Behavioral segmentation is a way to organize customers into segments based on the actions they take with your website, marketing content, sales team, your brand–really, any interaction they have with your company. Once you organize customers into groups based on the actions they take, you can more effectively target and market to them.

When done correctly, it can seem like marketing magic. It’s something you should be doing and it’s not terribly complicated.

Let’s break it down together.

What is segmentation?

Segmentation has been around forever, both informally and formally. It means dividing customers into smaller groups and speaking to those groups in specific ways. Examples include dividing by location, gender, or age. 

When we talk to segments rather than a whole group, we can speak more specifically and therefore have a more personalized conversation. 

For example, if you’re a window installation company emailing your US customer base in January, you can segment using location and change the header image to something snowy for your contacts in Minnesota (north) and something sunny for your contacts in Florida (south). 

The benefit is that the customer receiving your message feels that it’s personalized to them. 

While standard segmentation such as age, location, and gender can be powerful and make customers feel known, behavioral segmentation takes it a step further.

Breaking down behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation in marketing uses data from actions your prospect or customer has taken and allows you to segment those contacts into lists based on those actions. 

For example, you can group prospects who visited your website 10 or more times in the month of January but did not purchase. These prospects show high intent and so may be on the cusp of a purchase. You might consider sending this segment a discount code valid through the first week of February to see if their behavior (site visits) can be turned into a purchase with the right incentive. 

In the first example, it was the person’s location (Florida or Minnesota) that determined the segment; in the second, it was the person’s behavior. The first is geographical segmentation, while the second is behavioral segmentation.

Behavioral segmentation goes beyond demographic segmentation to help you better understand your audience and give them the right message at the right time.

What are the benefits of behavioral segmentation?  

Personalized experiences: At its core, behavioral segmentation lets you create personalized experiences for your prospects and customers. When consumers feel as though a brand understands them, they react more favorably to that brand. This increases brand loyalty and, ultimately, revenue.

Data-driven decisions: Behavioral segmentation allows marketers to make more accurate decisions based on user data since your most (and least) engaged prospects are easy to isolate.

Budget allocation: Behavioral segmentation makes it more clear where to allocate resources. For example, prospects with multiple website hits are likely in-market vs. those with one or two.

How does Insightly Marketing enable behavioral segmentation?  

Tracked Custom Events

Tracked custom events allow users to create a custom event and when it’s triggered by a prospect’s actions, the behavior can be used to alter a prospect score or segment audiences and communications.

This can be useful when you’ve got a behavioral tracking use case that isn’t included out-of-the-box with Insightly Marketing For example, if there users are accessing an online portal, you might consider tracking behavioral data from their interaction with the portal. Or, you might want a combination of activities (clicking on an advertisement and visiting a specific website page) to be tracked or segmented for future communication, offers, and outreach.

Forms 

No matter the plan you choose in Insightly, you have the option to create multiple forms to support your marketing campaigns. To get granular, create unique forms for each campaign  so you can tie every form completion to the action that caused it. Then message those prospects based on the specific offer or asset with which they engaged.

Files

You likely have assets that speak to different phases in the buyer’s journey. Perhaps an article is at the top of your funnel, so you can create a follow-up campaign with industry-specific information for those who read the first article.. If you have a lower-funnel piece, like a pricing guide, your follow-up campaign may include a demo or trial call-to-action. 

Redirect Links

Again, there is no practical limit to the number of links you can have in Insightly. If an asset is ungated, meaning there is no form associated with accessing your eBook or article, append a UTM to the link so you can track the exact journey the prospect took to get to it. Then, segment based on that link to continue the conversation in context.

Use behavioral signals within Insightly Marketing

Your marketing team needs a powerful tool to drive leads and create opportunities. Behavioral segmentation is just one of the many features used to drive and nurture leads for your sales team. Insightly Marketing includes this feature, plus offers customizable prospect grading and scoring, an intuitive journey builder, beautifully formatted automated emails, and more.

Insightly marketing is also part of a powerful platform that puts your marketing automation tool in the same suite of products as your CRM and customer service app. This aligns sales, marketing and customer service teams on a single, powerful platform.

Get a demo of Insightly Marketing today.

The post How to use behavioral signals in marketing campaigns appeared first on Insightly.

While sales is still the driving force behind most qualification efforts, organizations today need to work closely with marketing in order to properly qualify leads. One of the reasons for this shift is the need to adapt to the rapidly evolving customer journey.

In this post we cover the basics of sales qualification, why it’s important, and how to qualify leads in a way that makes sense for your business.

Sales qualification terminology

The first step in any lead management process is developing a shared terminology. The definitions presented in our previous article about lead disposition are probably a good starting point:

• Prospect: Anyone in your database who has ever expressed a basic level of interest in your product or service.
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): Prospects whose activity indicates that they are more likely to become customers based on prospect scoring (as compared to other prospects).
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs): MQLs that have been reviewed and passed to sales for follow-up.
• Opportunities: Converted SQLs who have expressed a willingness and ability to buy.

For the purposes of this article, let’s add one more:

• Unqualified lead: Anyone who doesn’t show a clear need for your company’s products and/or services, or meet other sales qualification criteria.

Your definitions may differ from the ones above. The main point is to align your teams with a shared understanding of key definitions and their meaning. After all, it’s hard to qualify deals when no one speaks the same language.

Why is sales qualification important?

You might be wondering why sales qualification is even necessary. Isn’t the point of business to provide your goods or services to as many customers as possible?

Not every person who comes to your website or calls your business is a good fit. Prospective customers realize that they have wants and needs. However, they do not have perfect knowledge about how your solution can fulfill those wants and needs. Therefore, sales qualification is an essential process that helps you to:

Create order and avoid chaos

A good sales qualification process—especially one that effectively uses lead scoring—makes it easy for staff to identify prospective customers who are likely to convert. Instead of staring at a massive database of hundreds of raw contacts, sales qualification winnows the list to a manageable size to ensure your team is working on best-fit deals.

Increase return on advertising spend

Marketers spend a lot of time optimizing digital advertising campaigns and website content to maximize engagement. Downloading a whitepaper, requesting pricing, or subscribing to a newsletter are a few common ways that prospects may engage. However, not every person who provides an email address is ready to purchase—or ever will. Sales qualification provides marketers essential feedback for understanding the types of campaigns and initiatives that deliver high quality leads.

Provide a better customer experience

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Imagine that you have a need, and you come across a service that you think meets your needs. You ask to speak to a sales rep, who fails to ask any meaningful questions and then begins pressuring you to make a purchase. This doesn’t create a good customer experience. Therefore, sales qualification is a fair and prudent way to ensure a positive experience for everyone, especially for the customer.

