(sales x marketing) to the power of technology = extraordinary results

Lead nurturing (part 3): warm to hot

What if the leads coming into the sales pipeline were already 60% qualified? That’s the power of integrated sales and marketing technology in the warm to hot segment of the sales cycle.

In the warm part of the cycle, your leads recognize your company name, have some idea about the goods or services you provide, and have a generally positive impression of you. The least you want to do is keep them warm and better still would be to continue to pique their interest until they’re ready to consider a purchase.

When sales and marketing are not integrated, however, the number of leads who backslide from warm to cold due to overlapping efforts or combined ignorance is too high.

We’ve all experienced the blunders that can happen when we’re part of someone else’s warm market. Maybe you get an email about a product you’re interested in, but then a sales person calls and not only hasn’t seen that email, but isn’t aware of the new product or deal. Or you’re genuinely interested in a product but you don’t have time to follow up and no one calls you. Or you get a personalized email that has no relevant information for you (as I did recently).

At its basic level, integrated and automated CRM for Marketing should keep your warm leads warm without undue effort. When your system really works, your warm leads will qualify themselves. Newsletters and email blasts are particularly effective in dealing with warm leads as a recurring way to keep you on their mind until they’re ready to buy.

The most important feature of your CRM for Marketing system in this segment is to be able to track who’s opening your emails, clicking through and spending time on your site. Sales should be receiving leads from the warm pool with a rich set of information about their interest profile. This doesn’t just benefit your organization – it’s good customer service to answer the questions your warm leads really have and not waste their time.

Service starts with the first touch

I recently attended a presentation given by the Ritz Carlton on Customer Service. It reviewed their customer service mission, which has resulted in two Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Awards (1992, and 1999). The customer service experienced by all guests at the Ritz Carlton is outstanding. It creates a relationship with their customers that leads to repetitive business and customer loyalty.

As I was listening to the presentation, the following fact was shared, “67% of customers leave a company because of disinterest or unconcern on the
part of an employee.” I thought about the challenge of Lead Nurturing/Lead Qualification that companies are increasingly experiencing, and it became clear that Quality of service starts with the first touch – and EVERY subsequent touch.

The employees at the Ritz Carlton, from the housekeepers to the desk clerks, handymen, concierge, etc., look for patterns with the guests, and post what they see/observe to their system, so they can better serve the guests. For example: a housekeeper may note that there are three Pepsi cans in the trash can in the room when they clean it and make a note to provide that guest with Pepsi in the future. The guest may have requested a wake up call for the past two days, so they could go for a run before starting their day. On the afternoon of the second day, the housekeeping staff lays out their running clothes in preparation for the next morning. The focus of all of this attention is so the guest can be delighted by the personalized service they receive. And it works.

That deep customer information is exactly what a top-notch lead nurturing system needs to provide –a central Interest Profile on each lead – across all touches and responses – that tracks everything, so patterns can be established. That information feeds the nurturing process to personalize to the lead’s interests, exhibiting to the lead that you are paying attention, and are interested in providing value.

A recent Gartner CEO survey determined that building closer relationships with customers will be the top strategy for growth over the next three years. Relationships are not easy to create, but when you have the tools to pay attention and refine the Lead Nurturing and Qualification process, more sales-ready leads will be passed to Sales, and the lead’s regard for your company will be high. That’s where you want to be when you close the deal.

Leveraging profitable channels for B2B Marketing intelligence

According to a recent Aberdeen Group research report, “Demand Generation: Kick-start your business," the four most profitable marketing channels for B2B companies are (in order):

1. Website
2. Email
3. Telemarketing
4. Trade Shows

As I wrote in my September 25th post,  – the top challenges faced by marketing are: measuring marketing results and lead generation, followed closely by lead nurturing and lead qualification. 

Combine these lists and you can see that you need a website you can manage and change easily, that can be optimized for search engines, and that provides value to your target audience. Your website builds your reputation with them and captures or qualifies lead information where possible.

Email is the preferred method of interaction within the B2B space today.  It is trackable, and it is interactive.  Many B2B marketing executives I know tell me they don’t even consider direct mail any longer.  They focus primarily on the email channel to get messages out to their prospects and leads.

Telemarketing is a secondary channel that validates and verifies lead interest and is part of and combined with email campaigns, and can be very effective when used intelligently to provide further value for each lead contacted.

Trade shows can be a good way to get into a specific industry and start to get recognized, or to drive marketing and sales conversations from the leads that can be gathered in those venues.  While there might be a few sales that occur directly from a trade show,  mostly trade shows are about demand generation – building awareness in your target market and getting more leads started in the nurturing process.

Simple enough, but when you start tying it all together it gets complex. What are you doing to power each of those capabilities, and can that technology deliver the intelligence needed to drive a continuously improving and effective lead nurturing process that will improve the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)?

