With the availability and affordability of tools like unified CRM solutions, the measurement of many metrics is automated. Plus, these tools provide dashboards that compile the metrics you need to see in one easy-to-access location.

Unfortunately, many businesses still don’t have a formal metrics and reporting structure established within their organizations. Moreover, those who do report on various metrics, do so in a siloed way and miss opportunities to extract valuable insights and act on them in a timely manner.

Marketing might be reporting on email open rates, but what does that mean for the rest of the business? How does that impact revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, and company growth? If all marketing does is pat themselves on the back for increasing email open rates, they end up with what are referred to as “vanity metrics.”

Vanity metrics don’t provide much actionable insight. However, certain metrics provide significant insight into business health and drive the smartest growth decisions. We’ll call them “golden metrics.”

• Productivity metrics
• Sales metrics
• Marketing metrics
• Marketing SEO metrics
• Customer metrics

Golden productivity metrics

Internal teams’ productivity levels are key to business growth—that’s common sense. But it’s easy to mistake the activity for productivity. Let’s quickly touch on that before diving into productivity metrics as it’s an important distinction.

Activity vs. productivity: an important distinction

Excessive meetings provide a great case study through which to distinguish activity from productivity.

Let’s say an employee often schedules meetings to discuss X, Y, or Z. However, during those meetings, little is accomplished, no one is engaged, and the information shared could have easily been conveyed through an email.

On the surface, that person may be seen as a proactive and productive colleague who brings people together to drive initiatives forward. But, more often than not, all they are doing is activelywasting time.

With that important distinction out of the way, let’s look at some key productivity metrics you can start measuring today.

Employee experience: The overlooked key to business success

Employee experience (EX) is one of the important variables that dictate employee productivity and a business success. If your employees aren’t happy, inspired, engaged, and motivated (all parts of the overall EX), the quality of their work product will decline. Plus, employees in these states of mind deliver a poor customer experience, further damaging your bottom line.

The challenge of measuring employee experience

It’s challenging to measure EX because there are too many variables involved. Most companies use surveys. But surveys don’t paint an accurate picture of EX for a variety of reasons, key among them are:

1. Many employees are hesitant to answer survey questions honestly for fear of retribution and this skews results. (You may tell them it’s anonymous, but many employees won’t believe you.)
2. Most companies design their own surveys. However, they are rarely designed by psychometric specialists with the expertise to develop an unbiased survey that produces reliable results. For a survey to be effective, it’s best to outsource it to the experts.

Fortunately, you can maintain insight into the quality of the employee experience without using surveys. You do so by analyzing additional metrics that are directly or indirectly connected to EX. These additional metrics, in addition to being an aggregate representation of EX quality, are themselves great ways to measure productivity.

Employee turnover rate

Turnover is natural and happens in every company. But if your turnover rate is significantly higher than industry benchmarks, it’s a strong indication that productivity is down, and your employee experience needs improving. The average national employee turnover rate in the US (as of 2019) was 22%. (1)

What’s the main driver of employee turnover? The graphic below says it all—82% of respondents to a recent survey cited better job opportunities as the leading cause.(2)

Employee engagement

You can measure employee engagement by looking at their usage rates of the technology you provide to make their jobs easier. Participation in employee engagement programs such as employee volunteer initiatives is another way to measure engagement. And you can use surveys, of course. Just be aware of the points mentioned above about using a psychometric expert to design and administer the survey.

Why is employee engagement so important? Consider that disengaged employees in the United States cost businesses between $450–550 billion annually. (3)

Back to top

Golden sales metrics

Fortunately for businesses, it’s much easier to measure sales performance than productivity. Below we lay out the golden metrics for sales, many of which can be measured by the powerful reporting productivity tools of a unified CRM.

Sales revenue

Sales revenue is a simple metric to measure and can provide much insight into the health of your business. This metric can tell you how sticky your product or service is, how competitive you are in your market, whether your marketing initiatives are producing results, and a lot more.

Plus, it’s easy to calculate. There are two types of sales revenue: gross revenue and net revenue. While both are easy to calculate, they provide quite different types of insight.

Gross sales revenue

Gross revenue is simply the amount of money your company brings in through sales. If you sell 100 widgets at $10 each, your gross revenue would 100 times 10, which equates to $1,000. That would be your gross revenue.