Scale business

Processes help you scale and grow. Therefore, a sales process that qualifies prospects is vital for attracting and converting the right customers, even as your market share expands. Qualifying one customer is easy. Qualifying 10,000 customers is not easy, but a well-defined sales qualification process can make it more manageable.

Sales qualification frameworks

Sales qualification frameworks create a structured approach to qualifying prospective customers. One of the most widely-used approaches is the BANT framework, as pioneered by IBM in the mid-20th century.

BANT definition: A set of four criteria (budget, authority, need, time frame) that helps sales professionals objectively evaluate the viability of business opportunities.

With BANT, the prospect is evaluated across four key criteria:

Budget: Does the prospect customer have a budget, and does it fit with your pricing model?

Authority: Does this specific person have the authority to make the decision to move forward?

Need: Is there an actual need that your solution could fill?

Time Frame: By what specific date does the prospect hope to solve his or her problem?

Although BANT is arguably the most well-known sales qualification framework, there may be other frameworks that better fit your business. Spend time researching sales qualification frameworks and find one that makes sense for your industry and business model.

Sales qualification questions

So, how can you know that prospective customers have the right budget, authority, need, or time frame? Ask them.

Sales qualifying questions form the foundation for determining if a prospect is a good fit for your business. By asking the right questions at the right time, you put yourself in a better position to understand the person’s situation, challenges, goals, and objectives.

But, what types of questions should you ask? Should you ask them all at once? Email or phone call?

Although there are no one-size-fits-all answers to these questions, here are some recommendations to get your creative juices flowing.

Where to ask

Take a fresh look at your customer journey map. How do prospective customers typically interact with your company? Does every customer require an in-depth demo process, or do most customers just want to go through a self-service checkout process? Your business model, product or service type, and customer buying process will play a major factor in determining “where” to ask your sales qualification questions. Other than the obvious channels (such as phone and email), what are other ways to collect data about the prospect’s needs?

Here are a few ideas:

• Optional form fields, such as revenue size or number of employees
• Chatbot prompts that ask targeted questions
• Exit intent banners on your website
• Surveys that are powered by automated marketing emails

When to ask

As illustrated by the previous examples, the sooner you can begin to build a unified view of the prospect in your CRM, the better. However, some prospects are less willing to reveal information until a person from your sales staff proactively reaches out.

Developing an effective lead scoring program simplifies the decision to initiate outreach. Once a prospect has exhibited the proper level of “interest” by visiting certain webpages or engaging with a predefined number of emails, a lead scoring system will automatically adjust the prospect’s score to a higher level. Data enrichment integrations and social media discovery features in your CRM may provide additional context. Deals that reach a certain threshold are then flagged for further review and passed on to sales. In this model, data serves as the foundation for knowing when to ask.

What to ask

Questions asked via a chatbot could be quite different than those asked during a 30-minute phone call. It all goes back to the purpose of the question. Earlier in the process, you may just be looking for basic insights about the prospect. However, as the relationship advances, you may need to ask numerous open-ended questions that get to the heart of the situation.

Let’s use my marketing consulting business as an example. Using BANT framework as a guide, here are a few questions that I might ask a prospective client during an initial consultation:

Budget

• What types of marketing programs are you currently running?
• Are you working with another marketing consultant?
• Do you already have an established marketing budget?

Authority

• Who else at your company will be involved in this project?
• Do we need to include anyone else in these conversations?

Need

• What are the goals that you’re trying to achieve?
• What have you tried in the past?
• What is your vision of success for marketing?

Time Frame

• How quickly are you looking to move forward?
• Should we plan to kick things off next week?

It’s time to build a better sales qualification process

Implementing a scalable sales qualification process can be beneficial for both your company and the people that you serve. Your sales and marketing teams will find it easier to identify and convert likely customers into paying customers. And, the prospects who decide to convert will go into the relationship feeling confident that your solution adequately meets their needs.

Recommit to building a stronger sales qualification process. Your team and your customers will appreciate it.

The post How does sales qualification work? appeared first on Insightly.

Demand generation therefore encompasses all activities that help attract, engage, and convert likely customers. Depending on your industry, ideal customer profile (ICP), and personas, this may include a combination of:

• Outbound sales
• Content marketing and SEO
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social media marketing
• Trade shows and virtual events
• Email marketing
• Direct mail
• Affiliate and referral programs
• Upselling or cross-selling to existing customers

Note that I bolded the phrase ‘likely customers’ in the previous paragraph. Why? Unlike traditional lead generation programs, which tend to focus on net-new emails or contacts, demand generation is focused on delivering net-new customers. Marketers, myself included, should pay special attention to this reality. Filling your CRM with 1,000 new email addresses that never convert is a waste of time and money. It pains me to say that, but it’s true.

So, what’s the best approach for implementing a scalable demand gen program that delivers results? Let’s take a closer look.

How to improve demand gen in 2021 & beyond

If demand generation is a multi-faceted endeavor that involves numerous disciplines, departments, and stakeholders, what can you do to maximize its impact for your company? Here are four steps to take in 2021.

1. Start with an objective view of your existing demand generation efforts

Whether you realize it or not, you already have programs in place that generate demand. (Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in business!) To measure the impact of your existing demand gen efforts, jump into your CRM and pull a report of closed opportunities over the past year. Customize the report to include the originating source, such as outbound sales, existing customer upgrades, paid ads, social media, etc. Now analyze the data to understand where revenue is coming from. Visualizing your data as a pie chart can be a simple, yet effective way to understand what’s working—and what’s not. Here’s an example.

In the example above, it’s clear that outbound sales is the largest demand generator. That being said, this chart tells us nothing about how effective sales is at generating demand. If the company’s sales team consists of 25 account executives and 10 sales development representatives (SDRs), then the fully loaded cost of closing one sales deal may be exponentially greater than a self-service deal from organic search. Spend time analyzing historical deal data from a variety of vantage points.

2. Develop a plan for collecting better data

As you analyze historical data, you’ll likely identify gaps that make it difficult to answer all of your demand gen questions. After all, customer data is not limited to basic contact information, such as job title, revenue size, and related opportunities. To truly understand demand gen’s impact on the customer journey, you may need to go deeper and begin collecting the following data.

Interaction data

Trade shows are great for generating lots of business cards but not for closing deals. One lead from a trade show may require dozens of sales and marketing interactions before he or she has the desire and ability to buy. Collecting web and email interaction data in your CRM provides in-depth insight for understanding which demand gen channels, campaigns, messages, and content influence a customer’s buying decision.

Behavioral data

Behavioral data is particularly useful for understanding the impact of your cross-sell and up-sell demand gen activities. For example, if you’re a software company, you might collect clickstream data from your app to measure interest in gated features. Simple adjustments to your product interface could have a major impact on awareness for and, as a result, demand for premium plans.