The Aberdeen report also points out that “Best-In-Class [companies] demonstrate heavy adoption of email marketing applications 87%, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 77%, customer survey tools 64%, and content/knowledge management tools 63%.”  It’s not enough to implement these tools. Effective companies are seeking to integrate them in ways that yield actionable intelligence.

Lead nurturing (part 2): cold to warm

Considering that most prospects in the B2B complex sale need to hear about your organization on average 12-15 times before they warm to you it seems like a good idea to automate this task. But if your automation comes off as impersonal, you’re just making cold leads colder.

B2B Marketing to cold leads generally consists of sending email to your list of leads, and having your website content and articles be relevant and add value to their issues and concerns, as well as showcasing your products and services. You may also focus on industry-specific trade shows as a way to capture leads and promote your brand.

A lead moves to warm when they start to recognize your company’s name and know what goods or services you provide. At this point, basic research into the leads who are responding can yield information that can be tailored to your follow-up emails, and telemarketing can draw on the initial research and interest profile, and begin to be effective at identifying potential opportunities for building relationships that will turn into sales.

In the past, you had a whole lot of cold or lukewarm leads in the world that you just couldn’t track. You might have an idea of whether a lead opened your emails, or even clicked through on a specific link, but not much more than that. You couldn’t tell the point at which they began to warm to you.

Basic web analytics allows you to track the baseline trends among your website audience – how many people come to your site in a month and how long they spend there. If that’s all the infrastructure you have at the moment, paying attention to those numbers is at least showing trends among your leads. You can see, for example, if your site traffic picked up right after a story about your company appeared in an industry magazine, or the day you sent an email to a segmented list. Couple that with an Email Service Provider and you can also see how many people open and click through an email. But that doesn’t deliver any true intelligence about what’s happening with specific leads, or segments.

With today’s technology, however, tracking cold to warm leads is exponentially easier than it’s ever been. CRM for Marketing now allows you to track the baseline trends among your cold audience – how many touches (emails) does it take on average before they a) open an email, or b) click through and visit your site. Once they’ve visited, where did they go, and how long did they spend? What content at your site is the most useful to leads in a specific industry or company size?

With CRM for Marketing, you’re starting to work smarter and increasing the intelligence you can draw upon to improve your ability to move leads through your lead nurturing pipeline and into the sales pipeline. Automation gives you the stamina to stay in contact with your cold lead market while customization puts in play the flexibility to warm them.

Strengthening your lead nurturing system (part 1)

It’s October and up here in Minnesota the air has taken on a distinctive chill, which is why I’m choosing this month to talk about Lead Nurturing systems. Some of these ideas about managing cold, warm and hot leads come from Wendy Nemitz of Ingenuity Marketing Group (thanks, Wendy!) who teaches lead nurturing to professional service organizations.

One important distinction she makes is in describing existing customers as hot leads for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. When we stop thinking of customers as leads, we miss out on some of the best Marketing and Sales ROI for our organization.

In her presentation, she also shows how people tend to be strongest at interacting with a single kind of lead, and this is also true for larger units inside your organization. For example, Marketing with its emphasis on demand generation is a natural for warming cold leads. Too often I see companies in which Marketing just dumps a pile of cold leads on Sales, which expands the rift between the two because Sales is stronger in the areas of warm and hot leads. One strength of implementing CRM for Marketing is that it allows every lead that goes to sales to be warm or hot.

Let’s look at the three areas and how they play out as strengths:

Cold – These are prospects who have never heard of you, or if they did, it didn’t stick. Maybe they’re on a list you just purchased, or a trade show you just attended. It’s Marketing’s job to reach these people and make sure your name sticks with them in a positive light. The goal is to move them into the Warm category.

Warm – These prospects know the name of your company. Most are on a list of leads you’re nurturing. The nurturing job at this level is to keep in touch and listen to them (watch their interest activity), knowing when to push it to Sales, so they can move in to close the opportunity. Here Marketing CRM can help by feeding the warm lead relevant information as needed, until they are ready for a sales conversation and ultimate purchase.

Hot – These are your customers. When marketing and sales succeed with this group, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities are frequent and effortless.

Across the Warm and Hot categories, both Sales and Marketing need to be up-to-date on the customers interests and the interactions they’ve had recently with your company.

In the B2C market where Wendy’s research has been done, the ROI for money spent promoting your company to warm leads is about 7 times that spent on cold, and efforts at cross-selling hot leads are at least twice as effective as working on warm. Of course you have to promote efforts with all three kinds so in the next three weeks we’ll explore moving leads along the value track from cold to warm to hot.
If you want more information right now, check out Einsof’s White Paper on the Interaction Value Track. If you want to read more about the smart marketing work done by Ingenuity Marketing you can find archive of newsletters here.