Net sales revenue

Net revenue considers expenses as well as incoming cash flow. To calculate net revenue, simply take gross revenue and subtract all the expenses in producing and selling that product or service.

For example, let’s say to produce one widget, you pay $1 for parts, $2 for an employee to produce it, and $2 to rent the space and pay the utilities needed to keep your shop open. Your expenses per widget are $1 + $2+ $2, which equals $5. When you subtract that $5 from the $10 in gross revenue you made from selling it, your net revenue would be $5.

What does each tell you?

If gross revenue is increasing, you can ascertain that sales are up. However, if, at the same time, net revenue is dropping, it means the costs of producing and selling your widgets are increasing. And that means less profit for your business. These are important distinctions that inform different types of forward-looking business growth decisions.

Customer acquisition cost

This is another helpful sales metric that sheds helpful light on the effectiveness of your sales team and the overall health of your business.

This golden metric is calculated per month, quarter, and/or year. To calculate customer acquisition cost, start by calculating the amount of money spent on acquiring new customers: marketing spend, sales technology subscriptions, sales team travel costs, etc. in a given time frame.

Next, divide that amount by the number of new customers acquired during that same time and you have your total customer acquisition cost. This metric is best used in tandem with customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (CLV), when used with customer acquisition cost, is one of the most important metrics to measure. In short, it is the total monetary value your average customer brings to your business.

It’s a bit more complicated to calculate. You start by calculating the average value of a single sale for a given time frame—typically one year. For subscription-based businesses, this isn’t limited to average annual subscription cost per customer—you must consider upsell transactions as well.

Once you calculate the average cost per sale, you then multiply it by the average number of purchase transactions you process per year (again, don’t forget to include upsell purchases). Finally, take that number and multiply it by the average customer lifespan (the amount of time the average customer remains a customer before leaving). That’s your CLV. It’s a particularly important business intelligence metric that all businesses should measure. If this is new to you, read this comprehensive piece on customer lifetime value.

Back to top

Golden marketing metrics

Let’s turn our attention to marketing metrics and reporting. Metrics are especially important for marketers. Proving the impact of marketing via metrics and reporting is one of the only ways marketers can justify their worth within an organization.

Marketers measure all sorts of metrics—open rates, click-through rates, new leads generated, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), etc. However, many of them don’t shed any light on overall business health and some don’t even help marketers themselves.

Why measuring MQLs isn’t golden

New leads generated and leads qualified don’t mean much because there’s no telling what will happen to them after they are generated and qualified. Many marketers revel in their ability to generate marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

The problem with that metric? The marketers using it to measure their own performance are the same people who define what it means to become “qualified.” It’s a subjective metric that many marketers spend way too much time focusing on and celebrating.

Sales measures lead-to-customer conversion rates (how many leads they convert into customers). It’s a helpful metric for sales teams but it doesn’t tie back to marketing because sales teams find many leads on their own.

MQL-to-customer conversion rate: Where the gold lies

The golden marketing metric in this mix is MQL-to-customer conversion rate, which measures the percentage of MQLs that sales convert into customers. Why is this important? It tells marketers how precise their criteria for qualifying a lead is. You can send MQLs to sales all day, but if only two out of 50 of them convert into customers, you’re not qualifying them properly and should sit down with sales and discuss your lead qualification criteria and revisit your lead disposition process.

What matters is that marketing is sending sales the right leads—those that are sales-ready. Quality wins over quantity here. The MQL-to-customer conversion rate will tell you whether you’re sending the right leads at the right time, or if your process needs to be refined. If your ratio is low, you are qualifying leads too soon. If it’s high, congrats, you should be promoted.

Back to top

SEO metrics

Among the most important elements of a successful business in the digital era is a healthy website. It’s crucial that your site can easily be found and is engaging enough for visitors to stay for a bit and return later. To drive traffic to your website, you need to constantly tend to search engine optimization (SEO) tactics—both on-page and technical SEO tactics.

Marketing is typically charged with SEO and website design. In the 80s, the physical brochure was your brand’s public face, and it was incredibly important to make yours shine and stand out from the rest.

Websites are today’s brand brochures and it’s equally if not more important that it shines. Why? There are exponentially more websites today (more competition) than there were brochures in the 80s.

How do you ensure your site’s visibility and high engagement? A few golden metrics will give you a constant sense of how well your site is doing, as well as inform you when something needs to be fixed. Let’s break them down.