Attitudinal data

Customers can be an excellent source of new ideas, and demand generation is no exception. Why not ask your customers for demand-generating ideas? Survey your customers and ask them to share feedback on:

• Which industry websites, journals, and publications do you read?
• What type of content would you like to receive from us?
• What would make you more likely to tell a friend about our company’s solution?
• If you were the marketing manager for our company, where would you advertise?
• What trade shows or virtual events do you regularly attend?

3. Align your sales & marketing teams

Sales and marketing teams tend to be the largest generators of demand for companies. Unfortunately, they’re rarely in alignment with one another. Inconsistent terminology, competing objectives, and siloed systems are just a few of the reasons why organizations consistently struggle to align these two groups.

If you’ve struggled to align your sales and marketing teams in the past, fear not. A well-structured demand generation initiative can be the perfect opportunity to foster cross-departmental alignment and simultaneously drive enhanced top-line performance. Alignment usually starts at the top, so your first step should involve gaining buy-in from sales and marketing leaders on a shared set of objectives, methods, and metrics.

Once aligned on the big picture, leadership must continuously work together to operationalize the vision. Check out Insightly’s sales and marketing alignment series for tips on accomplishing that goal.

4. Unify your demand gen systems into one platform

As you’ve probably noticed, there’s a blurred line between sales, marketing, and other demand generating functions. Allowing sales to work in one siloed system and marketing to work in another is not a viable solution in today’s competitive landscape. In short, you need the right technology to help you collect the right data, align your people, and understand what’s working.

Revenue generating teams want fewer, better systems. Ideally, they want one system that empowers them to visualize the buyer journey, create segmented lists of likely customers, and automatically engage buyers in a personalized way.

Unifying your demand generating efforts into one platform, such as Insightly, is a smart first step toward enabling this reality. Your revenue teams will spend less time on time-consuming data integrations and imports and more time on what matters most: developing highly targeted campaigns, programs, and initiatives that increase demand for your products or services.

They’ll also have access to better data—and more of it—presented in a visually appealing way that simplifies decision-making and team alignment.

Maximize the impact of your future demand gen efforts

Customer behavior continues to change at a rapid pace. To compete, companies must view demand generation as a strategic initiative that requires buy-in from leadership, a commitment to cross-departmental alignment, and technology that supports data-driven demand generation.

Ready to see how a unified CRM for sales and marketing can help you take demand generation to the next level? Request a free demo with an Insightly representative. No commitment required.

Request a demo

The post The future of demand generation appeared first on Insightly.

A refresher on lead scoring

The use of lead scoring in your business cannot be underestimated. Lead scoring simply means the process of assigning scores for each of your leads. The score is determined by several factors, such as demographics, the way leads interact with your business through various marketing channels, and the probability of their conversion into a paying customer.

The lead scores can fall on a negative or positive side of the scale, in other words, how more or less likely they are to convert. Once you identify the lead scores, you can identify the current top customers.

Your top customers are your net promoters, and they are more likely to return for a purchase and help increase awareness for your brand. Using the lead scores, you can then retarget your campaigns toward leads that require more nurturing before they convert.

Because you know which leads require more attention, you can increase the productivity of your marketing and sales teams as well. Remember, generating leads doesn’t matter as much as converting them into paying customers.

Now let’s take a closer look at traditional and predictive lead scoring to help you decide which one is right for your business.

Traditional lead scoring

Traditional lead scoring attempts to measure the quality of a lead in order to determine which would turn into sales. It collects and analyzes explicit and implicit data.

Explicit data is collected through online registration forms or other demographic information (job title, company, contact details, etc.) that the prospects provide. Implicit data is collected from the prospect’s behavior on your website and other marketing channels, like the number of page views, email open rate, click rate, and others.

The marketers then manually assign a score for each of these data points. They typically use the BANT criteria—which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing—to determine the readiness of a lead for a sale.

Source: Lucid Chart

Lead scoring models can also be based on the following data:

1. Demographic: location, age, gender, professional title, company, etc.
2. Online behavior: how customers interact with your website
3. Engagement: how customers specifically engage with your brand through marketing channels

Advantages of traditional lead scoring

Marketers have long used traditional lead scoring to gather information, update and test the scoring system, analyze the results, and identify better leads. With the use of customer relationship management (CRM) tools, the lead scoring process can be streamlined and integrated with the sales team.

Disadvantages of traditional lead scoring

While traditional lead scoring is tried and tested, it is also a bit too simplified and too focused on removing bad prospects rather than identifying great ones. The real challenge is to determine and to target the best leads and to better nurture all other prospects.

Traditional lead scoring is also not as adaptive for fast-changing markets because it works with a small dataset that’s manually collected and managed by the marketing team. This method is also highly subjective because a good lead is determined by the opinions or metrics made by the marketing or sales team.

Rankings also are based on a rather small dataset that focuses on the activity of prospects and their interaction—or lack of—with the website rather than their individual needs.

Repetitive tasks and lack of conversions because of the failure to optimize lead scoring methods can also discourage your teams and result in missed opportunities and slow growth for your business.

For what type of business is this ideal

Companies that rely on sales reps and their customer insights to develop lead scoring method benefit the most from traditional lead scoring.

Predictive lead scoring

Take all the benefits of traditional lead scoring and add the efficiency and effectiveness of machine learning algorithms, and you have predictive lead scoring.

Instead of relying on small datasets and the manual metrics of humans, predictive lead scoring gathers and analyzes big data to evaluate the significant behaviors of current customers and prospective leads. These data points are then ranked on a scale to distinguish between the leads who are more likely to be converted and retained, or purchase something from the business.

Predictive lead scoring allows you to automate the identification and conversion of sales for your business, allowing you to refocus campaigns and make better use of resources for a faster ROI.

Source: Towards Data Science

Advantages of predictive lead scoring

Predictive lead scoring outweighs the benefits of traditional lead scoring, because it:

• Generates trackable metrics based on large datasets
• Provides opportunities for the marketing teams to run better targeted campaigns and maximize ROI
• Improves the productivity of sales teams by focusing their resources towards better customers and leads
• Increases rates of conversion and purchases
• Compares past and current customers to adjust information profiles of leads
• Is less prone to error
• Gathers information backed up by data to guide decision making
• Identifies patterns and connections you might have missed

Disadvantages of predictive lead scoring

This is probably more of a prerequisite than a disadvantage: predictive lead scoring is only as effective and valuable as the data you have. To get accurate and useful insights about your leads, you’re going to need a lot of accurate and organized data and the necessary technology to manage it.

For what type of business is this ideal

Because predictive lead scoring needs a massive dataset to provide the best insights, it is more appropriate for businesses that follow the online behavior and engagement models.

