Aligning Marketing Automation With Sales Process

July 25, 2011 by · 9 Comments

Marketing automation is relevant today because buyers deliberate and educate themselves before they engage.  What used to be the role of a salesperson in the sales process has shifted to buyers and their ability to self-service for information.  However, marketing automation does not alleviate the need for sales.  The handoff between the buying process and the selling process needs to be aligned to create a continuous experience for your customers.

Before Sales Calls

Before the sales call, your marketing automation campaigns should be serving helpful and valuable content for your leads to consume.  In the process, trust is being built and your brand is being positioned.

The system should be measuring both of these factors – trust and positioning – via lead scoring.  Your sales team should be prompted at the right time when the scoring reaches predetermined thresholds.  The complete history of lead behavior should be visible within your marketing automation system and CRM.

By The Time Sales Engages

When your processes coordinate sales engagement, your sales people should be recognizable with credibility when they reach out.  If there is not recognition of your brand, then your nurturing has not been adequate in readying your buyer to hear from your sales force.

Assuming your marketing automation has done the hard work of positioning you in the mind of your buyer, then your salesperson has entree to a relevant and ready conversation around your value proposition.  Ready leads have surfaced and your team is focusing on the best leads.

Marketing Automation Strategy

In our work with clients, there are some valuable steps which should accompany a successful marketing automation strategy in order to align the sales process.  This will create a fluid ongoing process for marketing and sales in generating demand and converting leads.

  • Create real-time alerts. Based on the lead flow and buying process, there are certain events which may need sales attention.  Real-time alerts for visiting a landing page or downloading content shows interest in a specific call to action.  Serve these up as alerts for specific sales people that may want to engage the conversation with a buyer around their interest.
  • Educate salespeople on buying activities. Sales people are familiar with body language, using the phone and sending proposal.  These are activities that they initiate.  Marketing automation reports activities that the buyer is generating.  Help them make sense of the list of data they will see from digital body language that they can assimilate when they do finally connect in person with the buyer.
  • Manage follow-up with reporting. There may be assigned tasks to follow up with a ready lead.  Timing is everything.  Create logic which will trigger management if follow-up on a task is not executed.  Another way to manage the human aspect is to keep a real-time report or dashboard in front of everyone on the team.
  • Review sales success. Your salespeople on the front lines should be part of a feedback loop on what the buyer experience was like and where it can be further optimized.  Have regular meetings or a forum to get these insights into your marketing automation campaigns.  Help sales realize they are part of the team and how they contribute for their own benefit.

Aligning sales and marketing is attention to process.  Your organization will benefit from higher lead conversion ratios as the automation and human touchpoints are integrated and inviting for your buyers.

How does automation work in your business?

 


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Marketing Automation Sales Stages And Lead Qualification

July 22, 2011 by · 2 Comments

If you believe marketing automation is the silver bullet that will suddenly close all those anonymous leads faster on your site, then you miss the mark and the concept.  Unfortunately, sales organizations tend to seek closing the lead rather than nurturing prospects and building trust through education, positioning and delivering value first.

Marketing Automation Software Guide sent an article on the topic inviting dialogue.  Their comments on the ineffectiveness of marketing automation from the gaps observed in marketing automation execution is consistent with our own experiences which we have written extensively on in our AscendWorks blog.

Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing automation software is far less important than the marketing automation strategy.  How lead flows, lead scoring, list segmentation, triggers, copy, call to action pieces, and sales process integration work together is what makes marketing automation effective or not.  It’s the art and science of engaging a buyer where they are at.

The strategy needs to work much like a well-designed sales process.  There needs to be stages and qualification criteria.  Having a one-dimensional approach where you are seeking merely to close any lead that clicks on an email is both premature and detrimental to building trust.

Not all leads are qualified.  Your marketing automation campaign should drive various decision trees to segment leads according to their qualification.

In the sales process, there may be various stages:

  • Interest
  • Consulting Meeting
  • Value Proposition
  • Proposal
  • Negotiation
  • Closed/Won

These will vary according to how your company does business.  Likewise, various stages in the buying process need to be carefully thought through.  Buyers are in completely different mindsets at different points in time.  Their readiness is influenced by factors which you are trying to unearth as you build trust.

Consider structuring your marketing automation strategy and campaigns with segmentations such as:

  • Awareness
  • Education
  • Highly Engaged
  • Ready Buyer

There may be more depending on your sales cycles, change management impacts and sophistication of your offerings.  Once these segmentations have been identified, reflect these in your Lead Scoring and lead attributes to identify the different Leads.  The last stage should trigger a sales engagement.  The mistake of contacting buyers too early can lower trust, thus setting up qualifications that serve up ready buyers in the last stage of buying will create optimal timing.