Total organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to site visitors that find you via search results. Organic traffic doesn’t include visitors that arrived on your site by clicking an ad result—that’s pay-per-click traffic and is a separate tactic and metric altogether.

It’s easy to measure organic traffic. If you have a website, you can connect it to Google Analytics for free and easily grab loads of real-time data about site health, visitor trends, and more. Logically, you want to see a steady uptrend in traffic per week and month over time. Ideally, you want your traffic chart to resemble Berkshire Hathaway’s stock share price chart.

How to interpret organic traffic

You’ll see traffic dips here and there, but you should expect to see more and more visitors to your site as you grow. If your traffic plateaus, it could be caused by any number of things, including backend technical SEO issues that Google and other search engines see as negative factors and penalize your site’s ranking for.

The other usual culprit that causes traffic to stop growing is a drop in the quality of your content. Google’s algorithm keeps getting smarter and can increasingly differentiate high-quality content from fluff and clickbaits. But content quality is better measured by the next metric on our list: average session duration.

Average session duration

This metric can also be pulled from Google Analytics. It tells you the average amount of time visitors spend on your site. If this metric is hovering around one minute, it’s an indication that your site is not engaging visitors and needs some work. If session duration is, on average, three minutes or above, you’re looking good. When you reach five minutes, it’s time to bring out the champagne.

Bounce rate

We’re still in Google Analytics with this one. A “bounce” refers to a visitor who lands on a page, takes no action such as scrolling, clicking anything, etc., then leaves. In other words, they did nothing on your site. They came, took a peek, didn’t like what they saw, and left.

Alternatively, it wasn’t that they didn’t like what they saw but rather they realized they were in the wrong place. That results from your site’s rankings not aligning with search intent, a topic that’s broad enough to deserve its own article.

Quality backlinks

Backlinks are links on other sites that reference information on your site, then link to and send their visitors to your site to learn more. Google sees this as a powerful sign that your site is authoritative and thus ranks it higher.

Backlinks are an important metric to track but beware of one tempering yet self-destructive temptation. Don’t purchase backlinks. You must generate them organically by publishing amazing content that people want to consume. If you buy backlinks, anyone who clicks on them is likely to bounce and/or skew your other website metrics in a negative direction. Also, make sure that your backlinks are from high-ranking, relevant, and quality sites, otherwise they’ll affect your SEO negatively.

Back to top

Golden customer-focused metrics

We round out our guide to golden business intelligence metrics with some important customer-focused key performance indicators (KPIs). We’re now in the age of the consumer and customer expectations are higher than ever before. Catering to customers’ needs has never been more important. The metrics below are vital to maintaining a healthy business and insight into your future growth trajectory.

Customer churn and retention

These are two separate metrics but tie into one another. They provide the same type of insight but from opposite ends of a spectrum.

Customer churn

Calculated as a percentage, customer churn rate is the proportion of customers that you lose in a given month or year. It’s a great metric for keeping an eye on how quickly your business is growing and reflects the performance of every team in your business. It’s particularly helpful for subscription-based businesses.

It tells you if you’re losing more customers than you acquire and vice versa. Churn rate is easy to calculate. Simply take the number of customers you lost during a given time frame and divide that by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that timeframe. Then represent that number as a percentage.

For example, if you started the year with 100 customers but lost 15 that year, you would divide 15 by 100, which equals 0.15. As a percentage, that’s 15%. So, your customer churn rate would be 15%.

Customer retention

Customer retention is also most helpful for subscription-based businesses. Customer churn shows you one side of the coin while retention shows you the other. Customer retention tells you the percentage of customers who stick with you and renew their subscription to your product or service.

To calculate retention, you need three numbers: the number of customers you started the year with (A), the number you acquired during the year (B), and the number of customers you had at the end of the year (C). The formula looks like this: ((C – B) / A)) x 100.

For example, let’s say you started the year with 100 customers, acquired 20 new ones, and ended the year with 110 (because you lost 10 during the year). You could subtract 20 from 110 and have 90. Then you’d divide 90 by 100 (the number of customers you started the year with) which gives you 0.9.

Viewed as a percentage, 0.9 is 90%, which would be your customer retention rate. Now, is 90% a good retention rate? That depends on your business model. However, in most cases, it’s a high retention rate that means your business is stable with reliable recurring revenue. If this metric is new to you, learn more about customer retention and strategies to keep your rate high.