Aside from gathering a lot of data, predictive lead scoring management requires quite a bit of expertise and investment in order to be fully effective. Before you make the switch, ask the following questions:

• How do we want to use this score?
• What process changes should we make to share this data and information to sales?
• What obstacles or hindrances could prevent sales from using predictive scores?
• What score limits should sales focus on?
• Do we have the right tools to manage lead disposition and align sales and marketing?

Unified CRM tools like Insightly offer powerful features to streamline marketing campaigns, gather and present bigger and better data, and allow your business to provide better customer experiences.

You can’t underestimate the value of lead scoring for your business. Using the proper scoring model allows you to make data-driven decisions in lead management and to maximize ROI on your campaigns.

Read more like this:

• 7 lead scoring best practices to improve your conversion rate
• What are different types of customer data?
• How to set up a lead disposition process
• Why use marketing automation?

The post Traditional vs. predictive lead scoring appeared first on Insightly.

That being said, a process is purely theoretical without a proven implementation workflow. Workflows bring order and scalability by breaking processes into bite-size, repeatable chunks of value.

Unfortunately, many workflows are inefficient—or downright broken. That’s where workflow automation comes in handy.

Let’s take a look at the basics of workflow automation.

What is workflow automation?

Workflow automation uses technology to reduce (or eliminate) the manual aspects of a business process. When used properly, workflow automation elevates the productivity of an organization by freeing up staff to focus on high impact activities—rather than keying in data and performing monotonous tasks. In short, workflow automation should not eliminate human intervention; rather, it helps people to be more efficient and effective at what they do.

A variety of workflow management tools now exist. Some CRMs, such as Insightly, offer built-in workflow automation features that simplify email delivery, record updates, and record creation. Third-party automation platforms, such as Zapier, connect multiple apps together, thereby enabling automated workflows across countless business systems.

Workflow automation examples

Although workflow automation could benefit almost any department, the most common use cases are in sales, marketing, and operations. Let’s explore a few examples.

Sales

In sales, every minute spent on data entry and inefficient workflows adds up to lost deals and less pipeline. Smart sales teams use workflow automation to their advantage through streamlined:

Lead nurturing

Manually following up with each new lead becomes less feasible as a pipeline grows to contain thousands of records. Workflow automation supplements a sales team’s efforts by enabling automated email outreach. New leads receive a friendly welcome email within moments of requesting information. Additional emails can be triggered as prospects advance through the buyer journey. This approach provides leads with the helpful information they’re looking for—without creating new bottlenecks for sales staff.

Lead routing

Traditionally, sales organizations have relied on a manager to serve as “air traffic controller” for new lead records. Under this model, the manager reviews each lead and manually applies geographic or account-based rules to ensure proper assignment. Workflow automation eliminates this intervention by instantly analyzing data in the lead record, applying business rules, and making lead assignments.

Customer onboarding

Closing new business is exciting, but each new deal creates a significant amount of work. Handing off the project to the delivery team, setting up the new account billing, and providing training materials are just a few examples. Workflow automation can help account executives stay focused on closing additional deals without losing sight of customer onboarding. Automated tasks and emails keep internal stakeholders in the loop while providing a seamless experience for the customer.

Marketing

As marketers, we often juggle multiple tasks and projects at the same time. There are many responsibilities to organize and track, and although some marketing projects are unique, many follow a common series of events. Here are two that come to mind:

Inbound lead management

Digital marketers spend the majority of their time trying to increase inbound lead volume. However, generating a bunch of leads provides limited value without the right engagement plan. Potential customers want to feel valued, and they also want solutions to their problems. Workflow automation helps marketers provide a meaningful experience at scale by simplifying the collection, use, and organization of data. Web to lead forms automatically create new records, while workflow rules update data fields to ensure proper categorization. Workflow rules can also trigger drip campaign emails that keep prospects highly engaged.

Campaign management

Leads don’t just appear out of thin air. Experienced marketers realize that lead generation requires a multitude of creative campaigns. From email to social media to pay-per-click advertisements, each campaign has a unique set of requirements that contribute to its success. Workflow automation can create a structure for marketing campaigns, which reduces the need to reinvent the wheel. For example, a social media campaign may require involvement from several people within an organization. An ad strategist must create the right audience, a graphic designer must develop the perfect design elements, and a copywriter must craft compelling headlines that get clicks. An automated workflow could assign tasks to each user (in sequential order) at exactly the right moment. As a result, everyone knows exactly what to do—without unnecessary meetings.

Delivery

Operations teams can also benefit from business process automation. Here are a few ways to put workflow automation to use in the delivery of goods and services:

Project kickoff

The moment a deal closes, an automated workflow could convert the opportunity to a project. In addition, downstream tasks and emails could remind key stakeholders to take action.

Customer communication

The initial 90-day period is critical for establishing healthy customer relationships. After all, signing on with a new vendor is stressful and can involve large investments of time and capital. Providing premium support and communication during the first three months—and throughout the entire customer journey—is therefore vital. Customer success teams can leverage automated workflows to trigger helpful emails that improve the onboarding experience. Emails that contain how-to guides, on-demand training webinars, and one-on-one onboarding sessions can be especially impactful.

Project invoicing

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. Timely and accurate invoicing, therefore, is paramount to ensure long-term success. Accounting teams could use workflow automation to ensure new customers are added to invoicing and order management systems. Likewise, automated 30-day reminders could go out to ensure each customer is invoiced in a timely fashion.

Benefits of workflow automation

As shown above, workflow automation has a number of tangible benefits for almost any business, including:

Less manual & repetitive work

Reduction of manual effort is the most obvious benefit of workflow automation. Automated workflows create new tasks for staff. They can update fields and create new records. They can even send out emails. All of this work must be done by someone (or something). Why not let a robot do it? Workflow automation doesn’t just save time, it also helps to reduce errors and streamline work.

Better data

Automation reduces the prevalence and impact of bad data. Fewer oversights and typos improves data integrity, which, in the long run, leads to better decision-making and richer insights for continuous improvement.

Less stress, more productivity

Forgetting to take action can be a major stressor for anyone. No one enjoys letting the team down (or taking the blame for an oversight). Automating the creation and completion of administrative tasks reduces stress by eliminating mind-numbing work, minimizing oversights, and freeing up staff to focus on the work that they enjoy, improve customer experience, and build long-lasting customer relationships.

Process scalability

As alluded to at the beginning of this article, scalable workflows lead to scalable processes. Technology creates scalability by overcoming bottlenecks that are a result of inefficient workflows and contributors.

6 signs that you need workflow automation

So, when should you implement workflow automation at your company? There’s no perfect answer, but here are a few signs that it’s time to begin exploring workflow automation:

1. You find yourself doing the same task over and over again.
2. Staff consistently forget to perform an important action.
3. Delegating work requires more time and effort than completing the task yourself.
4. Staff spend considerable time just trying to figure out what to do next and/or fixing errors.
5. Your handoff from sales to operations is time-consuming and complicated.
6. You need to accelerate pipeline engagement without increasing headcount.

