What do you wish you had asked your Marketing Automation Vendor?

September 2, 2011 at 9:26 am | Posted in Lead Nurturing, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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A great new article from Marketing Automation Software Guide that complies the top 10 questions current MA users wished they had asked on the following topics: integration, support/training, roadmap and maintenance.

http://www.marketingautomationsoftware.com/blog/marketing-automation-vendor-questions-1090111/#ixzz1WnysbJYx 

by Lauren Carlson

CRM Market Analyst
Software Advice

Thanks for the Sales Lead! Now What?

June 17, 2011 at 1:12 pm | Posted in Lead Management, Lead Nurturing | Leave a comment
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OK, so you’ve done your job as a marketer.  You have a lead that you’ve grabbed and nurtured from vague interest to “sales ready”.  You are now ready to hand that lead off to the Sales organization. So, off it goes, and your job, other than knowing whether the lead is closed or not, is finished.  Right?  Not so fast.

Even assuming that your sales and/or dealer organizations are properly trained in lead follow-up and closing sales, you can (and should) do more.  Every lead travels a slightly different path on its way to becoming sales-ready.  Just like you try to design your nurturing campaigns in an effort to achieve “one-to-one” customized communications, the follow-up effort should be similarly customized.  For example, if the trigger to escalate a lead to “sales ready” is a series of systematic visits to your website, consider providing input to the sales resource about how to approach that lead. It’s probably not a good idea for the sales person to contact that lead and say “Thanks for visiting our website this morning, are you ready to buy?” Prospective customers don’t necessarily get a good feeling when they are reminded that their behavior is being tracked.  Instead, the sales person may want to introduce themselves as the local resource and then begin inquiring about their needs.

It’s probably not realistic to assume most sales or dealer organizations can remember how to approach different leads with the perfect follow-up message.  However, with the automation options available today, you should consider providing very specific guidance on how to follow-up certain leads based on their source, history and escalation triggers.  You can deliver leads not only with an activity profile, but also with scripting hints to optimize the follow-up messaging.  And you can build in additional triggers to assist the sales people or dealers with the timing of their follow-up activities.  Think of it as a nurturing campaign for the sales folks.

Get known not only for providing great sales leads, but also for giving great insights on lead follow-up!

JT McDonald

MQL exposed! Breakin’ down the marketing qualified lead

April 4, 2011 at 3:25 pm | Posted in Lead Management, Lead Nurturing | 1 Comment
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In my last post; “WQP, MQL & SQL.. oh my!” I provided the basic rules for determining where a lead should live within your lead management framework. The area that has the least clear-cut boundaries and rules for follow-up is the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Fortunately we have a subset within this area to help further target the messaging. It’s called “buying phase”. If you have a lead nurturing program in place, you should be sending different messaging to each person based on their current phase and have rules in place that automatically move a person from one phase to the next. There are no clear-cut rules for determining buying phase but your lead scoring questions/answers should help. The following is a general summary of a person’s mindset during each phase.

  • Interest: I might be interested in the product you sell but I’m not really sure yet. It’s likely that I’ve just started poking around the Internet. I want to find the product that best suits my needs but I really don’t know exactly what I need or even what’s available. Things that would help me include general information about your company, brand messaging, and general product announcements. If you have a buying guide or white paper that is generic like “How to select and buy ” that would be perfect.
  • Consideration: I am considering purchasing the product that you sell but I’m probably just as likely to buy it from your competitor as I am from you. I’ve started looking more closely at the features you offer. Now is a great time to send me specific product information about the line I’ve shown interest in. If you have any tools that help me compare your product to others or an online “product configurator” that would be helpful too.
  • Evaluation: I have decided that I am going to purchase the product you sell but I’m not sold on your company quite yet. I need the specifics to make my decision… things like pricing, delivery terms, options, etc. I’d also like to know the name of my local sales rep and their contact info so I can reach out to them with specific questions. If you have case studies showing how you helped people or companies that look like me you should send them now.

Is your experience different from what I’ve described above? Have other helpful things to add to a buying phase? Drop me at note at Jennifer@marketnetservices.com or comment on this post.

Nurturing alone isn’t enough…

October 14, 2010 at 8:17 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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Lead Nurturing or “drip marketing” campaigns are pretty well accepted cornerstones of any Lead Management strategy. However, don’t count on nurturing alone to convert leads. At some point, the nurturing tracks run out of content. But more importantly, the numbers just don’t add up. Think about the following example. If you launch an email nurturing track for 10,000 prospects in your queue, industry averages indicate you may get a 20% open rate and then a 10% click-through rate. This means 2% of your prospects become new hand raisers, or 200 marketing-qualified leads. This may then translate to 50-100 sales leads. Great stuff, but not necessarily an amount that will catapult your company (and you) to stardom. As a marketer, you still need to continuously bring new prospects into your queue to make sure you have overlapping and multiple nurturing tracks going at the same time. Thankfully, the availability of marketing automation tools makes establishment of these multiple tracks doable and affordable.