Customer effort score

Customer effort score (CES) is a simple metric that measures customer satisfaction and customer experience at the same time. There are various customer satisfaction metrics out there. Many businesses rely on net promoter score (NPS) as the holy grail of satisfaction metrics. However, using NPS as an end goal is misleading both for employees and businesses. NPS should be used as a beginning point, a way to learn and track customer satisfaction for ongoing improvements and building better customer relations.

Now, back to CES. CES measures the amount of effort a customer had to put into a specific interaction with a company. Many businesses use CES to assess the effectiveness of their customer support function, but you can use it to measure any interaction your business has with a customer.

In many ways, higher levels of customer satisfaction depend on reducing the effort a customer must put forth when interacting with a business. If their issue can be solved in a few minutes without putting much of the burden on their shoulders, they will come away satisfied. That indicates a satisfied customer who just received a positive customer experience. Checkmate.

CES tends to be more reliable than other satisfaction metrics. CES is calculated by asking customers to rate the amount of effort they had to put into an interaction, on a 5-point scale, with 1 being “very low effort,” and 5 being “very high effort.”

Collect a number of scores and calculate the average. A score of 2 or lower means that a company is making life easy on its customers, and they are happy. A score of 4 or 5 means that the company should rethink how they support their customers with a mind towards taking some of the burden off their shoulders.

Back to top

Connecting the dots

We just covered some of the most valuable metrics businesses today—metrics that provide real, actionable insight. That insight is necessary to make data-driven decisions today.

It’s important that your leadership team gets behind business intelligence and reporting efforts. After all, we have the data at our fingertips. Why would we not use it to inform the decisions we make that will dictate the future survival or failure of our businesses?

Good luck, and may the data be with you.

If you’d like to learn how Insightly CRM can help you to align teams around key metrics, reduce data silos, and create a data-driven culture and decision-making, then request a free demo.

Request a demo

Sources:

1-2. North American employee turnover: trends and effects, Mercer, 2020

3. DNA of Engagement: How Organizations Can Foster Employee Ownership of Engagement, The Engagement Institute, 2017

The post The ultimate guide to business intelligence metrics appeared first on Insightly.

Without disruption, we’d remain in a static state of stagnation and never evolve.

So why is “disruptive marketing” such a catchphrase today and what led it to this point? Marketing disruption is more important than ever due to rapid technological advancements, rising consumer expectations, and fierce competition in most industries.

In this post we cover the forces that have propelled marketing disruption and share actionable tips that will kickstart your own disruptive marketing efforts.

But first, here’s a little background into disruptive marketing.

Disruptive marketing is not new

Between the ninth and twelfth centuries, merchant traders began holding the first-ever trade fairs.(1) That disrupted the preceding norm in which trading was driven by interpersonal connections.

In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg unveiled the first printing press, allowing businesses to place ads in locally-distributed newsletters.(2) Those ads were also early forms of disruptive marketing.

Marketing disruption evolved slowly until the 1990s when we entered the digital era. Then, it began to explode.

Why disruptive marketing is so important today

The increased need for disruptive marketing tactics is largely driven by technological innovation, the consumers who use that technology, and intense competition in most industries.

Rapid technological advance

In 1987, 0.005% of the US population used cell phones.(3)

Ten years later, in 1998, that number was 20%.(4)

By the end of 2017, 95% of Americans owned cell phones.(5)

Ponder that for a moment and consider how mobile phone technology alone has dictated how marketers reach their target audience.

New consumers with higher expectations

New generations of consumers display different purchasing behaviors than previous generations, including higher usage rates of rapidly-evolving digital technology.

Their technology usage has resulted in new and higher consumer expectations. Here are a few ways shifting consumer expectations and behaviors are forcing marketers to adopt disruptive marketing practices.

Social media usage

To be fair, social media is used by every generation of consumers today. However, younger generations use it more.

Data from 2019 indicates that 90.4% of US Millennials use social media, compared to 77.5% of Gen-Xers and 48.2% of Baby Boomers.(6)

Given that Millennials are now the largest consumer demographic in the United States, this significantly impacts marketing tactics.(7) It forces marketers to invent new, disruptive ways to engage their target audience on social media.

