B2B Marketing Blog

Every year SLMA organizes and opens up voting for the top 50 most influential people in Sales Lead Management. Fred Yee, CEO of ActiveConversion is nominated again third year in a row, and shares this prestigious nomination with other luminaries including Jill Konrath, Steve Woods, Phil Fernandez and Joe Payne among others.

Fred Yee has won this title in past two years and is hoping for a greater support again this year. We’re showing our support for Fred by voting, and encourage our readers to do the same.

Anyone can vote, and it only takes a minute. Fred’s name (due to alphabetization) appears at the bottom of the list.

Please vote here. Thank You!

Following the ActiveConversion webinar on sales lead management, Brad Kamphuis, Director Business Development, spoke on the SLMA radio show on Oct 13, 2011 at 5:00PST.

You are invited to join ActiveConversion and Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) for a free webinar.

View the recorded webinar now!

Our speaker line-up!

This is the first time SLMA is co-sponsoring ActiveConversion webinar and we are privileged on having James Obermayer co-host the webinar and enlighten our audience with his vast experience and knowledge on lead conversion and sales lead management. James is the author of “Managing Sales Leads, Turning Cold Prospects into Hot Customers” and “Sales & Marketing 365.”  He is also co-author of “Managing Sales Leads, How to Turn Every Prospect into a Customer” (over 12,500 copies sold).  In addition, he has written more than 80 articles on sales and marketing management.

We are also excited to have Brad Kamphuis, Director, Business Development, ActiveConversion speak at this event. Brad is a veteran (with 22 years of experience) when it comes to sales lead generation practices, and is trained in all the “big-name” sales strategies, including Dale Carnegie, Sandler Sales, Miller Heiman and Brian Tracy and has been involved in training hundreds of sales representatives.

What to expect:

In 30-45 min followed by a 15 min Q & A session, Brad Kamphuis, and James Obermayer, will walk you through the top lead management strategies and the tactics using ActiveConversion Automation Rules involved to:

• “Clean” your sales lead data to save massive amounts of time on your lead qualification process,
• Target leads to zero in on the most qualified opportunities,
• Close the loop on leads that bring you business now, and leads that aren’t ready to buy.

Relationship building is a critical process in certain types of sales cycle involving personal interactions and rapport before the prospect is near the buying phase. The high cost and infrequency of purchases requires a level of trust and friendship to be established between seller and buyer. Note I did not say “between sales and the buyer”.

Traditionally, the sales department was responsible for developing relationships with prospects as they moved through the stages of the buying process. Marketing was traditionally only responsible for identifying which prospects sales should build relationships with. However, the time and dollar cost for sales to build and strengthen relationships was often too much to be able to see every lead to the end. The solution for this involves marketing accepting the responsibility for developing relationships.

Using marketing automation tools, such as ActiveConversion, marketing not only identifies prospects and leads, but also nurtures those prospects until they are sales ready. Automated drip campaigns, periodic offers, and resources such as videos or case studies build a stronger buy in. As the company begins to build their credibility as experts in their field, prospects authenticate them more, and finally move closer towards a sales ready state. Using marketing automation, marketing passes only leads that are close to sales ready state and are open to a purchase negotiation.

If marketing assumes the task of building relationships, there can be many benefits. Immediately, sales would have more time and resources to close sales with prospects that are sales-ready. The reduction in energy used to nurture leads who are not sales ready saves the parent company a large amount of overhead. As well, marketing has the resources and expertise to execute cohesive long term campaigns to deliver a message over multiple communications.

Establishing a relationship between marketing and the buyer is more effective and cost efficient than a sales representative chasing after a lead too early in the sales cycle when in fact the lead is still RESEARCHING!

Author: Mike Hwang

Many companies are starting to question whether or not their traditional means of marketing are as effective as they once were. For example, at one time, taking out an advertisement in an industry journal was a great way to get your company noticed. However, if your competition was also doing this, were you really getting noticed, or just getting lost among the clutter?

Many of those same companies who have been questioning their current marketing strategies have moved towards an online marketing strategy simply because they are able to regain their competitive advantage. Remember, the most successful businesses are the ones who have embraced innovation.

It’s also understandable that many businesses do not know a lot about online marketing or even where to start when implementing a new strategy. The following are three steps that will help you on your way to marketing your business online in order to see your business flourish and prosper into the future.

1. Search Engine Optimization and Marketing:

Search engine optimization is a garden that must be tended to and cared for. The first step is planting the seeds, or in this case the keywords. For example, you can research targeted keywords that you feel people will be searching for to find your products and services and build them into your website so that Google can index them. Along with that and other “seeds” you should plant, you must maintain and water your SEO garden. It is very important to remember than you cannot simply set and forget your SEO. You must keep up on whether or not you are getting your desired results. SEO is an effort that, with the right amount of time and care, can produce a positive outcome.

The second element is search engine marketing, which are ads that are set up and only paid for if they are clicked. This is called pay per click advertising.

2. A website that looks and acts professionally:

Would you hire someone who didn’t look or act professionally? If you did, would you expect professional results? Probably not, right? The same goes for your website. Many businesses view their website as an online brochure and those same people do not get much return on their website investment. The key is to have a website that converts visitors into prospects for your business developers to follow up on. This in effect is a website that makes you money.

