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.

ActiveConversion is proud to announce the release of an upgraded UI and automation rules designed to handle sales leads more efficiently.

Automation rules is a new cutting edge feature designed to simplify work flow around lead management and lead handling. Automation rules improve lead accuracy and streamline lead management tailored to individual user preferences. Users can now manage their lead data more effectively and reach right kind of leads they want to pursue with greater ease.

The user interface change simplifies the management of multiple entries and makes information more readily available. The upgraded UI simplified identifying sales-ready leads, and creates better experience for the users.

Both the upgraded UI and automation rules ensure our clients are able to find the right kind of lead at the right time. The new features enhance the user experience and improve lead management efficiency.

View our recent press release on this announcement.

Trade shows, especially petroleum shows, are a great opportunity for your business to network and meet trade show attendees.  Large shows often attract tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world who are looking for opportunities to grow their company.  For your representatives working the show floor or the booth, efficiency is critical for maximizing the number of potential partners they meet with.

The traditional standard is 5 minutes for each engagement.  In that time, your booth staff must engage, qualify, and disengage.  The main goal should be to meet as many prospects as possible and gather their contact information and qualify them as legitimate leads, not to convert a sale.

Waiting until after the show to convert booth visitors maximizes the number of visitors your booth team can meet and allows you to slowly nurture prospects who have longer sales cycles.  How then is the best way to convert them after the show?

Marketing automation is one of the best strategies for energy companies to nurture prospects towards a sale.  Software programs, such as ActiveConversion, generate targeted emails for customers who are interested in your products and services, but are not ready to purchase yet.  For example, a lead interested in instrumentation services would receive an email a week after the show thanking them for visiting the booth and provide a link to an online brochure or a whitepaper discussing the benefits of your services.  Future emails would offer other resources such as webinars or case studies, and eventually would include a direct sales offer.

With the volume of emails that you are likely to be sending with this strategy, tracking who does and does not read the message can be tricky.  Readily available third party programs such as VerticalResponse allow automation programs to track and identify which leads read nurture emails and which recipients downloaded information.

Once leads are sales ready, a sales representative can directly contact them and close the sale.  Involving sales only when the lead is ready to buy reduces the time wasted chasing leads still in the early stages of the sales cycle and improves efficiency.

Lastly, you may be wondering why not just close the sale with the qualified visitor on the trade show floor?  Generally, trade shows convert 1-5% of the total number of visitors to a booth.  If you attempted to close sales during the show, the total visitor number would be very low, and thus so would your conversion number.  If you limit the time spent with each visitor and only acquire contact information and level of interest, you are able to meet many more visitors and increase the total number of conversions.  Converting visitors after the show using marketing automation or direct selling maximizes your booth traffic during the show and maximizes the potential revenue to be earned after the show.

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!

Oil and gas service providers can implement a
marketing strategy to sell to customers worldwide in
a cost-effective and affordable manner. This
strategy leverages global trade shows supported by
a marketing automation solution. This approach
maximizes the Return on Investment (ROI) from
trade shows without requiring a substantial outlay.
Implementing this strategy will increase sales
beyond their local trade area while also reducing
costs in selling to local customers.

Following up on global leads from trade shows can be expensive, time consuming, and often fail to generate a sale.  Learn how to efficiently convert trade show leads into full fledged qualified prospects using online marketing and marketing automation.

Download this eGuide to learn the basics of:

• Using the internet to engage potential customers after a trade show
• Using conversion software to identify which leads are actually interested
• Maximizing time and cost efficiency with marketing automation
• Keeping prospects engaged until they are ready to buy

ActiveConversion recently conducted a “lunch and learn” seminar, and I must say, the topic was pertinent.  The event was very timely. Here are some of my thought and learning’s from this seminar.

The most important question asked is, “How can I improve my tradeshow ROI?” There are many ways to market for a tradeshow and many ways to spend your money, but often little if any ROI is realized. The most compelling factor to attend a tradeshow and set up a booth is the prospect of meeting face-to-face with the decision maker. But is your tradeshow marketing investment totally justified when you are just a needle in the haystack?

