B2B Marketing Blog

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

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!

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!

It is customary at this time of year for pundits to make predictions about the coming year. For many technology vendors this results in prophecies about product developments and such. I’d like to offer up a change in pace and modestly suggest some customer trends. Up until 2010, adoption of B2B marketing automation has been substantially driven by tech-savvy early adopters. In 2010 B2B marketers sustained traditional marketing practices like email campaigns and continued experimenting with social media, content marketing and thought leadership. In many campaigns the data was encouraging but the challenge for B2B marketers was connecting marketing results (in the form of increased traffic) to sales results (increased leads and revenue).

As online marketers searched high and low to meet this challenge, interest soon focused on marketing automation as marketers increasingly saw that early adopters were using this technology. In 2011, I expect this trend will significantly increase and adoption of marketing automation will spread beyond this group as word spreads within individual markets.

For example, the use of content marketing has grown and as a result, online marketers are beginning to understand that content must be tailored to where the customer is in the purchase cycle. This goes hand in hand with lead scoring and lead nurturing and points to marketing automation as a way to exploit this new way of developing customers. Although early adopters have a significant profit motive, it is this pragmatism that propels a technology thorough early adoption and even into adoption by the early majority. I can’t wait for 2011.

Occasionally you’ll hear that sales people are “coin-operated,” implying that they are focused on closing sales and earning commissions.  While the phrase is usually used admiringly, it can also carry a somewhat negative impression, meaning sales people pay no attention whatsoever to matters not related to closing sales.  So if it is true that sales doesn’t care about anything other than making money, why do sales executives perk up when they hear about the virtues of marketing automation?

To be certain marketing automation is a key B2B marketing activity.  By automating various online marketing functions it reduces marketing costs and increases ROI.  However, a major function of marketing automation has become of significant interest to sales executives.  This process is called lead management, which produces qualified leads for sales to follow-up.

By automatically generating and qualifying leads, a marketing automation system like Active Conversion achieves two things: First, it reduces the load on sales.  Sales reps dislike calling prospects before they are ready to buy.  It is a time-consuming process to qualify prospects only to discover that it is too early in the purchase cycle.  Sales reps consider this activity wasteful of their time (they are coin-operated after all).  On the other hand some prospects don’t appreciate being continually contacted before they are ready to engage vendors.

Secondly, marketing automation increases the number of qualified leads.  By automatically and  interactively engaging prospects with timely and useful information, the lead management system increases the total number of qualified prospects out of any given lead generation campaign.  What sales rep doesn’t appreciate more qualified prospects to close on?

When a B2B sales lead is sent to a sales representative from a marketing automation system, he or she can be assured that the prospect has visited the website multiple times, read a few blog posts, downloaded an important white paper or otherwise exhibited interest in their product or service.  The marketing automation system has qualified the prospect for the sales rep.

Closely related to qualifying is the issue of timing.  In a marketing automation system, notifications are sent to the appropriate sales rep at the precise moment that lead becomes qualified.  This way, no time is wasted beforehand and prospects are contacted at the instant they are ready to engage the vendor.

Marketing automation systems like Active Conversion help increase revenue by allowing sales reps to concentrate on what they really want: closing sales and making money.

Peter Drucker, one of the most beloved management gurus of all time, once famously said ‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Nowhere is that more true than in marketing and sales. Yet decades have gone by since Drucker uttered these words that are used in almost every business school, and marketing being a very expensive part of a business has yet to embrace measurement. Part of the reason is because it is very difficult to do. Unlike other company activities, marketing and sales has always had more intangibles associated with it than any other activity within a business function.

With products like ActiveConversion, this has changed.  Because prospects and customers will no doubt visit your website or landing page, or click on an email or ad before engaging, it is now easier than ever to measure what marketing and advertising is working. ActiveConversion goes one step further than measuring. It actively generates and qualifies interest from those visitors.

We thought it would be interesting to show how a lead management automation product (like ActiveConversion) proves it value, especially to management. We have built a ROI calculator that you can use to ensure that a product like this will benefit your bottom line. Business software should always have a strong ROI, yet it is not always quantified for management. Together with the competitive advantage you will get for your sales team, even the most cynical CFO will approve of a product that will pay for itself in weeks if not days.