Assume the majority of your buyers will be in the unready parts of your pipeline.  This allows you to create content assets inside of your marketing automation system that will persist for a continuous pipeline of incoming buyers as you learn and refine how each buying stage is serviced with content and connection.

Buying stages reflect psychological shifts.  Reflecting these requires astuteness in your marketing automation strategy and approach.  The rewards are that you will have a system that produces predictability and increased probability for sales.

What are the buying stages you see in your process?

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Lead Nurturing With Education

July 20, 2011 by · 13 Comments

If your buyer is not educated, then they will feel unready to engage the sales conversation with your team.  Filling this gap with strategic marketing automation lead flows in Loopfuse that help the buyer to ask the right questions sets up a qualified lead for your sales team.

If you sell a sophisticated product or service, expect that much of the focus of your marketing automation campaigns will revolve around education.  If you provide this value to potential buyers, then your expertise becomes established in their mind.

Here are some approaches we have used to in our marketing automation consulting to help our clients funnel their prospects through the buying process which will help you design your own processes:

  1. Focus on the problem. Use a sequence of autoresponse emails to articulate the specific problem your customers seek to solve.  The scenarios can vary.  You can segment each lead flow by problem definition to allow your landing page visitor to opt into a personalized experience with the problem they face.  Speaking about features and benefits is marketing talk.  Start with the problem and how your offering makes a difference and helps people every day.
  2. Ensure the copy is conversational. If you merely provide an encyclopedia of answers, people can turn to Wikipedia or other sterile sources of information.  Use plain language in your copy and connect as a human being.  Assume your buyers know very little about how your industry or market works.  Provide the rudiments and help them gain expertise in a sequential diet of information that makes sense to any person new to the industry.
  3. Provide branched lead flows. When your email campaigns reach a logical point, provide other calls to action for further lead flow opportunities that get further than preliminary education.  This could be an e-course or videos that go further into the education process.
  4. Score your leads for their opt-ins. As your leads opt into further lead flows, ascribe scoring that helps to qualify their lead status for your sales team.  If there is deep interest in the education process, then create a triggered task for your salesperson to make contact.  The sequence of Lead activities should reveal a high level of engagement and interest which makes sense for sales engagement.
  5. Break up the content. Our attention is sparse.  Instead of a thirty minute video, make 5 smaller videos.  Condense white paper content to multiple pieces or email template communications.  Create anticipation for the next Lead Flow sequence and integrate them together into a cohesive experience.  This creates fresh engagement for your buyers and keeps their attention and engagement.  Furthermore, your marketing automation rules can be further engineered to funnel the buyer for each interaction.

If your buyer feels educated, they feel empowered.  Furthermore, if you are the one providing the education, then you will have permission to engage in dialogue.

Help them know the right questions to ask and frame the sales discussion from the education process.

Using your Loopfuse system to design multiple educational Lead Flows will create the growing pipeline for lead qualification for your sales team.  You will notice a difference in the sales conversation with higher levels of trust and readiness to buy.

What are some areas that you could provide marketing automation for education?

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Marketing Automation With Story

July 18, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Marketing automation serves to nurture unready buyers.  The strategy for nurturing effectively is the art within marketing automation that is both difficult and critical.  When we implement a marketing automation campaign for our clients, we have to be able to tell their story and connect the dots with the customer’s pain.

Story is what creates the emotional connection that your buyer is seeking to differentiate you from the noise they see in the marketplace both online and in color.  It is the art of the tell that gives reason to picking your brand.

The Problem With Corporate Speak

In a different era, it was about making an impression and appearing large, successful and better than everyone.  Marketing was business and impersonal.  Press releases, corporate brochures and websites all carried the formal tone to give buyers an assurance of stability, professionalism and superiority.

The copy is somewhat comical now.  Communications has become more democratized.  We can see through the nonsense and we don’t want to read a sentence three times trying to figure out what it means.

We all know companies and brands have their flaws.  We are suspicious of anyone that claims otherwise.

We Dig Scars.  Get Real.

What makes us human is our stories.  We have drama, pain, and challenges we face every day.  How we overcome our adversity is what makes us valuable, heroic and attractive.  Think about why we watch movies or finish a great novel.  The story draws us in.  When we are with friends, we tune in to the person sharing great story.  We are wired to hear story and we respond with emotion.

