Archive for the ‘Lead Scoring’ Category

Interview: Mike Damphousse Answers 5 Questions on Integrating Human Touch Points into Lead Nurturing

Friday, April 15th, 2011

In the Lead Nurturing Cookbook, we offer a recipe for managing and qualifying inbound leads using your marketing automation platform. Mike Damphousse, CEO/CMO of Green Leads, LLC, a firm that specializes in using the phone to get qualified appointments for its clients’ salespeople on a pay-per-performance basis, participated as an “Expert Chef” on this recipe offering marketers insight on how  to create a strategic process to involve people in the process of lead nurturing and qualification.

To expand on some of the important concepts Mike discussed in the Cookbook, I asked him to answer 5 questions to help you understand the importance of leveraging personalized outreach along with marketing automation to improve your success.

EM: What role does telemarketing play in qualifying inbound leads and why is this role critical to the process?

MD: In the scope of demand gen, inbound leads inherently have a higher value than other forms of leads because they have already raised their hand in some manner. It may be as simple as them simply visiting your site and learning, or it may be as mature as a lead requesting a call back after educating themselves on multiple visits. As it pertains to how an inside team or an outsourced vendor plays into the inbound lead follow-up and qualification process, there are two key factors to remember: first, the faster the prospect has a response from you, the more likely they will convert to a meaningful conversation, and second, know what they were interested in and be prepared for the call. They warmed themselves up for you, so don't make the mistake of treating it as a cold call.

EM: How does integrating telemarketing into your lead nurturing programs affect data integrity and sales intelligence?

MD: No matter how good your automated lead scoring and data collection can be, there is still no replacement for human judgment. Allow your team to be able to make lead scoring adjustments and insist that they consider data hygiene a part of their jobs. A typical example that results from an inbound lead is missing titles. A simple thing, but it impacts the lead score, the reps impression of the lead, etc. So the simple act of having the rep verify the title, say with LinkedIn, is significant. It creates clean data. It can impact or trigger a change in the lead score. And it prepares your rep for the call. The benefits of maintain good data far outweigh the time it takes to maintain it.

EM: Your company Green Leads specializes in b2b appointment setting and reaching top-level executives. What advice do you have for sales reps and telemarketers tasked with connecting with these decision-makers?

MD: Think about this: the sales cycle doesn't start until a conversation with a prospect is taking place. Make sure that your prospect wants to have that conversation. So if your goal is appointment setting, don't call and sell your products and services, call and earn the right to have a more detailed conversation about your products and services. Make the goal of your first call to get a second call.

EM: At what point in the prospect-to-close process would you recommend integrating your first human touch point?

MD: Think about where in the process the prospect is. If they are educating themselves, make your touch bring value to their education process. If they are showing the propensity to buy, then increase your touch to a more detailed sales discussion. Adjust the touch to the prospect. Make it a buying process instead of a selling process.

EM: In the Cookbook you discuss the importance of incorporating the human touch into the lead nurturing process. How can marketing automation improve those one-on-one interactions?

MD: Most marketing automation systems now can actually schedule a human event. And what I mean by that is if you’re building a lead nurturing track, and let’s say the track is: prospect downloads White Paper 1; you nurture them for several weeks; if they visit your site again, you spring another email on them, etc. When they get to a point that’s appropriate to involve a sales rep or telemarketing rep, the marketing automation system can trigger that human event. Honestly, selling doesn’t happen until a conversation happens. So if the lead nurturing track has gotten the prospect to the point that they’re deemed educated and qualified, then you trigger some level of interaction to occur.

Mike is the consummate sales and marketing executive, leading both the growth of Green Leads and the techniques and practices behind Green Leads' demand generation success. Mike brings over 20 years of senior management experience from a series of high technology and b2b marketing firms. During the past 6 years Mike has developed a new brand of demand gen that leverages both technology, the human asset, and social media. After sharing these ideas with other leading demand gen companies, Mike decided to form Green Leads, where he can complement these practices with a higher sense of quality and accountability to the company, its people, its clients, and its community.

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Jeff Erramouspe

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Posted in B2B Marketing, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Marketing Performance, Sales | No Comments

5 Ways to Prevent Sales Funnel Leakage with Marketing Automation

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

In the b2b world of long sales cycles involving multiple decision-makers and influencers, sales funnel leakage is one of the most challenging issues Sales and Marketing face. It occurs when Marketing Qualified Leads are passed to Sales but do not actively enter the sales cycle, and as a result, fall out of the funnel. Why should reducing funnel leakage be a top priority for organizations? According to DemandGen Report, 80% of un-worked leads – those not worked by your sales team for various reasons - will buy from someone over the next two years.

