are in use by more than 400,000 organizations and over 100 million users globally. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

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).

How to Run a Webinar: Define Your Invitation and Registration Process

How to Run a Webinar

This is the fourth installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

You’ve picked your ideal webinar service provider. The next step is to define your invitation and registration process.

Define Your Webinar Invite Process

Once you’ve got your data ready and your target audience defined, it’s time to start putting together a process for inviting people. We propose the invitation process below. The process sends out three invitation emails to your database. The second and third emails are sent out to people that did not open or click previous invite emails.

Webinar Invitation Process

 

Make sure to vary your “preview text” for each invitation email. In your marketing automation software, you should have an option to enter in some preview text in the email builder. The preview text is usually at the upper left side of the email in small text. It’s what shows up in the preview pane of the recipient’s email inbox. They’ll usually see anywhere from 1 to 3 lines of text in their preview depending on their settings. With more than half of all emails getting opened and read on mobile devices, it’s critical to have a compelling preview text. Use different preview text verbiage for each of your three invite emails.

After the event is over, add recipients who opened the email into an “Active List” in your MA software. As an optional step, you could email everyone that opened any of your three invite emails but did not register for the event. We suggest sending this email the day before the event.

Define Your Webinar Registration Process

This is the process people will go through once they register for your event. As shown in yellow below, there are two ways to register participants. Through the event provider, such as GoToWebinar, or via your marketing automation system. If using the marketing automation system, create a web form and landing page in the platform. There are a number of advantages for creating the form and landing page in a marketing automation system. Some of those advantages include the ability to build a smart form with progressive profiling, deeply customize your landing page, style your web form to your liking, and control all of the branding. Data also gets injected directly into the marketing automation system, which can be used for future marketing purposes.

Registration Process

In the diagram above, the steps in green require your company to create email content for each step. With the invite process, there are nine (9) emails in total. All emails should use your standard template though, which will be recognizable to recipients and prevent them from marking your email as spam.

Leading up to the event, most of the messages are reminders. Don’t forgot to include a shortcut for the user to add the event to their calendar of choice (Outlook, Google, etc.) in your thank you for registering and reminder emails. We like using AddToCalendar for this. Once the event is over wait a few days for data to be collected and send a follow up to people that registered and showed up, with a separate follow up for people that didn’t show up.

Your marketing automation system will help you capture this data and configure the process from start to finish – ahead of time. This can be a relief to most companies. The stress of running a webinar increases around the time of the event. If your processes are setup and scheduled ahead of time you’ll have more peace of mind, more time to get things done, and more time to focus on your webinar content and execution. All administrative and marketing tasks will be handled by the system!

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about the importance of having a powerful Marketing Automation tool in place.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?