Your story is what makes you unique.  Marketing automation allows you the opportunity to deliver this to a stranger.  The goal is to help them become familiar and acquainted with you.  It builds trust.  Stories such as:

  • How you got started
  • How you make your product
  • What customers are doing with your service
  • What cause you are fighting for
  • What you did to fix the last customer service mistake
  • Who your team members are
  • What you have tried that failed
  • How you failed in order to succeed
  • Where you are going

Telling your stories in a personal tone that is conversational helps your audience to know you are real and that there is someone behind the product or service that cares.  It gives your customer a reason to tell others by telling them your story.

If there is no story, then you have a commodity.  Throw your lot in with the rest of the stodgy competitors in your space who look the same.

It may mean that your content marketing has to take on an overhaul.  It’s well worth it.  It is the difference between connecting and remaining irrelevant.  The marketplace is too congested.  We live in a world where people crave what is real, authentic and has a story.  Your audience is waiting.

What is your story?

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Marketing Automation: Beyond The Boundaries

July 12, 2011 by · 1 Comment

Boundaries (II)

Much of old school selling happened on a personal level. Face-to-face meetings and phone calls were common. Prospects gave us attention because we had information which would help them understand something they were unfamiliar with.

The new economy is digital. We can self-service on what we need education or orientation on using the internet. Buying is done far before the selling starts by a salesperson. However, it is part of one continuum.

Unfortunately, organizations trapped in old mindsets are limited by self-imposed boundaries. They can only measure, react and move sales forward based on a buyer’s willingness to give time and attention for a meeting.

The boundaries from an old model limit visibility, interaction and value exchange possible in a much larger paradigm. Marketing automation goes beyond traditional boundaries to augment the selling process and skills of an organization with timely value to prospects. Here are some things that your new process can now support when you go beyond the boundaries:

  • Automation is doing the prospecting. Multiple personal follow-ups may not be welcome. Once a week personal touchpoints are about the maximum a prospect can tolerate without perceiving aggressiveness. However, valuable information delivered at the right time can record digital behaviors – opens, clicks, page visits, downloads, etc. – and be recorded within your CRM customer data. Your salesperson and your marketing automation system are working in tandem with all touchpoints – personal and digital – recorded in a prospect’s record.
  • Prioritization of leads. A salesperson can have one engagement at a time. They work in serial. Marketing automation working with a sales process helps to percolate the most ready leads. Lead scoring reports help to communicate how active a buyer is with your content and their readiness to buy based on responsiveness and interaction with your content assets. This helps sales to focus their energy on a more qualified list of leads.
  • Lead conversion pipeline. If you are only working in the physical realm, then your pipeline is what you see and touch. However, a pipeline of promoted leads can automate what constitutes a working pipeline for your sales team. Lead distribution from a large set of visitors or prospects can be managed automatically with assignment rules in place. Your sales meetings can be focused on action rather than reporting, for the reporting is real-time with true sales opportunities.
  • Sales readiness. If your salesperson is having to educate in valuable meetings with the client, then it is a limited meeting compared to a buyer who is able to dialogue and collaborate. Nurturing from marketing automation can prepare the mindset, dialogue and understanding of the buyer. This helps them to feel comfortable in technical discussions and ask the right questions. Framing of the discussion creates a better buying situation where intelligent questions and dialogue can occur. It feels like selling otherwise where there is a large knowledge imbalance between the salesperson and the buyer.

Ultimately, marketing automation removes boundaries between the buyer and the information they need. Trust can be built and the ingredients for a rich sales discussion are prepared with the buyer able to consume valuable information on their timetable. It is convenient and preferable for how people like to buy in the new economy.

If your processes rely only on human touchpoints, then your boundaries can limit revenue opportunity.

What would automation look like for your business to grow sales?

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing Automation, Sales Process · Tagged: , , , , , ,

Marketing To Attention

July 11, 2011 by · 6 Comments

marketing ignore attentionMarketers miss the proverbial eight ball when it comes to attention.  Many marketers still believe we watch TV commercials fully when the majority of people skip the ads.  Here are the behaviors most of us do today in a world of too much marketing stimulus:

  • We change channels for radio ads.
  • We tear up and throw out junk mail.
  • We don’t pick up because of caller id
  • We mark email as spam from strangers
  • We skip sites with unwelcome banners
  • We completely ignore billboards and signs
  • We sign up for “Do Not Call” and “Do Not Fax”
  • We walk by the overbearing salesperson
  • We skip the magazine ads
  • We use free Craigslist rather than old school classifieds

While marketers have gotten creative throwing money at more colorful and refined artwork that interrupts us, buyers have built up defenses to block out the noise.  We have gotten quite good at blocking, ignoring and reporting unwelcome marketing.