Plugging leaks in your sales funnel can prevent you from losing un-worked leads to your competitors and significantly impact your bottom line. Below are 5 ways marketing automation can enable you to prevent sales funnel leakage:

  1. Create a lead scoring model to enable Sales to automatically prioritize leads.
    Lead Scoring models help your sales team prioritize leads that are ready for action. The total lead score is comprised of both a fit and interest score, and leads are automatically passed to sales once they reach a certain score. The key to creating a successful lead scoring model is getting Sales and Marketing to agree on what constitutes a qualified lead. According to a SiriusDecisions report, about 80% of leads are not followed up by on by Sales. This is probably because of a disconnect between Marketing and Sales.
  2. Use sales alerts to respond to high-scoring leads at the right time with the right message. Connecting with today’s crazy-busy buyer is incredibly difficult. If you are lucky enough to get them on the phone, you have about a 5-second window to say something valuable before you’re dismissed. Marketing automation provides your sales team with real-time sales alerts tracking when prospects enter your website and what pages they view – giving sales reps the ability to have a relevant conversation at the moment the prospect is focusing on you.
  3. Develop a lead nurturing process to engage decision-makers. According to a survey by American Business Media, 78% of business decision-makers say they are spending less time with sales representatives. Before scheduling a meeting, they want relevant information delivered to them. Content should be objective, personalized, and delivered in a simple, clean format. Each touch-point should provide more information and value than the last preparing them for the initial meeting with a sales rep.
  4. Close the loop between the sales and marketing process with tight CRM integration.
    In the long b2b sales cycle, circumstances, such as budget, role or need, are constantly changing. A lead that was initially qualified may become unqualified or not sales-ready. These leads should be passed back to marketing for continued nurturing. Tightly integrated CRM and marketing automation platforms, enable sales reps to enter those leads into a marketing-driven lead nurturing campaign directly from their contact records. Leads will continued to be nurtured by marketing until they are sales-ready – and when passed back to Sales, your company will be top of mind.
  5. Track your results and revise your process. Building a solid process to utilize your marketing automation solution to its fullest potential is a work in progress. You should constantly track and evaluate your results. Are there bottlenecks in your sales funnel? Does your lead nurturing process fizzle at a certain touch-point? Is your lead scoring model aligned with what Sales considers a truly qualified lead? Tracking your results and revising your process accordingly is critical to creating an effective sales funnel.

Plugging the leaks in your sales funnel can lower your cost of doing business and significantly increase deals closed per sales rep. Marketing automation enables you to plug those leaks and keep your hard-earned leads’ eyes on you throughout the sales cycle.

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Jeff Erramouspe

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Posted in Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Marketing Funnel, Sales | No Comments

Q&A Excerpt: Driving Leads with Social Media

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

In Tuesday's webinar Social Media Integration into Marketing Campaigns – Does it Drive Leads?, Manticore Technology Demand Generation Manager Emily Mayfield examined her own successes and failures with social media in a recent, multi-touch marketing campaign featuring The Quintessential Marketing Automation Guidebook. In this Q&A excerpt, Emily Mayfield and VP of Marketing Christopher Doran will answer audience questions regarding integrating social media into a marketing campaign to successfully drive leads.
View the entire Webinar.

Question: How do you explain the importance of how social media generates revenue to someone at the executive level, who doesn’t know much about it or see the value of it?

Christopher: Buyer behavior has changed. Ten years ago, if you were planning on purchasing a new car, you might look in the paper or read consumer reports – now the first place you would probably go is an internet search engine. Social media is an important part of that shift. When a buyer is looking to purchase a product and goes to the internet for information, blogs, discussion forums, and online reviews (all social media outlets) are the results that pop up. Social media is just another tool in a marketer's tool belt. When a buyer is searching for your product or service, you want your company to be the first and most frequent result they see. Social media is another outlet to accomplish that – and it’s free.

Question: Have you discovered any variances in social media success by audience type?

Emily: Yes, social media success does tend to vary by industry and audience type. Typically, marketing and communication roles in industries, such as high-tech, retail, and business services, are more active social media participants than other audiences, therefore those target audiences may produce a better response.

However, as noted in the answer above, modern buyers across industries and roles use search and the internet as their number one source of information. Social media – blogs, discussion forums, twitter feeds, reviews – shows up in search results. Participating is these outlets will increase your exposure and drive leads across all industries and roles.

Question: Based on the results you showed earlier - where most of the opportunities (deals in the pipeline) were driven from social media – would you say that your target audience CMOs and directors of marketing ARE using social media heavily?

Emily: The results of this case study certainly point to that. Last year, Business.com published B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study – a report which analyzed the use of social media across roles and industries. The results of this study point toward the same conclusion - marketing and communication professionals at the executive and senior management level are the heaviest users of social media.

Question: How did you convert blog visitors to leads for this campaign?

Emily: For this campaign, we posted a summary of each section of the eBook and did follow-up interviews with the authors. Visitors could download the section without registering on a landing page. In each section, we embedded a link to a Manticore Technology prospect page (our term for landing page). The reader had the option to download the complete 50-page eBook in exchange for registering on a prospect page and providing us with their demographic information – name, title, phone number, company, revenue, etc. We used the information entered to assign the registrants a lead score, and if their score was high enough, they were passed to sales as a lead.

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Jeff Erramouspe

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Posted in Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Marketing Metrics, Social Media | No Comments
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