Do any of these situations sound familiar? Perhaps it’s time to take the next step. If you’re an Insightly user, check out all of the free training materials in the Help Center. Review the training videos and documentation so you can maximize workflow automation’s impact at your company.

If your current CRM provider does not offer workflow automation or you are not getting value from it, request a free demo and your workflow automation needs assessment with Insightly.

Request a demo

The post What is workflow automation? appeared first on Insightly.

Lead disposition helps you streamline your marketing and sales efforts, so that you spend the right amount of time trying to nurture or convert certain leads. There are a few tips to help you manage your lead disposition process, and one of them is having a clearly defined prospect scoring, or lead scoring, system.

In this post, we want to show you how to create a lead scoring system, so that you can better execute your existing lead disposition process.

Why use lead scoring

Let’s first take a look at why lead scoring is so integral to the lead disposition process, and the actual ways it can help you make faster sales from highly qualified leads.

Prioritizing leads

Use lead scoring to identify hot leads, or prospects that are most likely to convert into an actual sale. More specifically, use lead scoring to easily determine which of these leads have scored high enough in your matrix (more on this later in the post) to be moved into the next stage of your sales process.

On the other side of the spectrum are cold leads. Some of them may require additional nurturing, while others shouldn’t be disqualified and removed from the contact list. With lead scoring, you can effectively keep track of your recent interactions and attempts to re-engage or nurture any leads who show signs of dropping off or turning cold.

Identifying top subscribers and net promoters

One added benefit of lead scoring is being able to identify your top existing customers, who can become your net promoters or affiliates for your products.

Reviewing your net promoter score vis-à-vis your lead scoring matrix can tell you if any customer might be able to refer your products/services to other prospects or if they’re more likely to remain as passives (users who are satisfied with your product but are vulnerable to competitor offers) or detractors (unhappy users who may damage your brand and business growth with word-of-mouth).

Your lead scoring matrix can even tell you if your business is able to start implementing a referral or affiliate program. Determine how engaged and loyal your customers are, start predicting your net sales per product when you introduce affiliate earnings as expenses, and invite those loyal customers to be your first promoters.

How to start lead scoring for your business

1. Align your sales and marketing teams

The first prerequisite for your lead disposition process, and ultimately your lead scoring process, is to align your sales and marketing teams.

Marketing teams should know when exactly a lead is considered a SQL that’s ready to go through the next stage of the sales process. Sales teams can provide valuable insights about what makes leads convert to a sale, so marketing teams are able to tweak and improve their campaigns for lead generation and lead nurturing.

2. Revisit your buyer personas

Once you’ve aligned your sales and marketing teams, work together to revisit your buyer personas. At minimum, your personas should cover all these information:

• Name
• Demographics
• Pain points
• Goals
• Favorite features of your software or product
• Biggest concerns about your software or product
• Decision-making power
• Ability to buy

Revisit your existing customer profiles to update or change your buyer personas.

Having all the required minimum information plotted in your buyer personas can help you create a more accurate lead scoring system from the onset.

3. Create a lead scoring matrix or point system

A typical lead scoring point system goes from 0 to 100 points. But, of course, you’re free to design a matrix that makes more sense to your team and your business.

In this matrix, you will essentially be plotting specific behaviors or criteria that apply to a lead or customer, which is then awarded a specific number of points or score.

The most important thing to note while you brainstorm this matrix is to award specific behaviors—or criteria—that indicate a higher likelihood to purchase with higher points, and that these criteria or behaviors really do indicate higher interest to purchase.

Make sure to cover different criteria about your customer’s behaviors, then assign points based on each. Let’s look at a few specific examples.

Profile criteria

These include demographic information that apply to your customers. Businesses may assign a lead 1 point if they are a small local business earning X amount of annual revenue, but give them 2 if they are a medium-sized business earning Y annual revenue.

Leads may get 10 points if they are a sales manager but only 3 points if they are a junior salesman.

Behavioral criteria

Behavioral criteria are specific actions or behaviors your customers take to engage with your brand and may indicate interest to purchase or learn more about your product.

You will need to include behaviors that apply to specific campaigns, such as a webinar, for example. So leads are awarded 10 points if they signed up for a webinar and then receive 20 more points if they attended live.

Also consider any repeat behaviors that may indicate interest, including viewing a landing page or sales page multiple times or inquiring about a product via multiple channels.

For example, a possible lead scoring matrix for a website and domain host company may include “signed up for a free account,” “looked at current promo for hosting plan,” or “checked logo maker landing page 3 times” in their set of behavioral criteria.

Negative criteria

As best practice, include negative criteria in your matrix, which are those that tell you a lead is an unqualified lead and is not worth pursuing further. For example, they may be an intern or university student looking for general information or someone who is based in a country where you can’t do business.

This also covers behaviors like no email opens, clicks or other engagement with marketing campaigns for the past X months, unsubscribing from emails, or reporting your emails as spam.

4. Define consumer behaviors that point to interest

Create a range or threshold to indicate to your marketing team that a lead is hot enough to move into the next stage of the sales process. Anyone who doesn’t meet this criteria may require more nurturing, so your marketing team will be able to follow up with them.

Use your lead score to pinpoint several ideal scenarios that indicate a lead is now sales-qualified, then add up points for each to determine just what makes a sales-ready lead.

For example, perhaps a lead responded to a cold email campaign and asked for more information about your offer. Or another lead attended one of your webinars and clicked the link to your sales page.

5. Consult sales team for logic errors

Your sales team can provide valuable insights about your existing customers and the indicators that truly point to interest or require more lead nurturing.

Consult your sales team for errors in your assumptions, so your lead scoring matrix is as accurate as possible.

6. Connect with your CRM and other tools

Your next step is to plot your lead scoring system to your CRM. Wherever possible, integrate your tools together so that each behavior and criteria can be scored automatically, depending on your users’ actions. If you use a unified platform, like Insightly, you can streamline the entire lead management process and simplify sales and marketing integration.

7. Monitor and evaluate results

It’s best not to expect you’ll have the perfect lead scoring system in place right away. These tips are meant to help you create one as accurately as possible at the beginning. Over time, you will notice areas for improvement and update your system accordingly.

Keep monitoring your results. See if your assumptions about SQLs are reflected correctly in your lead scoring matrix. If not, adjust your point system to reflect the most accurate behaviors and criteria that point to SQLs being ready to purchase.

Start lead scoring to shorten your sales cycle

Speed up your sales cycle by targeting your warmest leads and spending time nurturing everyone else. Use the steps above to figure out exactly which leads are worth pursuing and which ones might require less effort, if any at all. Just be sure to keep monitoring your results to determine how to continually improve your systems.