We do other things that have our attention:

So how come there is so much money spent on bad, brainless marketing when our behaviors are pretty obvious and congruent?  Why do businesses sell the way they did 20 years ago rather than how we buy today?

I say go where the attention and focus is.  Build connection each step of the way that makes you desirable.  Then, maybe, you get a chance to have a conversation that matters with someone you desperately want as your customer.  Make it personal.  Study it.  Create immense value.  Then make it repeatable.

You will then have a system and process which automates your marketing approach.  You can be strategic in your marketing automation rather than desperate and hopeful in old strategies that are hit or miss.

What do you think?  Feel free to comment.

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Why Marketing Automation Makes Selling Easier

July 5, 2011 by · 5 Comments

Marketing automation sets up the salesperson.  It assumes something that traditional sales does not: buyers prefer self-service until they are ready to buy.

If you court your buyer too early, you can violate trust.  It is intrusive and unsynced with how they would prefer to move through the process of buying.

At some point, a switch occurs.  When the buyer feels ready, they move into engagement.  Selling becomes easy at this point.  The hard work beforehand is a process.  The actual sale is an event.  Create a personalized, predictable and relevant process and you create repeatable events for your business.

Here is the heavy lifting that marketing automation does before the event of a sale:

  1. Creates Awareness:  The marketplace is saturated and noisy.  Marketing automation gets past this noise by connecting with the buyer in an impactful and precise way based on their behaviors and preferences.  It is targeted when a well-designed marketing strategy has been implemented.
  2. Educates: Assume you know much, much more than your buyer.  You think about your product or service all the time.  Your buyer is buying when they need something.  There is a long list of items they have and you are one item in time and attention they are focused on.  They want to learn as much as possible, preferably from you.  Your marketing automation strategy should empower the buyer with knowledge which you have.
  3. Builds Trust: Your brand becomes part of the flesh and blood of your marketing automation system and touchpoints.  Frequency helps to spotlight your brand.  Insight and expertise positions you in the mind of the customer as the leader.  They want to pick the leader.  Effective marketing automation strategies build trust by positioning your leadership and your care by adding value as they are learning.
  4. Measures Interest: You can’t keep calling your unseen buyer.  However, their digital body language is telling you many things if you can capture it and analyze it.  You can see what content they are interested in, how they move through a decision tree and the level of interest they have ongoing.  Scoring what is invisible and surfacing it for sales readies the conversation your company will eventually have.
  5. Qualifies Leads: If your expensive sales team is wasting time talking to people that will never buy, then it is a waste of resources and money.  Allow your system to direct such uninterested prospects to some kind of referral nurturing campaign.  The workload for your sales team can be focused and cut down by seeing your marketing automation system percolate with the most qualified leads.
  6. Positions The Sales Meeting: Imagine someone who is already sold.  They are ready to do business with you.  They know your value proposition and they trust you.  This is the result of marketing automation executed well.  Your buyer feels like they know you because of the hard work of your marketing automation processes.

There are two ways to sell – you call people or they call you.  Calling people has natural limits.  You can only do it so often.  It is linear and inefficient.  It takes manpower and will power.

People calling you can scale as a business process.  It affords you better opportunities with higher levels of effectiveness.

Take a look at your selling process.  Think through how it works and what you would want your buyer to experience.  Imagine a process which connects personally and moves the buyer forward towards the sale.

What would stop you from implementing such a system?

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4 Call To Action Marketing Strategies

June 29, 2011 by · 3 Comments

Take ActionEffective calls to action will reveal your connection to the buyer’s problem and the value of your message to your market.  It represents the decision point between anonymity and courtship.  Your visitor is giving something to get something of value.

The call to action constitutes the beginning of the relationship after getting found.  Here are four call to action marketing strategies to employ in your buying process that will help your visitors take a next step:

  1. Provide Ideas. The problem you solve is something that your visitors are thinking about continually.  They are looking for fresh ideas and new ways to attack their problems.  Give a list of ideas, preferably that you have tested and can attest to working.
  2. Minimize Download Steps.  Ensure your forms, buttons and the overall process for getting access is as simple as possible.  Friction in the process can cause people to disengage.  Be the buyer and ask yourself if you would be delighted or annoyed by the process.
  3. Measure Conversions. Use a real-time analytics system and ensure you can see the conversion points in the process for downloading.  If people are on the page, then ensure that you can deduce why they discontinue if you see such metrics.  If you see successes, replicate this elsewhere as part of your marketing automation process.
  4. Nurture Via Marketing Automation. After the call to action has worked, the next step is to create personalized marketing to the new lead which shows care and connection.  Your marketing automation campaign should be relevant to the value piece they consume and invite them to a logical small next step.

