20+ years
It sounds so attractive to pay appointment setting companies fees based on the number of appointments they set up for you. It seems there’s no risk, and would appear to make it simple to compare one teleservices company to another. It comes down to dollars and cents you pay for each appointment.
But is that really true?
If you’ve put together an in-house team to make and receive phone calls as part of your sales and marketing process, you’re probably wondering if you’re getting your money’s worth. Is the program as cost effective as possible? Are you optimizing lead qualification efforts and maximizing your return on investment?
The answer is: Probably not. Why?
Because an in-house team will likely cost your company more than outsourced teleservices. And more often than not, in-house teams are not as effective. Let’s examine this in greater detail.
Internet marketing—websites, white papers, YouTube videos, social media, pay-per-click and more—has become a major part of many business-to-business companies’ lead-generation strategies. It appeals to marketers with its promise of cost-effectively attracting prospects who are genuinely interested in their products and solutions.
And it can deliver that promise. But it could do it better if marketers were not making one big mistake.
Many of us are addicted to the snooze button. There is nothing else on a cold winter’s morning that we savor more than a few extra minutes under the blankets. It’s only natural for us human beings to put off things we don’t want to do. And in that list of not-so-fun, easy-to-put-off tasks, one that looms large is database cleanup. But it’s also a critically important part of the lead generation and sales lead qualification process because people change positions quite often and contact data gets stale.
So how do you cut this onerous undertaking down to size and make it trouble free?
Imagine having deep insights into your target accounts that can give you a competitive advantage in marketing and sales. They enable you to prioritize who to call, create customized messages that grab their attention, encourage decision-makers to consider your products, shorten the sales cycle, and close the sale.
Channel partners can grow your sales and spread the message about your products or services. But to have an effective channel partner program, you have to recruit the right channel partners to achieve your goals. This post explores channel development tasks from partner profiling to lead generation and qualification.
If you’re experimenting with email marketing for customer acquisition, you might ask your optometrist how to improve your success.
You’ve probably stared at an eye chart with big letters at the top and microscopic ones at the bottom, and read down until the letters blurred. If you don’t have 20/20 vision, the optometrist subjects you to a series of tests, putting several lenses in front of your eyes, and asking you how far down the chart you can read with each one.
Then, he or she fine tunes your prescription by flipping from one lens to the next, asking “is it clearer with this one or that one?” The doctor gains a little more information about your eyes with each test, and discovers the best prescription to help you see more clearly.
Essentially the optometrist is performing A/B testing to determine the optimal lenses for you. And that’s what you need to do to optimize your email marketing.
According to a Forrester Research study, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead. Also, Marketing Sherpa’s research shows that marketing departments with lead nurturing in place generate a 45% higher return on investment than those that lack such a program. Despite this, they report that 65% of B2B marketers have not established a lead nurturing program.
What are the building blocks of a lead-nurturing campaign that gets results?
Whether you received a lead because someone signed up for a webinar, demo, or other offer, you need to institute a lead nurturing process to transform it into a qualified lead. What’s the best way to do this? If you want to maximize your sales conversion rates, start by picking up the phone.
The key to lead nurturing and conversion is to focus on the prospect, their problem, and helping them to find a solution. You cannot do that without a true understanding of the issues and opportunities the person is facing. The closer you can come to interacting directly with someone, the deeper your mutual understanding will be.
While it may seem simpler to sell directly to your clients, if you want to grow more quickly, it makes sense to leverage the power of channel partners. Taking on a new partner, however, requires time and resources. And since you want to make sure you are spending your time wisely, you need to target the right partners. Finding partners that are a perfect match for your company starts with a channel-partner profile.
