Tokyo12Category Archives: Lead Nurturing

The Art of the Concierge Approach

Tokyo12

Deciding to try something new for Thanksgiving this year, my husband and I spent ten days in Tokyo visiting family. This was my first time in Asia and I was completely taken with the city and culture I found in Japan. One of the things that impressed me the most was the graciousness of the Japanese people. They were unfailingly courteous and attentive, especially in transactional situations. It’s not atypical for a clerk to escort you out of the building at the end of your purchase and carry your package to the door before thanking you profusely and sending you on your way. Truly, this is how service is done.

Tokyo by night

Tokyo by night

The more I experienced such exemplary service, the more I came to realize it’s exactly like the concierge approach that we talk about all the time here at OppSource: the idea of completely devoting yourself to a prospect’s moment-of-interest in order to guide him to the appropriate next step. It sounds obvious, but many companies do a poor job of this–they get someone on the hook (by phone, over email, even in person), and their instinct is to push the sale instead of taking the opportunity to really understand what the prospect is looking for or interested in. Sometimes, the prospect just has a simple question and if your answer is to send a product brochure instead of asking thoughtful follow-up questions (and actually listening to the response), you’re missing a potentially greater opportunity.

If you learn best by example, take it from the Japanese:

  • A smile goes a long way. I was constantly greeted with a smile in Tokyo and you know what it did? It made me smile right back.  Lesson: Good moods go a long way. Even over email or chat, cheerfulness counts.
  • Pet the ego. Between the bowing and the smiling and the attentive graciousness, I felt like nothing short of royalty in Japan. Lesson: While you don’t have to fawn all over your prospect, remember that you’re interacting because they have a need right now–keep the focus on who they are and what they need, not what you can sell them.
  • To the bitter end. As I glanced back at the Narita airport after our plane was backed out from the gate and onto the tarmac, I noticed that the ground crew had stopped what they were doing and were waving good-bye to the plane. Lesson: Always say good-bye. Whether it’s walking a prospect out the front door or ending a phone or email conversation with well wishes, don’t forget to finish the transaction memorably and warmly.

More than anything, the concierge approach is the most effective way to ensure a positive experience with your brand. Even if you never make a sale, making an impression can be just as valuable.

What’s Your MAP?

Nope, I don’t mean Marketing Automation Platform. I mean your marketing automation PLAN? Too often companies decide on a technology purchase and chart a marketing course to sail hand in hand with these tools. But they are thorny and require a constant flow of content, true dedication, skills specialization and steady attention to be successful.

Sure, you can stand up a marketing automation system in a day or two, architecting some general inbound or outbound workflows. The standard plug-in into Salesforce.com is easy enough to get up and running – but will it serve your overall business need? Did you define what that need was prior to purchasing? Was it that you needed to get some emails out the door? More leads in general?

Marketing automation’s value comes with its rigorous functionality set designed to keep your message and brand in front of customers on strategically timed intervals whether you choose to proactively include someone in your program, or they are an inbound registrant. Success requires thoughtful answers to several questions we outline below:

Ask yourself:

• Have you put someone in charge of your marketing automation strategy?

• Have you designed a series of 90 day content plans to make sure you have fresh offers coming off the assembly line for your database of prospects and inbound marketing efforts?

• Have you designated a person on your team as responsible for being the tool guru? As important, have you set their expectations and role definitions to allow the needed time to achieve this goal?

• Have you set a series of benchmarks defining what success “looks like” quarter by quarter?

• Have you defined what a ‘lead’ means to sales and documented the criteria?

• Have you secured buy-in for your sales team on the exact process they will follow when pursuing leads your marketing automation plan produces?

As you continue to vet your marketing automation plan, keep these questions in mind. Taking time and answering them, sometimes with tough decisions, will make your initiative a success.

Moment-of-Interest Marketing – It’s not just about timing

We talk a lot about Moment-of-Interest (MOI) Marketing around here because we truly believe in its necessity. Piquing someone’s interest today doesn’t ensure they’ll remember who you are tomorrow–or even an hour from now–which is why pursuing prospects in the moment of their interest is crucial. I could go on and on about the whys and hows of following up as quickly as possible in order to maximize your message but I’d rather focus on something of equal–if not greater–importance: the follow-up content.