This step in the buying process is critical to manage from an experience standpoint.  It sets up the next parts of an effective marketing automation process.  Analysis should provide the feedback loop you need to refine how the conversion occurs between visitors to leads.  Be vigilant and you will be growing a database of potential leads to work through the next phases to your sales process.

What are some of your call to action strategies that have worked?

 

Filed Under: Blog, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation · Tagged: , , , , , ,

3 Loopfuse Sales Handoff Tips

June 23, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Making Loopfuse work with your sales process is more than just integrating Salesforce.com and Loopfuse.  That is merely the technical aspect.  The process and synchronization of sales activities with marketing automation must be thought through, implemented and adopted by your team to extract maximum benefit from your Loopfuse implementation.

To drive Loopfuse success here are three tips which you can use to have maximum impact on converting leads:

1. Conduct Thorough Sales Training

Your sales team will have data available to them within their Lead records.  They need to make sense of the information and distinguish between knowledge and action.  The former helps them assess the quality of leads.  The latter helps them react tactically.

For instance, if they have open activities in their Lead records, there needs to be expectations set on completing the task to call or reach out to a prospect.  Help them understand the impact of being late and how that can affect a ready opportunity.  Explain how Loopfuse is helping the timing of their sales call.

2. Make Lead Scoring Mean Something

The Lead Flow processes you set up along with prospect activity capture will generate ongoing lead scores.  Your sales team needs to know what the scoring means and how to prioritize their activities.  Help them translate the scores into action and meaning.

You may need to create new filtered lists or reports in Salesforce.com ready your sales people on lead scoring.  Furthermore, triggered reports from Loopfuse to the sales team with the Top 100 Leads are also highly beneficial.

Let them know that the scoring will continually be optimized.  Have a thorough dialogue and ensure there is buy-in.  Future iterations to your Lead Flow campaigns will benefit from the trust and buy-in.

3. Allow Control Of Notifications

Your sales users have permissions in their Loopfuse accounts to set notification settings of events that will matter to them.  Review the options and allow them to toggle the notifications according to their level of need in their role.  They will understand what data will matter and what will merely clutter.

Show them examples of the notification emails and help the content to have meaning so it does not end up as an ignored email in their inbox.

Loopfuse Success

Loopfuse success relies on your sales team working with real-time marketing information which was previously inaccessible.  The digital data that sales now gets with their sales activities helps to drive a fluid buying experience.  In your sales handoff, be sure to paint the big picture and how marketing automation works hard for them in areas such as following up.

Be sure to review the entire buyer process as well so they understand what the buyer is personally experiencing.  This will set context and help them in their sales conversations.

What are issues you face with sales integration?

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Marketing With Story

June 22, 2011 by · 4 Comments

We are all tied into story.  It is part of being human and can be found in cultures across time and space.  It is what resonates.

If you don’t have a story, you don’t have a business.  There is too much noise and your buyer cannot differentiate your offering from others.  When we work with our clients on positioning their brand and automating their marketing systems, the story is what has to come through to bring life to the otherwise devoid value proposition.  Why you do what you do has to come through or there is not a connection with the customer.  Your backstory is part of what makes you unique and valuable.  Here are some areas which are vital for building your audience:

  • Make it personal.  How did you arrive to where you are?  Share the journey.  What is the background to how you came into existence?  It is unique to you and needs to be told.
  • Share the process. If you deliver a service or a product, share how it is made.  Illustrate the steps.  Talk about the meticulous care you take in sourcing raw materials or working through the finer points of process so quality can shine through.
  • Illustrate problems and success. Your customers need to see themselves in the testimonials of customers you have.  The customers you have provide a mirror for prospective customers.  Tell their adventure in a way which highlights their problems and how you solved it.
  • Paint the vision. Do you want to have 50 million people using your product?  Are you wanting to bring water to every village in southern Africa?  How does what you do connect with something larger than all of us.  Your story helps the customer know what they are a part of by participating.
  • Create meaning. Whether you use symbols or imagery, make a connection with something simple that stands front and center in the customer experience.  Help them think about your story through something ubiquitous and frequent.  Make meaning happen.
  • Talk from the heart. Leave out the corporate speak and connect with authenticity.  Ensure your tone and copy shine your humanity through.  Faceless, sterile corporate identities leave little for the emotions or to build trust.

Every touchpoint you have with the marketplace should be laden with your story.  Let it resound with conviction.  The stories we hear help us identify with people and brands.

What is your story?

 

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