Read more like this:

• What is lead disposition?
• 12 tips to generate qualified leads from a sales webinar
• Why use marketing automation?
• Lead generation vs. customer retention

The post How to use lead scoring to make faster sales appeared first on Insightly.

A customer journey map gives B2B suppliers an effective model for how and where to connect with customers during this pre-sales research period. Marketing automation systems allow marketers to deliver increasingly detailed information to buyers to help move them from awareness to purchase. As buyers near the bottom of the funnel, sales reps ramp up their efforts, in hopes of securing a conversation, being able to show a demo, and move the process toward a deal.

Yet, that final inch can feel like a mile, or an eternity. Anyone who has engaged in this process knows that the plethora of options, opinions and information customers encounter—whether online or in person—is overwhelming.

According to Gartner, “77% of buyers agree that purchasing has become very complex and difficult.” Further, “Today’s B2B buying involves more stakeholders than ever before. The median B2B buying group involves six to 10 decision makers‚ each armed with four or five pieces of information they have gathered for themselves.”*

How can companies help buyers get to the finish line? It’s time to think about the purchasing process differently.

A job-based model of B2B purchasing

The customer journey is predicated on the idea that once buyers become aware of a problem or potential solution, they move in a generally forward manner toward decision and purchase. Along the way, they will seek and encounter various pieces of content that will help propel them toward purchase. But what if this process is not linear, and actually involves a fair amount of circling and backtracking? And what if the very content suppliers are providing contributes to this backtracking?

In the recent Marketing-Fueled Buyer Enablement report based on primary research, Gartner identifies six distinct jobs in the buying process: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation.

Let’s take a quick look at each of these tasks.

Problem identification

The jumping off point for every B2B purchase, this job entails pinpointing the problem that needs to be addressed. To do this, buyers may conduct research online and download content such as white papers and reports. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by information at this stage, and while problem identification seems straightforward, buyers may return to it as they improve their understanding of the source or scope of the problem.

Solution exploration

This job is all about identifying the available solutions to the problem. This may include web searches, online and in-person discussions with peers, speaking to supplier reps at a tradeshow or event, reading customer reviews, and more.

Requirements building

In this step, buyers look more specifically at how the solution will function in their own company. They may create and evaluate responses to an RFP, view demos, and download resources to answer questions such as, Which systems will this solution need to integrate with? How will the solution fit in with our company’s existing processes and procedures? Because different solutions may have different requirements, buyers may need to return to this step multiple times during the purchase process.

Supplier selection

Once buyers understand their internal requirements for the solution, they can narrow down the list of suppliers to those that meet their needs. Buying group changes, budget cuts, and legal flags are just some of the circumstances that might send buyers back to explore additional solutions before they can complete this step.

Validation

During this stage, buyers will evaluate their chosen solution by corroborating suppliers’ claims, soliciting end user feedback and references, and looking at third-party expert analyses. This is one of two jobs that Gartner considers to be “always-on” during the purchase process.

Consensus building

At the end of the day, buyers must be able to convince the rest of the buying group of the merits of their chosen solution. But consensus building tasks begin much earlier, as buyers work to develop a shared understanding of the problem and requirements, and continue throughout the process as buyers educate other stakeholders about what they have learned, work to deconflict information found through separate research processes, and ultimately agree on a solution.

As in any complex process, these jobs are not strictly linear. According to Gartner, “90% of buyers reported revisiting, or looping back to at least one job as part of their overall purchasing process.” From this vantage point, we believe it’s clear that buyers need help navigating this process. Suppliers that can provide this help will be at a significant advantage.

Shifting the focus to buyer enablement

Gartner’s term “buyer enablement” describes a very specific type of content marketing: information that enables customers to complete critical buying jobs.

“Instead of focusing content marketers’ efforts on constant generation of thought leadership, white papers, infographics and videos, marketing leaders should rebalance their content efforts, capitalizing on their deep industry knowledge and customer empathy to develop and deploy information to help buyers buy‚” says Martha Mathers, Managing VP, Gartner.

We believe that suppliers who can ease the buying process for customers will enjoy faster sales. But that’s not all. A less complex process has a value in and of itself, and suppliers who can facilitate it are likely to foster greater customer satisfaction as well.

Where does this leave sales?

Is this the end of marketing and sales as we know it? No. Based on this new model, marketing and sales alignment becomes more important than ever. Sales and marketing need to draw on their collective expertise and work together to create and deploy the high-quality tools that make it easier for customers to navigate and complete the purchase process.

Modern B2B buyers get their information from multiple sources, including online searches and conversations with sales reps, so it’s most important that they get relevant and consistent information, no matter how they’re engaging with the supplier.

At Insightly, we offer a free needs assessment and customized product demos to help our potential customers decide whether our solutions are right for them. To learn more about Insightly’s unified platform for sales, marketing, and project management, request a demo and let’s talk.

Request a demo

*Gartner for Marketers “Marketing-Fueled Buyer Enablement,” 2019

The post The new B2B purchase process appeared first on Insightly.

• Contaminated customer data
• Suboptimal marketing campaign performance
• Weakened sales effectiveness
• Low ROI on marketing investments and lost sales revenue

Simply put, lead disposition is a true point of intersection for marketing and sales and plays a crucial role in growing your business revenue.

According to Tony Kavanagh, CMO at Insightly, lead disposition is the single most important part of the demand generation funnel flow, from visitor to customer, and beyond.

Decluttering eliminates confusion and fosters a greater sense of alignment between sales and marketing teams.

“Keeping your lead queue clean provides a clear field of vision for the people who go out and close deals,” says Tony. “It also enables a continuous feedback loop so that marketing gets the data they need to improve lead quality.”

Lead disposition example

Before going any further, let’s look at a basic example to illustrate how lead disposition works in an ideal world.

1. A new prospect raises his hand

A prospective customer visits your website and requests more information by submitting a webform. He provides his name, email address, phone number, and company name, which is sent to your CRM via a web-to-lead form.

2. Your sales team engages with the lead

An account executive (AE) from your sales team follows up to learn more about the lead’s needs. After a brief discussion, the AE realizes that the lead submitted the form by mistake and/or does not actually fit your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP).

3. The AE disposes of the lead record

Considering that the lead mistakenly filled out the form/does not fit your ICP, and will not be a fit in the future, your AE deletes the lead from your CRM.

Although this example seems rather straightforward, the reality is that most lead disposition scenarios are not so cut and dry. Most leads do not mistakenly fill out forms. Many leads fit with your ICP but lack engagement. Others are highly engaged but do not directly align with your ICP, creating an overflowing list of quasi-qualified lead records.