Customer experience

Experts predict the customer experience will be the key brand differentiator by the end of 2020. Brands like Amazon and Netflix that deliver a deeply personalized customer experience have reset expectations in a significant way.

Moving forward, marketers should explore disruptive tactics to enhance the customer experience if they want to succeed.

Customer success

This goes hand in hand with customer experience. If your customers are not successful using your product or service, you’re likely to lose them to the competition.

You may be wondering how marketing and customer success are related. For one, customer success teams can identify satisfied customers willing to provide customer testimonials for marketing.

Second, marketing isn’t all about lead generation, it’s also about customer retention. If marketers find new ways to deliver materials that drive customer success, they’ll not only increase retention rates but encourage cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Increased competition across the board

Competition in many industries—particularly the technology space—is more intense than it’s ever been. Let’s take a look at how increased competition is driving disruption in marketing.

Catering to customers’ needs

Increased competition means it’s easy for a customer to leave you for a competitor because there are so many of them.

The days of ignoring your customers’ needs are over. If you don’t deliver unique value and cater to customers’ needs, they will leave for a company that does.

Marketers must find disruptive methods of differentiating themselves from the competition by standing out as customer-centric brands (more on that below).

A shifting balance of power

Consumers have more power in the customer-vendor relationship than ever before because it’s easy to leave you for a competitor.

If you deliver a poor customer experience, customers can go straight to social media and blast your company, doing serious damage to your brand reputation. How do you avoid this? Disruption.

Tips for embracing disruptive marketing tactics

Here are some tactics that you can implement today to start disrupting.

Use technology

While technological advances are forcing us to invent new disruptive marketing tactics, we can use technology to do the disrupting.

Technology can help you better cater to rising customer expectations. Customers want a personalized or humanized marketing experience. To deliver one, marketers must maintain deep insight into customers’ needs, challenges, goals, etc.

The Unified CRM

Unified customer relationships management (CRM) systems provide a great example. They track every touchpoint a brand has with prospects and customers. Marketers can use that insight to experiment with new tactics for personalizing outreach and delivering what customers need at each stage of the customer journey.

Plus, unified CRMs are great tools for experimenting with new tactics because they provide A/B testing capabilities and data analytics to track the results. With a unified CRM you can experiment with a sample group before pushing a disruptive tactic out to all your prospects.

Be prepared to fall

Disruptive marketers constantly test new ideas and many of those ideas don’t succeed. Be prepared for that because it’s an essential part of disruptive marketing.

Instead of viewing an unsuccessful tactic as a failure, think of it as a learning experience. The best lessons come from picking yourself back up after you fall. Few great things occur without some trial and error.

Leave emotions at the door

You may firmly believe you’ve discovered the golden key to success with a new tactic you devised. And it may be the next best practice everyone adopts. But it might not be.

Be careful not to fall in love with any new tactic you experiment with. If you do and the tactic doesn’t work as you expected, you’ll feel like you failed. This can lead to lost motivation and confidence, which are two of a disruptive marketer’s worst enemies.

Stick to your convictions

If you devise a new plan no one has ever dared to try and upon mentioning it you receive criticism, let it roll off your shoulders. Don’t let other people’s doubts deter you from going against the grain.

Otherwise, you won’t succeed at disruptive marketing. Disruption requires courage, determination, and an unrelenting sense of confidence.

Meticulously track the results of every experiment

Keep a running list of ideas you’ve tried, regardless of whether or not they are successful. If one didn’t succeed but still managed to produce some results, you might just need to tweak it a little to make it a winner.

This is another area where a unified CRM comes in handy. Every new campaign or tactic you try can be tracked in your CRM system. You can run reports on success rates, learn as you go, and maintain a view into which tactics are pulling in new leads or repeat business.

Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes

After all, you’re a consumer too, so this won’t be hard. Ask yourself, “What could Company X have done differently to win me over?” Then test that different approach out on your customers or prospects.

Validate before repeating

Don’t blindly throw a wrench in the spokes of your marketing machine. It’s important to test new, disruptive tactics on a sample group of customers or prospects before rolling it out completely.

This is why the reporting and tracking capabilities of a unified CRM are so central to effective disruptive marketing. Best of all, that same unified CRM system lets you A/B test disruptive tactics to validate them before you try them on a large scale.