3. A Marketing Automation System:

Wouldn’t it be handy if you knew which companies were interested in your goods and services before they even told you? Well this is actually possible. By implementing a marketing automation system, you will not only know who is coming to your site, they will be lead scored, and inform you of their current engagement level. Further to this, for those who are not yet ready to buy, you can also set up email nurture campaigns to continuously remind them of your offers so that they will think of you when they are ready to buy.

Author: Jon Edgar is an Account Specialist at ActiveConversion

I have often heard, “Marketing automation doesn’t work for me”, or “It’s of no use to our company, but it certainly looks and sounds interesting!” For some companies, marketing automation is still just a fancy word, and a concept that is not well understood.

How can companies make optimal use of marketing automation? Here is my view:

Awesome SEO/Inbound Marketing:

To get those prospective leads to your landing page. It is hard to attract visitors to your website when search engines cannot find your business. It is even harder justifying inbound marketing costs then. Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SEM) are ways that you can use to bring potential customers to your website or a landing page.

Conversion capability of your online forms:

You need a compelling offer to entice visitors: From your awesome SEO, visitors can now find you from search engines and other marketing channels they visit; now they would like to know more about you. On top of that, they need a compelling offer to click and take advantage of the information that you are sharing. An online form on a landing page, with offers such as free trial, free whitepaper downloads, free webinars, free consulting, free live demos will encourage visitors to fill out the form. Oh Yes! Do not forget to add the privacy statement beside the form. Your landing page visitors will be less hesitant to share their business information with you if you forget to assure them of confidentiality.

LEADS themselves:

The visitors who filled the form to avail the offer are now your LEADS. Some companies will still call them prospects and not leads because they have not shown any buying behaviour yet to call them qualified or warm leads. Their engagement is indicated by their action of filling out a form, or offering contact information. They are interested, they are involved, and they are LEADS.

A good marketing automating system to nurture those leads:

After you get leads from your forms, it is important to qualify them before you send the leads off to sales rep. Marketing Automation can be the engine that does just that. Targeted emails, on the targeted days, will nurture the leads while marketing automation tracks if the leads took additional steps in learning more about you. The more interest, warmer the lead is (interest typically shown from the kind of engagement leads has: eg: click on a link to your case study, collateral, webinars, whitepapers or at the very best reply to the email with an interest to talk). Nurturing the lead has done a good job in converting the cold lead to a warm or Hot one.

A great lead management engine to give only the qualified leads to sales:

Marketing automation is generally hooked up to a CRM. It is essential that only the HOT leads are sent to the sales rep. This will optimize their time and make it easy for them to close the deal. If the lead is not warm enough, it will be sent back to marketing or just ignored as dirty data.

Last but not least, you need a great sales team to close the sale:

Yes, a great sales team will make sure that no HOT leads are lost to competitors and the benefits of marketing automation come full circle; that is the reason why you bought marketing automation in first place!

Did I miss any points? Please comment with your suggestions!

Traditional marketing techniques involving tradeshows, events, direct mail etc. are still very prevalent, and they are heavily used by many companies to market their product and service offerings. While online marketing is gaining a much larger share of the marketers’ budget – it would be imprudent to ignore the traditional marketing techniques that are still a very powerful means of getting marketing messages across to targeted decision makers.

In this recent study of Interactive marketing priorities for SMBs, (Forrester) for 2011, Shar VanBoskirk believes that 54% of marketers will decrease their marketing budget for traditional tactics.  While more than half of the marketing budget is now being spent on interactive/digital/online marketing, it is still hard for some companies to actually understand the true value or ROI gained from this medium. The return on invesment is approximately measured based on the number of click throughs (CTR’s) from email marketing or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising or from number of page views calculated from certain analytical tools. Online form, used by marketers to gather useful information of their prospects, is also very powerful online lead generation technique. But with stats indicating that only 1-2% actually will ever be willing to share you their information, makes this lead generation technique not that attractive (The ‘Contact Us’ fallacy: The importance of identifying anonymous visitors).

I’d like to share here how companies can still make use of their traditional marketing. Combining both traditional and online marketing techniques (powered by marketing automation and sales intelligence tools) companies get the best possible ROI  from their marketing budget. Integrated marketing will not only augment your marketing efficiency, but will also give your marketing a much needed boost in this digital age.

Use marketing automation tools to nurture leads you already have in your sales funnel

Meet with your prospect at a networking event. Exchange your cards hoping that they might call you or that you will get back to them when the time is right. But, is the time ever right? After the event, your card will either end up in a pile of other similar cards collected over the years or will just be forgotten. You can alternatively choose to nurture those leads on the given email address. Marketing automation tools can nurture leads with pre-written, automated email messages, and help you stay on top of their mind, giving them a chance to learn more about you.

After all, on an average it takes about 7-10 touches to register certain brands and their marketing messages. A series of nurture emails with valuable content such as thought leadership, industry knowledge, and links to marketing collateral can help you reinforce your marketing message in several ways.