There are many other techniques to market a tradeshow: you can sponsor an event, you can write editorials in the event magazine, you can advertise on the tradeshow website etc.  Tradeshows are already an expensive endeavor, and they can cost more if you choose to advertise using these other popular channels.  If you are not a large company, costs for tradeshows can be significant considering the already limited marketing budget.  On top of the advertising costs, there are other associated costs such as designing the booth, time that your sales reps spend to exhibit, flying costs, as well as food and lodging.

So, how much do you get back on the investment you just made on the tradeshow? Not as much as you were expecting, but the use of online marketing techniques can boost your tradeshow investment. In my last post, I wrote how you can combine the use of traditional and online marketing techniques and benefit from them, but here I’m describing how you can use online marketing to better market your tradeshows.

Following some concerns and solution suggestions based on online marketing and online tools – thus making it the most for your tradeshow investment.

BEFORE the show: How do we get more people to visit our booth?

Invite people from your list to meet you at the booth. Give them a compelling reason for meeting: a big prize give away, or a free product, or a free software copy, or free consulting time or free passes to the tradeshow in your email. Give prospects a good reason to meet you to make the best use of their time and money.

DURING the show: How do I maximize marketing during the show?

When the prospective client meets you at the tradeshow, you can scan his badge and register him in your system. These are already partially qualified leads and can be entered into your CRM or Marketing Automation system. Using a marketing automation system will let you know exactly who clicked on your offer, and then scanning their badges at the show and assigning those leads to your system can qualify your leads further.

AFTER the show: Who are my best prospects? Whom should I follow up? What do I do with the big list of names?

After the show, send the prospective client a thank you email note with the prize giveaway announcement, and have the prospects click on the results. If the prospect does more than just look at the prize landing page (for example visit other web pages) browse your product page or the pricing page, you can see how the accumulated scoring of your leads will give you a better picture of the lead quality. Now that you know who is really interested, you can nurture them further using marketing automation tools.

Therefore, during various stages of your tradeshow you engage the prospect, and help qualify the leads that actually will be worth spending your time on.  With online marketing, make before the show, start of the sales cycle.

So the next time you are a part of tradeshow, think about the before, during and after of the tradeshow, and how online marketing can help generate stronger leads. Download this PowerPoint slide deck and read this whitepaper that talks more about the challenges which companies face today, and learn more about increasing tradeshow ROI using the online marketing techniques. Go on and start perfecting your tradeshows!

Related articles

• Webinar Recording- Learn How to Substantially Increase Your Trade Show ROI (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• Global Petroleum Show 2010 Exhibitors; Find the needles in the haystack! (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• Tradeshows: What’s your ROI? (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• B2B: Tradeshows (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• How to Engage a Tradeshow Audience Year-Round (marketingprofs.com)
• Make Your Next Tradeshow a ‘Qualified’ Success (marketingprofs.com)
• Let Your Brand Shine at Tradeshows (marketingprofs.com)

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 .

Nowadays, the majority of sales are generated from the web.  However only 1-2% of website visitors engage with the companies they are researching and even less become customers.  Companies turn to online advertising, search media, search engine optimization to increase leads. The expectation is that if you can get visitors to a website, and if the website has forms, visitors will fill out a contact form. However, amount of inquiries from forms typically fall short of expectations.

The truth is most website visitors avoid filling out forms.  Forms are so prevalent; nobody wants to fill out another form. Besides exposing their email address, people know if they fill out a form, they can expect to be hit with email.  Even if you put valuable information behind a form, most visitors’ feel that they’ll likely find what they need if they keep searching.

Losing Without a Chance to Participate

As mentioned, people don’t fill out forms unless they have to.  For most buyers, they’ll only fill out a form when they’ve done enough research to make their decision or next move.  If you don’t have the ability to identify a buyer during the early stages, you may not even have a chance to participate before losing.

If you can identify a potential buyer in their research stage and proactively engage with that buyer, your odds are significantly increased.  Especially if you are the only one among your competition who can engage them before they engaged you.

There are a number of anonymous visitor tracking solutions available that can help companies do more than just wait for inquires. Identifying anonymous visitors provides your sales team the ability to make well-timed calls, your marketing team the ability to nurture leads and business intelligence on your potential customers, and gives businesses a critical edge in this increasingly competitive business environment.