20+ years
No one said that tech marketing was easy. After all, you’re trying to reach IT leaders — some of the busiest people on the earth. Not only that, other companies are hot on their trails too. Naturally, they’re seeking cover, doing everything they can to avoid vendors and stay focused on their never-ending to-do’s.
Given the challenges of reaching your target audience, you need to have your marketing and sales ducks in a row. Where are marketers going wrong?
Outsourcing marketing tasks is a trend that’s here to stay. There are many reasons for this, including:
Because of the influence of technology and the web, marketing functions are changing more rapidly than ever before. It’s hard for an internal team to keep up with the shifting environment as well as their business and the markets it serves.
You need high-level leaders to craft your marketing strategy and guide its implementation. Also, executing digital marketing requires an array of specialists. These include web designers and developers, content and copywriters, graphic designers and videographers. In addition, you may need gurus of social media marketing, marketing automation, conversion optimization, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, digital display advertising, email marketing and more.
And digital is only part of the marketing equation. For B2B marketing, you have to add the human touch. For this, you’ll need trade show and conference organizers and inside sales people or telemarketers.
in-house talent may not offer all the skills and expertise they need.
This problem, however, doesn’t mean marketers should reshape strategies to reflect their internal capabilities. The opposite is true. They should design marketing strategies that promise to produce the highest growth, then determine how to implement them with company associates and external resources.
“Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder,” Mason Cooley, an American writer.
It’s September. We’re almost into the fourth quarter (Q4) and John, the Vice President of Sales, is in a mild panic. It’s not surprising. After all, time’s running out to meet his quota and sales are soft.
How did he get into this position?
When he arrived at work at the beginning of January, he was full of optimism for the New Year and ready to tackle the sales challenges. Ahead of him stretched twelve long months to make it all happen. Plenty of time to fill the pipeline, nurture leads and convert them into sales. Or so he thought.
It seems like this missing link is made of gold. What are these sales lead management teams doing that is multiplying the number of ready-to-buy prospects while cutting marketing costs?
But things didn’t work out that way.
Each month sales fell just a little short. And John thought he could tweak a few things to catch up. It didn’t work. Now, he’s about 5% down year to date. Making up those lost sales in the last quarter will require some heroics.
Does this sound familiar?
Too often glass-half-full leaders fail to take strong actions to get sales back on track until they’re up against the wall. Time, their friend at the beginning of the year, zips along and turns into their enemy. And, as Cooley noted so wisely, procrastination makes hard things become harder.
When you’re managing business-to-business telemarketing representatives, you can record their conversations and use them as learning opportunities. If one agent is particularly productive, you can listen to recordings of her phone calls to determine what sets her apart from the others. Also, if another is having difficulty meeting their goals, you can re-live their conversations and learn where they go off track.
Before doing anything, however, become aware oflocal and federal laws related to recording calls and ensure that you abide by them.
When you’re listening to recordings to find out why some representatives are successful and others struggle, pay attention to these areas.
We hear so much these days about the customer-driven buyer’s journey and that more than half of the sales cycle occurs without prospective customers contacting a sales representative. The new buyer’s journey puts ever-increasing pressure on marketing departments to handle the pre-sales process.
Although marketing technology, with its lead scoring, data integration, and automated content delivery tools, can help marketers respond quickly to inquiries online and deliver targeted content, it’s often not enough. That’s why the best marketers still match high tech with the human touch—especially when their product line is complex, and the sales cycle is long.
It’s not enough to capture a lead, follow up, pass the lead to sales, and hope for the business. You need to turn requests into qualified leads and ideally sales-enabled leads. Marketing’s job is to get salespeople in front of prospective customers. And one of the best ways to do that is to work with a professional telemarketing service that specializes in B2B sales and develop a proven appointment-setting strategy.
Last September, the AA-ISP, an international association dedicated exclusively to advancing the profession of Inside Sales, released their 2014 Inside Sales Top Challenges. And they discovered that the number one challenge sales leaders are facing today is training inside sales people to perform well. In fact, many sales organizations complain about a high turnover of inside sales representatives as they don’t manage to bring them to the performance levels they expect in the calculated timeframes.
Why is training such a hot issue?
A 2013 study by InsideSales.com reports inside sales is growing 300% faster than field sales. This trend is expected to continue. That’s because inside sales:
· cuts costs
· is accepted by customers who have become comfortable learning about companies remotely via websites, social media, content downloads such as e-books and white papers, email and phone calls
In fact, many customers prefer the flexibility of phone calls to face-to-face meetings.
Due to the benefits of inside sales, the B2B sales model is changing. Inside sales representatives are taking over more sales duties, sometimes handling the complete sale by themselves rather than working hand in hand with a field sales person. Even if they are working with a field sales executive, they may be doing more up front to transform leads into qualified sales opportunities before passing the baton to the field sales person.
The growth in demand for inside sales people has resulted in a shortage of qualified reps on the market. That means companies now need to hire and train people who may not have a proven track record in inside sales.
How to rock sales lead development? The quick answer…put a sales lead management team to work.