- JT McDonald

The Problem with Stereotypes

July 26, 2010 at 7:47 am | Posted in Lead Nurturing | Leave a comment
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I object to being demographically stereotyped.  Just because I’m a male, “X” years of age, make “Y” income and like to golf, marketing folks think they know what I’m interested in and how to talk to me.  Wrong!

If you lined up the guys in my neighborhood (subdivision of about 50 houses), you could find 10 peers who all fit the same demographic and even psychographic profile as me.  And even though many of us are targeted by the same marketers with similar messaging, I’ll bet you my next paycheck that the messaging doesn’t appeal to us or resonate with all of us the same way.  You know why?  Because deep down, we’re not all really “birds of a feather”.  We all have different life experiences, different internal motivators, and different current circumstances.  All of that means that I won’t perceive a given marketing message the same as my “look-alike” neighbor, even though we may appear the same based on our demographic and psychographic attributes.

Interestingly, groupings still occur, but they’re based on how people receive and perceive messages, not necessarily their external attributes.  Develop, target and deploy your marketing communiques on that basis, and you’ll find more success.

 JT McDonald

Old habits die hard

June 23, 2010 at 3:50 pm | Posted in Lead Nurturing | Leave a comment
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In an effort to practice what we preach, MarketNet followed all the rules when launching our lead nurturing campaign.  We scrubbed our list, we segmented based on company type, CRM platform and more.  We customized our emails and tested subject lines and offers. We loaded the campaigns and let them rip… and people opened them and clicked on the offers just like they were supposed to. 

I immediately responded to every person who clicked on the offer and asked if they wanted to talk about lead management or lead nurturing or if they were just gathering information (and let them know it was fine either way).  Approximately 95% of the people told me they didn’t want to talk… yet.  I actually started to get a little upset.  My old school sales hat was on and I wanted to close the deals now! 

Then I remembered what I tell my clients every day.  Not every lead is sale-ready!  This is why we do lead nurturing in the first place.  Our goal is to put relevant information in the hands of the right people at the right time.  My open and click rates show that I met those goals.  Now I just need to keep doing the right things and being just a tad bit more patient, trusting in the process that’s been shown to work over and over again. 

Working with truly qualified and sales-ready leads is so much more satisfying than prospecting.  But old habits die hard… especially if you’re in sales.  Patience my sales friends!

Interested in getting our nurturing emails?  Sign up here: http://www.marketnetservices.com/contact.aspx and put “lead nurturing campaign only” in the comments field.

There’s no such thing as a sales lead

May 13, 2010 at 3:50 pm | Posted in Lead Management | Leave a comment
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There’s no such thing as a sales lead, only “notable events”.

Sales Lead Management is our business. We exist because we help clients generate, respond to and eventually close sales leads. But, interestingly, we don’t talk about sales leads in our day-to-day operations. Let me explain. A sales lead is nothing more than “a contact who we know is ready to purchase”.  How we know that is where the “magic” happens. Sometimes a contact indicates they’re ready to purchase by reaching out directly to us and saying exactly that. But more often, a contact participates in a number of activities or notable events that indirectly tell us they’re ready to purchase.

For example, a contact may request product information, then download a competitive comparison piece, then visit one of your product pages four times in a week, and then visit your dealer locator page. Statistical analysis may indicate that this sequence of events historically leads to a sale, so we say those notable events elevate a contact to sales lead status. They’re still the same contact – they’ve just undertaken a series of notable events that increase the probability that they’re ready to buy. So, we move them into the “sales lead bucket” for attention from the sales department. When they’ve purchased, or devolved back into a marketing lead, they resume their status as a contact we’re nurturing until the next time.

Hence, there’s no such thing as a sales lead – only contacts who participate in “notable events”.

JT McDonald, Guest Author and president, MarketNet Services, LLC

But enough about me. Let’s talk about you…

April 26, 2010 at 3:44 pm | Posted in Lead Nurturing | Leave a comment
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Most prospects probably hate lead nurturing “content” you write.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of us like to talk about ourselves.  This  dynamic usually extends to our corporate lives.  So in a professional setting, we talk about our business, our challenges, our bosses, our customers…you know, things that are interesting to us.

If we’re doing lead nurturing (trying to engage prospective customers with interesting information), most of us unfortunately stick to the same gig – we offer things that we find interesting.  Usually things about what WE do, how OUR stuff can benefit customers, statistics showing how OUR systems work.  It promotes us, plus it’s easy – we’re subject matter experts

But guess what?  Many customers and prospects could probably care less.  Being like us, they want it to be all about THEM!  So, start using lead nurturing content that focuses on their issues.

One of our clients is in the office furniture industry.  Instead of offering lead nurturing content that talks about how great their products are, we’ve worked with them to place content that is useful to their customers.  Examples include pieces on how to organize office space for efficiency and happy employees, and reviewing key business practices to better survive a rocky economy.  The content didn’t focus on the client’s business, but rather serious issues facing their customers and prospects.  It’s a better way to engage, become a resource, and eventually develop a more meaningful relationship.

So, think about it…use lead nurturing content that interests your customers, not you.  

JT McDonald – Guest Author & President of MarketNet Services, LLC

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