It dawned on me the other day that the phrase “moment-of-interest” can be seen as having two components to it, the moment and the interest, and each must be given its due. The moment is all about timing, connecting with the prospect right when he demonstrates a desire to know more about you. The interest is all about using what you know to elevate the discussion.

It’s not just enough to immediately engage, anyone can send an automated email or pick up the phone based on a triggering interaction; follow-up must be purposeful and  based on the triggering interaction. Showing the prospect you care enough to get in touch immediately is great, but showing the prospect you care enough to get in touch immediately and provide complementary collateral/messaging to the resonating message is much better.

For example, if you were researching exhaust clamps for your vehicle and downloaded an overview brochure to learn more about a specific model, would a follow-up email asking you to signup for a newsletter be the best way to keep engaging you? Or would a follow-up email with tips for installing exhaust products be a better way to keep your interest? It works in the B2B space as well. If you were researching accounting software and downloaded a whitepaper on the future of SOX compliance (a titillating read, I’m sure), would you be more likely to stay interested if you got an auto-generated email leading you to a generic ‘library’ of whitepaper content or an email that included a checklist of top SOX violations every company can easily avoid and links to the last five blog posts the company has featured about SOX compliance?

When you elevate the discussion by responding to the data the prospect has given you, not only does the prospect stay engaged longer, you’re also already on your way to creating credibility and authority in the prospect’s mind. Focusing on response time alone is only half the battle–make sure your moment-of-interest efforts are truly responsive.

The Power of Sales Acceptance

Alignment and communication between marketing and sales is a crucial aspect for a company’s ultimate revenue success. The two teams need to think, act, win and lose as one. Marketing cannot believe it can walk away from sales when there are rough times, and that cuts both ways. The first piece of sales and marketing alignment is defining what truly is a lead. With this in place, marketing can set about creating demand for sales.

Just as important as sales and marketing alignment is the team requirement for sales people to ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ leads produced by marketing. This is a pivotal activity that must happen, according to industry analyst firm Sirius Decisions, within 3 to 24 hours. The proper systems and processes must be set up on the back end to properly code reasons for acceptance and rejection with a click of a mouse with the opportunity to add more commentary. Sales should want and be excited to deliver feedback. Creating this culture will help marketing deliver better qualified leads continuously, resulting in more revenue and success for all.

It is enough to start with a non-systems powered process to just get this initiative off the ground, but integrating it into where salespeople live, their CRM system and its related mobile applications is critical for long term success. Marketing and sales is now a closely knit team – neither can succeed if they walk alone.

Lead Scoring is Not Lead Qualification

CSO Insights just recently published their latest Lead Management Optimization Survey. Their latest research shows that >70% of the firms surveyed either have no lead scoring process or an informal lead scoring process in place. The same survey indicated that over 50% of the survey respondents have no consensus or agreement in place between sales and marketing on what constitutes the definition of a qualified sales lead. Clearly this is problematic.

Renowned Psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the phrase “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” in the 1960’s. This is certainly true today for the marketing automation software vendors. With all the data suggesting that lead scoring or the lack thereof is a problem, then all you need is marketing automation software and it’s fixed – right? Wrong!!

Today’s marketing automation software is architected around contacts not accounts. Unfortunately, in the B2B world, it’s accounts that actually buy things. Thus, lead scoring all the contacts that respond to digital-based marketing messages does not help create more qualified leads for B2B sales professionals. Closing the gap on this requires finding the right influencers and decision makers in the accounts and then having conversations with them to identify their objectives, pain points, motivations for change, etc. With these critical pieces of intelligence in hand, a lead can be properly scored and qualified into sales ready or not.

All of this requires human intervention in the lead management process. As inquiries generated by marketing are augmented with new contacts through conversations, referrals and research, the collection of interactions both digital and conversational make their way into bona-fide sales leads. Only when these personal contacts and interactions occur can a lead be effectively qualified and handed off to sales as sales-ready opportunities. If you would like to learn more about our best practices in lead management, download our white paper “Six Pillars to an Effective Lead Management Program.”
 

Lead Capture: Deliberate Action Versus Forced Reaction

 Many organizations are trying to figure out how to get the highest quality and the most information possible from their web forms. Some companies try to optimize by varying how many questions they ask. Still others change pick-list values on a regular basis to mitigate abandon rates. One piece of the puzzle often overlooked is empowering the prospect to quickly pick and choose what they are most interested in, then use your marketing tools to score accordingly. Instead of offering one login to a resources page, why not offer several top performing pieces and let the prospect choose only the ones they want? Letting the prospect see a synopsis or teaser when rolling over the choice can help drive interest as well.