In short, knowing when to dispose of a lead record is rarely obvious—especially without the right set of rules and processes.

“Disposing” of qualified lead records

Now, what about leads that actually fit my ICP and are ready to be sales-qualified?

Obviously, true leads should not be deleted from your system. That being said, their lead records should still be disposed of as quickly as possible.

“The lead queue should never be used as a permanent location to keep leads. The goal of any business should be to empty the lead queue as quickly as possible,” says Tony. “Think of it as the place where marketing and sales compete in a never ending race with opposing objectives: marketing to fill the queue; sales to empty it.”

What’s the difference between lead deletion and lead disposal? Here are two ways to dispose of lead records without deleting them.

1. Convert the lead to an opportunity in your CRM

The most common way to dispose of a qualified lead record is to simply convert it to an opportunity, contact, and organization. If you’re an Insightly customer, here’s how to convert a lead in a few clicks.

2. Revert the lead to a prospect in your marketing system

Perhaps the lead isn’t ready to move forward but wants to stay in the loop. Or, maybe the lead unexpectedly went ice cold. Having your sales team continuously reach out is a waste of time, and converting the lead to an opportunity does not make sense. If you’re using a marketing automation system that’s tightly coupled to (or is part of) your CRM, you may be able to dispose of the lead by moving the person back to “prospect” status. That way, the prospect will continue to receive your nurtures and communications without clogging up the lead queue.

Benefits of a lead disposition program

According to Tony, implementing a lead disposition program requires close alignment between sales and marketing along with buy-in from senior level staff. Agreeing on a shared set of definitions, rules, processes, data, and technology puts an organization in the best position to reap the full benefits of a lead disposition workflow. Such benefits include the following.

1. Data integrity

Effective use of customer data is increasingly important to companies of all sizes and business models. Lead disposition accelerates effective data use by ensuring sales and marketing activities match up with your buyer journey personas.

2. Marketing campaign performance

Marketers cannot guarantee ever-increasing levels of return on advertising spend without outcome-based feedback from sales. Disposing of lead records (either through qualification, reversion to prospect, or deletion) provides marketers with the data-driven intelligence that’s necessary for making prudent advertising decisions.

3. Sales performance

Your sales team wants to do what they do best—sell. Parsing through dozens of random lead records is not an effective use of their time. Lead disposition aligns with their desire to sell by overcoming unnecessary clicks and decluttering the workspace.

Why aren’t more companies doing this?

Clearly, lead disposition is an innovative approach to managing the middle of your lead generation funnel. But, if it’s so innovative, why aren’t more companies actively strategizing about their lead disposition workflow?

Stay tuned for our next post that explores why lead disposition rarely occurs in the real world and what does it take to set up a proper lead disposition.

In the meantime, explore other sales and marketing topics and best practices on the Insightly Blog.

The post What is lead disposition? appeared first on Insightly.

How to identify sales-ready leads in your database

The majority of businesses rely on new lead acquisition for growth and pay little attention to existing leads. In many ways, that’s a waste of resources and effort, not to mention lost sales opportunities. Part of the challenge here is the separation between sales and marketing processes: marketing passes leads to sales and, unless a lead turns into a customer, is done with the outreach. With Insightly’s unified platform and a CRM connector you can solve this issue by easily moving “contacts” from the CRM side into Marketing as “prospects,” getting another chance to identify sales-ready leads and add them to nurture campaigns. You can set up customer journeys with a series of emails that include tracked links, so you can easily map your prospects’ interactions with brand content and determine their readiness to buy. More specifically, here are a couple of ways to identify sales-ready leads:

1. Engage leads with the right content, such as pricing information, vendor comparisons, data sheets, etc. and use responses to determine their readiness to buy.
2. Use secondary calls to action (CTAs), such “contact sales” button or links to resource and pricing pages and track clicks to identify your prospects’ exact stage in the funnel.

How to create a successful marketing campaign: the basics

Before introducing different marketing campaign plans you can execute with Insightly Marketing, let’s go over the four basic steps in developing any marketing campaign plan.

1. Define your goals. Make your goals specific, measurable, and achievable. Whether it’s a new product line, geographic expansion, or attracting a new customer type, make sure your marketing goals are driven by your business needs. For example, if your business goal is to bring in more mid-market companies, then your marketing goal might be to “generate 1,000 new marketing qualified leads from mid-market companies online in the first half of 2020.” Use benchmarks to ensure you’re on track at any given point in time and to motivate your team along the way.
2. Determine your audience. Your buyer profile, which includes basic demographic information, industry and company profile, business role, and specific pain points will shape your business strategy, outreach campaigns, messaging, content, and execution. Research your ideal customer’s daily content consumption habits and preferences. Which news or business sites do they visit? How frequently? What about social media channels? What type of content (blogs, webinars, podcasts) do they engage with the most?
3. Develop strategy. You’ve got your goal and audiences set. Now you need to identify campaign types to determine your course of action. What are you trying to get people to do? Download content, watch videos, browse your website, and/or talk to sales? If your goal is to drive traffic to the website, then share engaging brand content (like infographics, for example) across social and other content distribution platforms. Also, whenever possible, your sales reps should encourage prospects to visit your website.
4. Messaging. Make sure you create a central theme first and then develop different types of content for each stage of the customer journey. For example, you may use top-of-the-funnel content, like blog posts or ebooks, earlier in the journey and share product details and vendor comparisons down the road.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s review three types of marketing campaign plans you can set up in Insightly Marketing.

Getting started campaign

This is one of the most basic, easy to set up, and budget-friendly multi-channel marketing campaigns. Use your website, social channels, and email to reach your target audiences. Once you create at least one anchor piece of content, such as an e-book or webinar, you can repurpose it in various formats across these online channels as well as add it to your sales enablement toolkit. These simple campaigns are great for learning marketing automation basics and testing the effectiveness of your messaging and content.

Customer upsell campaign

In the B2B world, where sales cycles are long and complex, upselling and cross-selling can be a challenge. This campaign plan can help you organize your efforts and empower your sales team. The key component of an upsell campaign is educational content. Use your website, help center, and customer stories to provide prospects and customers with answers to their most pressing questions and best practices on how to make the most out of your product and/or service. Create email templates your sales and customer service teams can use for ongoing outreach. User groups are a great way to collect customer feedback and foster community among your customers.

Expansion campaign

This is the most complex and expensive plan and is often used for breaking into a new industry or market segment. Here you may add new channels, such as paid social and partner marketing. As you expand your business, you may find that partner network is one of the most effective ways to reach new customer segments, build trust, and establish relationships.

Whether you’re just starting out with your marketing campaigns or are a total pro looking for better marketing automation solutions and sales and marketing integration, request Insightly Marketing demo to learn how you can take your marketing to the next level and reach your business revenue goals.