The calculation is simple but revealing. By being able to identify more targets (WITHOUT spending more on marketing or advertising), by automatically identifying, nurturing and qualifying your existing prospects, you can produce ROI well in excess of your investment with this kind of technology and automation. ROI can be in days, AND your sales force will never complain about a lack of good leads again.

Try it for yourself.

There are many great sales methodologies out there, SPIN, Miller Heiman, EDGE framework and others. No matter which dogma you choose, they all have one common weakness, as good as they look on the page, they all need to be executed to matter.

There is no getting away from the fact that the biggest reason for a lack of sales is a lack of execution. The sad truth is that sales people know what they have to do, they just don’t do it. You can train them, but can’t make them.  It’s the age old “doer and the thinker”, in sales the doer executes and wins.  There are many great plans gathering dust on shelves, but the winning plans are the ones actually executed.

Join Tibor Shanto, a top sales expert and the co-author of “Harness The Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers”, and Yves Matson, senior account executive at ActiveConversion as they discuss strategies around sales methodologies and how to properly execute them.

In 45 minutes followed by a 15 min Q&A you will learn:

• How to successfully execute sales methodology?
• Why CRM systems do not get adopted?
• Why there is lack of execution?
• What are the four cornerstones of execution?

Click here to access the recorded webinar.  Also, get a copy of the presentation from Slideshare.

Both before and after the Global Petroleum Show, companies seriously interested in you will likely visit your website. Knowing who is interested in your product and services (and especially when), is something that you can use to increase your trade show return of investment substantially.

Finding The Needles in the Haystack
Research on trade shows have shown that serious buyers will gravitate to doing their research online and arrive at your website both before and after the trade show. But trade shows like the Global Petroleum Show can have two huge wins for exhibitors; Opt ins, and after show website visits.

Opt Ins
By virtue of the fact they are going to the GPS show, anyone visiting your booth is qualified in so far as they are in the energy industry. When one of them asks to be scanned for more information they are doing what is the holy grail of  marketing; they are “opting in”.

When someone asks for their badge to be scanned for more info, you can email nurture them  while always leading off with “you are receiving this because you visited our booth”. Then use a new breed of software to notify you as to who keeps coming back to your website, or visited the right pages on your website; it will tell you who to call, who you stand the best chance of building a relationship with.

The Bigger They Are, The Less They Call
Every exhibitor at the GPS hopes for booth visits from big, sought after accounts. But ironically the bigger the account, the less likely they are to call you after a trade show for fear of salespeople chasing them months on end. Regardless though, if these big accounts are interested in your company they will likely visit your website after the show to investigate your company further. Again, knowing who is visiting, who is interested in your company, who you should target over the weeks and months following the GPS show can be a significant competitive advantage.

eHow To Guide
Here’s a quick eHow To Guide from ActiveConversion that further explains what I’ve mentioned above. Good luck at the Global Petroleum Show 2010!

Are you really listening to your customers? Quite often we’re so busy with the day-to-day work around our businesses that we don’t stop to really take in what our customers are actually telling us. More often than not we’re listening with a bias towards our current issues. This is completely natural. However, to be Customer Centric; throw aside your personal thoughts, issues, desires and really listen to what your customer is saying. Be fully focused on their agenda. Questions to ask yourself; What is their life like? What are their challenges? What helps make them succeed? What are they really telling you about your product or service?

You’ll be amazed by the depth of understanding you’ll get. You will more clearly see the value your product or service is bringing to someone. You may even start to see patterns emerge in a particular subset of customers, perhaps even in a whole vertical market space. You may just find that competitive edge you’re looking for. Strangely enough, all you had to do was to listen, well, really listen.

Listening is a key skill for everyone in the organization. It is crucial to make listening a part of organizations communication protocol.  It should not be limited to just marketing & sales but should spread across other departments such as product and support. There are so many benefits, that listening skills should even be part of your hiring strategy! Because of the benefits of Listening, many smart organizations are actually training employees in listening skills. For all the advanced tools and plethora of ways to communicate these days, sometimes its the simple things that matters – just listen.