Deliberate actions should score higher than forced reactions. What I mean by forced reactions is making someone choose a pick-list value or enter free text to proceed to the asset page. How many times have you just “picked whatever” in order to get through the form gate? No process is ever completely perfect, but you can count on the fact if a prospect proactively chooses the asset they want, not only will they fill out the form more accurately (I want that piece, I better give a real email address), but you can also bank that they are more interested than others who don’t exactly know what to expect from your resource library.

Making Great Content Go Farther

One of the challenges that we constantly encounter in the executing the nurturing campaigns of the lead management programs that we manage for our customers is having enough compelling content.  ”Compelling” is the operative word — as you want to provide content in your nurturing campaigns that is contextually relevant to the prospect given where they are likely to be in their buying cycle.  One technique to address the compelling objective is to use 3rd Party research reports from known and trusted sources.  In the high technology marketplace, Gartner, Forrester, and Sirus are a few of the big-name trusted 3rd party research firms that have prolific content.  The challenge is that using this content is expensive and as such, most companies don’t have endless budget to spend for these great pieces of content.  How then can you make this great content go farther?

Ardath Albee recently provided some great suggestions in her blog post “Make 3rd Party Content an Opportunity not a Necessity” on how to make this kind of content more powerful and go further.  Her suggestion was to find the  ”big ideas” contained in each of these 3rd party reports and then tie back into the special things your company does with a complementary article, blog post, or white paper.  As Ardath says, it doesn’t have to be a lengthy article, just invest 800-1,000 words that will showcase how your company’s solution address the big ideas mentions by the 3rd party research report.  This not only positions your company’s key capabilities, it positions your company as a thought leader who has invested in bringing solutions to market to address these “big idea” issues.

How Will You Get Your Fair Share of New Buyers in 2011?

The new year has brought with it a great deal of excitement and hope for a much brighter business climate. The headlines suggest that corporations are flush with cash and have good intentions for spending on everything from plant, technology, and even people.

New research from Sirius Decisions suggests however, that we B2B marketeers better rethink how we capture our fair share of this expanding market opportunity. Their 2010 research suggests that 58% of B2B inquiries were initiated from the web and they project this to grow to 71% by 2015.

Even if you discount their research for a typical margin of error, you cannot ignore inbound marketing tactics in this new market environment if you expect to get your fair share of new buyers.

  1. What is your inbound marketing game plan?
  2. What is your content marketing strategy to attract and engage these inquisitive web leads?
  3. What lead management and nurturing process are you going to use to make sure that your growing list of web leads are properly scored, nurtured, and qualified?

Marketing ROI: The Lead Source Downfall

There is an old, if irritating joke in marketing: I know 50% of my spend is going to the wrong things, I just don’t know which 50%! In a world of ‘marketing automation’, ‘CRM integration’ and technology vendors stumping these products, how can this still be so?

How the systems are configured to capture and report information is the process and execution question many executives neglect. If your systems and workflows aren’t designed to contemplate many marketing touches and give credit where credit is due, the insight identifying the “right 50%” of spend is wasted. The root cause of this problem is marketers and salespeople thinking in terms of “lead source”. When an opportunity gets put into Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics or others many companies default to adding a ‘lead source’ which is then the ‘reporting’ go to field to see ‘how this opportunity was created.’ It’d be like buying a house and only asking how the interior painting was done – this was the last critical step, but what about all of the effort that came before?

Enter the notion of campaigns. Campaigns can be associated at the lead, contact and account levels and allow for multiples – not just one ‘source’. Companies who are rigorously implementing campaign tags into their CRM systems have a more complete view of ALL of the touches and tactics that contributed to creating the opportunity. Did they first come to a trade show, then a webinar and finally a tele-nurturing resource reached them to qualify? It would be short sided to say, “tele-sales, you did it!” Actually, marketing AND sales did it through this portfolio of action.

What’s more, with campaigns you can track back to how many opportunities participated in a particular tactic, and decide if you should do that again (of course, feeling confident that the right sales and nurturing process was interacting with the prospect after the initial touch).

One OppSource customer’s marketing department that is doing this well is able to justify spend, cease non-performing tactics and justify their very existence as a delivery group – after all, in business isn’t that a point of value we’re all trying to show?