Follow innovators & thought leaders

To be disruptive, you must stay at the forefront of emerging trends and innovation. Follow key thought leaders in your industry on social media. Pay attention to what they’re talking about.

Sometimes we have a revolutionary idea lurking just below the surface of our consciousness, but it’s missing a key element. All it takes is one fresh perspective from someone else to help you connect the dots, find that missing link, and arrive at the next winning marketing tactic.

Understand your customers & industry

Finally, it’s essential that you understand your market and customer base beyond data points. Otherwise, you can’t put yourself in their shoes, nor can you understand their needs and goals.

If you work in investment banking, experimenting with goofy humor in your marketing efforts is unlikely to produce results. But, dry, clever humor might work.

On the other hand, if you work in children’s toy manufacturing, the opposite is probably true.

Are you ready to disrupt?

Only you can answer that question. One thing we can say for sure is that if you don’t continually evolve your approach to marketing, you’ll end up treading water while everyone swims past you.

To be a successful disruptive marketer, you must have steadfast confidence in your own abilities. You also need the right technology to bring your ideas to life, test them, and measure and learn from the results.

Want to learn more about a unified CRM and how it can help you run disruptive marketing campaigns? Request a demo with an Insightly rep to see how you can align your sales and marketing to test different marketing ideas, measure results, and continuously improve your customers’ experiences with your brand.

Request a demo

Sources

1-2. “Infographic: A History of Disruptions in B2B Marketing,” Oracle, 2012

3-4. “Cell Phone Subscribers in the U.S., 1985-2010,” Infoplease, 2017

5. “Mobile Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, 2019

6. “US Social Media Users by Generation,” eMarketer, 2019

7. “Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation,” Pew Research Center, 2020

The post Disruptive Marketing: What it is and how you can benefit from it 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.

More specifically, marketing automation software streamlines and automates tasks and processes that marketers would otherwise do manually, or not at all. It helps users to save time, produce better results, reduce human error, and use data to target marketing efforts to specific groups. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As businesses across industries continue to adjust to the new digital age and ever-changing consumer behavior, the need for marketing automation continues to grow.

A recent Google Trends report shows a spike in the number of weekly searches for the phrase “marketing automation” has almost tripled over the past five years.

Nucleus Research reports that marketing automation increases business productivity by an average of 20%, which is now used as the definitive benchmark for marketing automation success.*

Yet, how can you be sure you will receive a significant return on investment (ROI) from marketing automation? Let’s take a closer look at marketing automation benefits.

Benefits of using marketing automation software

Automation of time-consuming tasks and processes

Marketing automation software eliminates the need for marketers to complete numerous tasks manually. From lead generation to customer retention tactics, a solid marketing automation solution can automate tons of tasks. Plus, automation is typically customizable, allowing you to set up workflows for any number of purposes.

Here are just a few tasks and processes that can be automated using marketing automation software:

• Lead and demand generation campaigns
• Automated email blasts and email marketing campaigns
• Lead scoring that allows you to identify hottest leads based on their interactions with your company, content, and social media presence
• Automated trigger alerts that would notify sales when a new lead becomes marketing qualified
• Tracking of all lead behavior, such as website pages visited, content downloaded, etc.
• Automated reports sent to you and available on your customizable dashboard, giving you at-a-glance access to the metrics you need to see most

When you can rely on certain actions automatically taking place at a specified time, you can confidently focus on other responsibilities, including planning and creative work.

With extra time to spare, you can focus more attention on building a world-class brand and amazing customer experiences. That, in turn, leads to increased customer satisfaction levels, improved brand reputation, elevated levels of customer loyalty, and faster overall business and revenue growth.

Increased revenue and cost savings

Saving time alone results in increased revenue and cost savings because marketers can produce better results, more efficiently, and in less time. With marketing automation you can generate and convert more leads.

Moreover, most marketing automation solutions provide email and landing page templates, eliminating the cost of outsourcing graphic design needs or hiring an in-house graphic designer. Simply put, nearly all of the benefits tie back to increased revenue and cost savings.

Personalized marketing

Marketing personalization involves getting to know your customers and prospects, and compiling data on their purchase history, challenges, goals, needs, demographics, and interests. Marketing automation system collects that data automatically through lead forms and by tracking purchases back to individual customers, which means you don’t have to do it manually.

With so much customer and prospect data at your fingertips, you can leverage marketing automation software to personalize your messages. For example, if customer X has a history of purchasing product Y, and that product goes on sale, you can automatically send that customer a message about the discount.