That of course, begs the question, “what is a sales lead management team?” It is, unfortunately, often the missing link between sales and marketing. It’s that gap between the two disciplines where leads are lost either because marketing doesn’t qualify them or sales doesn’t follow up on them. Conveniently, marketing points the finger at sales and sales points the finger at marketing.
If only there was a group in between marketing and sales that could take marketing leads and transform them into qualified sales opportunities.
That’s what a sales lead management team does via the phone, email, and more. And a Forrester Research study says that businesses which put a priority on lead qualification and nurturing have 50 percent more sales-ready prospects and reduce their cost-per-lead by 33%.
It seems like this missing link is made of gold. What are these sales lead management teams doing that is multiplying the number of ready-to-buy prospects while cutting marketing costs?
You've decided it's time to use the power of the human touch and connect one-on-one with your prospects and customers. You're ready to nurture and qualify leads more effectively and maximize the use of your sales team's time.
Perhaps you've previously done some informal telemarketing. You've asked a few administrative assistants to make calls on an as-needed basis. However, this option may not have worked for you because you were not able to put the correct systems, training, people and processes in place. It ended up being expensive, time-consuming and ineffective.
So, now you're making a choice between setting up an inside sales function or outsourcing the task to a professional B2B telemarketing organization. Intuitively, it may seem like it would cost less to tackle telemarketing tasks at your company. However, you want to see the numbers in black and white.
Get ready for the holidays with the 12 days of B2B lead generation. Give yourself the gift of qualified leads and more sales.
On the First Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
A Database of Suspects
Start the season with a database of suspects, people who meet your basic criteria to become clients, but are not yet qualified. Clean it up—eliminate duplicate names and update and append the data.
On the Second Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Two B2B Segments
Look at your historical activities and decide how to group suspects so you can approach them with a set of tailored marketing tactics. Segment by industry, geography, company size, role, department or any other easily defined criterion…whatever is most likely to yield results.
The Third Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Three Engaging Pieces
Provide content that engages and educates your suspects who are doing a lot of research before talking with your sales people. Whether it’s a blog post, e-book, video, webinar or infographic, the content needs to answer the questions that suspects ask as they move through the buying cycle.
The Fourth Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Four Convincing Studies
As your suspects move through the buying cycle they become prospects and want to understand how your product or service has worked for other clients. Case studies are compelling because your prospects can relate to other clients’ problems and how you helped to solve them.
The Fifth Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Five Days of Calling
Once you have a clean, segmented list and content to answer questions, it’s time to get on the phone. Ask questions one-to-one that help you understand each prospect better so you can customize their journey from awareness to decision making. It’s all about personalizing your marketing and adding a human touch.
The Sixth Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Six-Pages of Prospects
The prospects are those who fit your qualifications as a potential customer and have shown interest. Through tele-prospecting, you can determine who is interested in receiving more information…perhaps one of those engaging pieces.
The Seventh Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Seven Nurturing Emails
You need to nurture prospects to help transform them into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and getting them ready to send on to your sales team. To nurture, send emails that answer prospects’ questions and provide insight. Also, add some tele-nurturing into the sequence to warm up leads even faster.
Research shows that to generate a response in the B2B world, you need an average of nine touches in order to gain a response.
The Eighth Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Eight Scoring Rules
Obviously, you can’t contact everyone at once. So, you need lead-scoring rules. These rules will help you to prioritize the prospects and determine which are more likely to become MQLs, and eventually sales qualified leads (SQLs).
Base lead scoring on demographics (company, industry, revenues, etc.), their level of engagement with your company as well as what you learn from conversations with them. The key is to keep lead scoring simple.
The Ninth Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Nine MQLs
As you nurture the inquiries, some will respond. They will click on links in emails, visit your website, ask for more information and take actions that show they may be interested. When they reach a certain pre-determined score, they cross the threshold and become MQLs.
The Tenth Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Ten More MQLs
Once you have the process down, the leads will continue to flow. After all, you have to feed your sales team continuously.
On the Eleventh Day of Lead Gen
Marketing Made for Sales
Eleven SQLs
Now business developers talk with the MQLs on the phone to determine if they are sales qualified leads (SQLs). The initial lead scoring can help you to estimate interest based on the level of a person’s engagement. It cannot, however, determine why they are taking action. The only way to answer this is to have a human-to-human conversation that uncovers the intent that led to their activity.
On the Twelfth Day of Lead Gen
Sales Made from Marketing
Twelve Closed Sales
In the end, if you follow a well-defined lead management process, the results will convert to sales. Although it may start slowly, it will snowball over time. And that’s the biggest gift of all.
For a free consultation on B2B lead qualification, call us now at +1 718-709-0900 (Americas) /+39 06-978446-20(EMEA).
Even in a world where people are able to conduct much of their business virtually, face-to-face meetings still play an important role. In fact, Meetings Professionals International conducted research that shows 40% of prospects convert during in-person meetings.
So, how do you get more live appointments?
Follow this step-by-step process to fill your salespeople’s calendars with well-qualified sales appointments:
