Lead Qualifying, Nurturing for Complex Sales

“It’s Complicated” Isn’t an Excuse for Marketing Anymore

Though there is complexity in every B2B sale, some industries are more complex than others. It may be that you have a long sales cycle, serve different verticals and each has its own funnel, or you do thorough prospect screening and turn away those you know are not a fit.

Marketing Automation is a whole new breed of technology that was created for complex sale situations. It captures detailed information on prospects that can be used to tailor every marketing touch-point. If you have invested in this software, you still face unique challenges in getting the full benefit of Marketing Automation.

Not Enough Traffic for it to Work

Marketing automation relies on a site with a steady stream of inbound visitors to signup for email offers. When there aren’t enough emails, the tool can’t tell you how well each type of traffic converts, and you won’t know which advertisements/channels to use. You don’t want to pay for visitors who only came to download free resources.

This lack of data also prevents you from getting insight into what combination of emails and landing pages turn prospects into sales opportunities. This doesn’t help marketers who are already under pressure to show results on this technology investment.

Leads not Nurtured before Being Passed to Sales

Marketing Automation exists to send only qualified leads to sales, yet they reject many of them claiming the CRM is full of marketing leads that aren’t ready to talk. This makes for an alarmingly high cost per qualified lead. Leads of varying quality/maturity come to your site in no particular order, so without adequate site tagging and lead scoring, you can’t know which are the high-priority leads to send, and which are run-of-the-mill leads which should be held back until they prove they are ready.

Low Clickthrough and Conversion Rates

Whenever Marketing Automation lists lump engaged leads together with dead ones, or customers with prospects or SMB with enterprise-size companies, the email response rates will always be poor. Your contacts aren’t all the same, so they should not receive one-size-fits-all emails. Prospects need to see relevant content to convert, and the only way to feed them relevant content is to set up workflows. This way, contacts are divided into segments that each receive relevant messages.

From your whole list to a narrow segment:  You can use Marketing Automation to narrow down to, for example, only the prospects who watched your product demo and poured over the case study in their vertical, but haven’t made it past the pricing page. Prospects in this segment might need financial proof, so logic that points them to your ROI calculator may be exactly what’s needed to convert to a sales opportunity.

Helping your Nurturing Campaigns
We manage a client’s Marketing Automation system with a “glass half full” approach. We can take a campaign from conceptualization stage through to deployment and measurement, with services that include:

• Building call-to-action offers, as well as templated landing pages and emails.
• Tagging web elements and scoring prospects to determine which ones advance to your CRM
• Creating workflows for what a prospect sees based on what actions they do or do not take.
• Setting up a dashboard that shows how much value you’re getting out of your marketing automation, as well as data for making smarter media buys and content investments.

Put our Marketing Automation experience into action on qualifying and nurturing your leads.