Request a demo

The post Tips on finding sales-ready leads & planning marketing campaigns appeared first on Insightly.

Although your chief marketing officer (CMO) is happy, not everyone in the organization loves the change in direction. Sales reps, in particular, seem skeptical. As a result, turf wars have started to develop between the various departments.

Why hasn’t your sales team embraced this new source of opportunities? What can be done to fully maximize the value of each web lead?

Let’s explore why your sales reps are skeptical of inbound web leads — and what to do about it.

1. Marketing doesn’t keep sales reps in the loop

To gain the level of online visibility that has been achieved, your marketing team implemented a multi-faceted tactical plan. Content creation, pay-per-click advertising, email promotions, social media engagement, and link building are just a few of the team’s ongoing endeavors.

With so many moving parts, it’s proven impossible to keep the sales team up to speed.

Take, for example, the white paper campaign that launched last month. In a perfect world, the sales team would have been provided advance copies prior to distribution. Instead, marketing went live with the program and promoted the landing page via email, social, and several paid channels. The campaign generated a ton of buzz and delivered dozens of qualified leads. Sadly, the sales team lacked the proper context to effectively follow up, resulting in subpar revenue performance.

If the goal is to generate as many web leads as possible, your company is winning. However, if the goal is to attract and convert leads into paying customers, your company is failing. Just ask the sales team.

2. Your sales reps are already too busy

Even if marketing did a better job of informing internal stakeholders, there’s still no guarantee that sales reps have the capacity to manage a flood of web leads. After all, most of their time is already accounted for with higher priority items, such as:

Following up with existing opportunities: If given the choice between a warm opportunity or an unvalidated web lead, most reps are going to spend time on the warm opportunity. Doing so makes perfect sense.

Upselling to current customers: It’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one. Your reps want to see the company succeed, but they also want to earn more commissions. Focusing on the needs of existing customers is an easy way to achieve both goals.

Manually preparing reports: Because your company’s current CRM lacks easily customizable reports and dashboards, sales reps spend a considerable amount of time preparing and updating pipeline reports. Your company can’t be successful without these reports, and someone has to prepare them. This duty falls on the shoulders of the sales team.

Simply put, every waking hour of your sales team’s day is already booked solid. Naturally, following up on a list of unverified leads isn’t very high on anyone’s priority list.

3. Small window of opportunity

Unlike “traditional” leads (such as those originating from trade shows), web leads have a much smaller window of opportunity for engagement. The more time that passes, the less engaged a web lead becomes. This makes the follow-up process even more frustrating for your sales reps.

Here’s why.

Websites don’t have business hours

Your website is (hopefully) always online. Prospective customers often assume that someone from your company is also online (or soon will be). Although this may seem like an unrealistic expectation, it’s an expectation nonetheless.

Limitless alternatives

Think about the last time you invested an hour of your time researching vendors or service providers. You likely clicked through several websites, read about their offerings, and possibly filled out a few web forms. Do you recall all of the websites you visited or interacted with? Probably not, unless the vendor was quick to respond (if responded at all).

Your competitors are faster to respond

The first company to respond is more likely to win the prospect’s trust (and business). For the reasons we’ve already discussed, web leads are already low on the sales team’s priority list, but delayed outreach only compounds the issue.

4. Web leads can be a source of distractions

It’s understandable why sales reps think that web leads are so distracting. Hours pass with no new leads. Then, out of nowhere, a dozen new alerts appear in your reps’ inboxes. How can they reasonably be expected to deal with such unpredictability with everything else on their plate?

Thankfully, there are some basic things your company can do to reduce distractions and boost lead engagement. Consider these ideas:

• Use web-to-lead forms to automatically collect lead information in your CRM, rather than filling your sales team’s inboxes with hundreds of email notifications.
• Create lead routing rules to reduce duplication of effort and lighten the load on everyone.
• Implement workflow automation triggers to ensure each lead receives a personalized, timely response to his or her inquiry.
• Integrate to an appointment scheduling software tool and empower leads to book time on their own terms.
• Maintain tight controls over duplicate records to avoid unnecessary confusion.
• Hire a freelancer or part-time consultant to answer incoming live chat sessions.

In summary, your company needs to implement systems and processes that streamline the management of incoming web leads. Doing so will reduce internal distractions and deliver an improved experience for prospects.

5. Web leads tend to be “information gatherers”

In the seemingly rare circumstances when web leads are actually followed up with, your sales reps are notorious for saying things like this:

“None of the web leads are interested in buying anything — they’re just looking for free information.”

True, web leads can be a mixed bag that includes those who have no intention of buying your products or services. Therefore, calling and emailing every person who downloads a whitepaper isn’t the best use of your sales team’s time. On the other hand, some web leads, especially those who engage through live chat or request pricing information, may turn out to be extremely viable. Classifying all web leads as mere “information gatherers” is unwise and could prove costly for the company’s bottom line. What’s the right balance?

Using your CRM’s tagging functionality could provide a much-needed solution to your lead management difficulties. For example, grouping web leads by interaction type could add clarity to an otherwise confusing situation:

• Requested contact
• Downloaded whitepaper

By grouping leads based on website action, you give your sales team the ability to quickly hone in on those who are truly interested. Furthermore, by integrating your CRM to a marketing automation system (or better yet, using a unified CRM), you could automatically engage “information gatherers” without bothering the sales team.

6. There’s not enough visibility

With lead data spread all over the place, your company’s current process offers minimal visibility into what is working (and what’s not). To keep sales reps motivated and marketing on track, you need a CRM that delivers intuitive business intelligence reports.

As you evaluate the feasibility of switching CRMs, look for a system that can help answer questions like these:

Questions from sales

• What percent of “information gatherers” ultimately become paying customers?
• How likely are live chat leads to convert into opportunities?
• Which web forms indicate that a lead is highly qualified?
• Which traffic sources send the most engaged leads?

Questions from marketing

• What percentage of web leads are never followed up with?
• How can we simplify the follow-up process for our sales team?
• Which marketing programs should be continued or discontinued?
• What types of nurture programs do we need to convert “information gatherers” into qualified leads?

An effective CRM not only provides answers to these questions, it more importantly empowers users to extract key insights without help from the IT department. Good data is of minimal use if only a select few can access it.

Less skepticism, more sales

Switching from a purely outbound sales organization to a hybrid inbound model isn’t always the smoothest journey. The good news is that you’re well aware of the problem and proactively seeking solutions to address the sales team’s concerns.

In the long run, with the right mix of technology and business processes, you’re likely to experience less skepticism and a greater harmony between sales and marketing.

Ready to get a free needs assessment and see an integrated CRM in action? Request a demo. No commitment required.

Request a demo

The post 6 reasons why your sales reps are skeptical of web leads appeared first on Insightly.