Use CRMs funneled by marketing automation to continue building the relationship

Prospect info gathered from these traditional channels can be manually entered into your CRM. Marketing Automation (MA) tools synced with certain CRMs make it possible to send the prospect info from CRM to MA tools to track future visits. You can also track if your prospect show more interest in your offering after your initial meeting. Marketing automation is then used to track, score, and nurture those prospects until they become a qualified lead. Anonymous visitor identification system, can also report visits from different individuals from the same company showing their cumulative interest. Keeping a watch on your prospect/company will help you solidify the next steps within your sales process.

Use of email marketing to inform and persuade your prospects in the funnel before the show

Bulk emails can be used to inform your prospects of the tradeshow booth you are setting up or a seminar you are hosting. The email informs and persuades the prospects in the list to come and visit you at those events, and they are an excellent way to – increase the awareness of your brand, and get a meaningful reason to get in touch with your prospect list to inform your prospects about your events along with your new or existing initiatives.

A set of 2-3 emails before the event is reasonable to stay in touch with your prospects and persuade them to take an action (such as opening the email, looking at the content), and hopefully attending and meeting you at the show.

Use online marketing with traditional techniques to increase brand awareness and get business online

It is never too late or too expensive to start online marketing and improving your website for better conversion. Online marketing will help you get business online and also help you establish your brand’s awareness.  This online presence creates a buzz around your company and products, and definitely gives your company an edge in the digital age. Combining the use of editorials or advertorials in your target market magazine along with an online banner ad will hit multiple audiences, both offline and online.

To learn more about combining traditional and online marketing (powered by marketing automation), read this whitepaper on increasing tradeshow ROI .

ActiveConversion will be hosting an information packed live seminar on March 3^rd, 2011 in Calgary for all those looking to get first hand experience in learning how to sell more globally without significantly increasing corresponding marketing costs.  As an audience member, you’ll learn how you can combine and leverage traditional and online marketing techniques to sell globally in the most efficient way possible.

Register for seminar here

Often B2B companies end up spending substantially on marketing in addition to their own time – be it at the trade shows, conferences or events. This face to face interaction is intended to meet directly with potential new customers and create relationships. But often, these expensive endeavors remain fruitless due to the disconnect between marketing events and actual sales activities.

This seminar is presented by Yves Matson, Marketing Director from United Safety Solutions, who will walk through his own experiences. Yves is familiar with traditional marketing techniques, and he will demonstrate how the effective use of online methods and existing marketing such as trade shows to gain more customers. The highlight of this seminar will be how to make the best use of online marketing and marketing automation tools to accelerate your sales.

Register today for this informational and value packed seminar, and learn strategies on how to build stronger relationships with your prospects and get better sales results when you combine traditional & online marketing techniques. Also learn about how to effectively use marketing automation tools to your advantage to take your marketing efforts to the next level.

In a previous post (If it’s called Marketing Automation, Why does Sales want it?), we’ve discussed how marketing automation has become more of a sales tool, even though demand generation is typically in marketing’s domain.

In this post, I’m going to move that theme further and discuss how demand generation is moving toward revenue performance because of marketing automation.

Today’s marketing automation systems do such a great job of aligning marketing with sales that demand generation is no longer just an activity to reach prospects and drive awareness and interest.  It can be used to automatically score, rank and route B2B leads to the assigned sales rep. With that in hand, marketing now (can) have a direct hand in generating revenue.

Of course, sales still has to propose good solutions and close the deals, but with this helping hand from marketing automation, revenue can actually be impacted in a meaningful way.

This is great and gives marketing a seat at the table when it comes to deciding manpower and resources. Sales can spend more time selling, and less time cold calling or chasing unqualified leads.

Management could then view marketing as a revenue center rather than a cost center.  This will elevate marketing and ensure their participation is as important as sales. Marketing automation makes this possible by integrating demand generation, lead management and CRMs, so that marketing activities directly link to revenue performance.

It won’t be long before the infamous ‘should marketing have a quota’ discussion crops up again!

The celebrated catchphrase for the classic TV cop show Dragnet, “Just the facts , ma’am,” might as well be the description for ActiveConversion’s new AC-ProspectAlert.  This module allows sales people to access their alerts and other sales lead information without having to log into the full ActiveConversion system.  It was recently introduced with the new UI (user interface) for ActiveConversion and was designed to provide sales reps with what they want as fast as possible.

Previously sales people could access this information via a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) account like Salesforce.com but for greater flexibility and for those businesses that haven’t deployed Salesforce.com to their sales team, AC-ProspectAlert is just the ticket.

• Laser focused view: It optimizes sales time and allows sales reps to concentrate on engaging prospects and closing business instead of navigating through a maze of menus to get the information they need.
• Sales leads: For those organizations that use Jigsaw’s contact data, this has been seamlessly integrated into AC-ProspectAlert so that sales reps can access this data conveniently.
• Easy to use: Because it shares the same slick new UI as the full ActiveConversion services, sales reps can quickly and easily find the information they need.
• Track Key Indicators: The new dashboard has been designed specifically for the sales rep in a hurry.

As the man said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”