You can configure the system to automatically pull data stored in specified fields into the email. This makes the email feel more personal and shows your customers you are paying attention to their needs and preferences.

Armed with that data, you can deliver exactly what customers and prospects want when they want it. This makes your customers feel valued and builds trust and loyalty.

The prevalence and importance of personalization in marketing are undeniable. So much so that 94% of top-level executives say that personalization is critical to reaching customers.**

Deeper insight into results

It is important to any marketer’s success that they engage in a cycle of continuous self-improvement. This means analyzing what has been done, gauging how successful each tactic is, and focusing attention on the tactics that produce the best results. This is incredibly difficult when done manually because it involves loads of manual data collection and analysis.

In fact, in many ways, it is impossible to track certain metrics without marketing automation. For example, without a marketing automation solution, there is no way to know how many people opened or clicked on a particular email.

The reporting and analysis generated by a powerful marketing automation system can provide deep insight into sales results, customer churn, revenue growth, number of leads in each stage of the lead lifecycle, and much more.

This all leads to more informed, insightful, data-driven decision-making, allowing businesses to grow more successfully and at a quicker pace.

Sales and marketing alignment

It’s quite common for sales and marketing teams to work in silos, which hinders collaboration to produce best-in-class results. This negatively impacts a company’s capacity to convert leads into new customers and drive business growth long-term.

Many companies struggle to identify the best ways to align the efforts of their sales and marketing teams. You can facilitate sales and marketing alignment with marketing automation. Here are a few examples of what you can do.

• Implement a customer relationship management solution.
• Integrate your marketing automation software with your CRM solution.
• Collaborate on messaging to involve sales and gain their insight.
• Implement lead scoring and consult with sales while building your lead scoring model.
• Map customer journey, so you can deliver relevant content to prospects.
• Define lead lifecycle stages so marketing and sales can both see which stage a prospect is in.
• Set up a lead disposition process, or the rules that govern how sales moves a sales qualified lead (SQL) to an opportunity, disqualifies it as inappropriate, or returns it to marketing for further nurture.
• Hold monthly meetings with both teams to get sales reps’ insights on trends and content that help them win opportunities.
• Collaborate on content.
• Leverage automated notifications to sales when they need to take action on a certain issue.

The unified CRM

Today, many vendors offer “all-in-one” CRM solutions that include customer relationship management, marketing automation, and project management capabilities in the same system. CRM software that combines various systems into one comprehensive powerhouse solution facilitates faster and more reliable business growth. Learn more about unified CRMs in a case for a unified CRM.

Evaluating marketing automation software

There are a number of ways to evaluate and compare different marketing automation technologies, but in the end it comes down to your marketing goals, priorities, and available resources.

Being strategic about your marketing tech investments will not only help you reap higher ROI, but will also help you to pursue new opportunities as your business scales.

When searching for the right solution for your business, make sure you take the following steps:

1. Create a list of business and system requirements.
2. Audit your existing technologies and capabilities.
3. Check out user reviews in the leading software review sites: Capterra, G2 Crowd, Gartner Peer Insights, and GetApp.
4. Ask for demos and make a shortlist.
5. Request a free trial so you can test drive the system before purchasing.

Get more detailed tips from the marketing automation evaluation checklist.

Ready to start shopping around?

Take your time and don’t rush into any decision. Don’t be hesitant to reach out to individual vendors with questions. You can also connect with one of our reps to see Insightly’s unified platform at work.

Request a demo

Sources:

* Marketing Automation Drives Business Success, Nucleus Research, 2017

**Leading with Customer-Focused Content, PWC & Forbes Insights, 2016

The post Why use marketing automation? appeared first on Insightly.

As a digital marketing consultant, I’ve heard many clients make this exact statement. The benefits of a #1 ranking are obvious: more clicks, more pageviews, and — hopefully — more customers. In reality, showing up first doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes a well-orchestrated digital marketing strategy that requires a substantial investment of time and, yes, money.

So, what is digital marketing? As the term implies, digital marketing involves the promotion of goods or services through digital channels, such as websites, social media, mobile ads, and other online media. But how can it impact the growth of your company?

Let’s discuss some basic truths about digital marketing.

Digital marketing is multi-faceted

New clients often ask me, “How much should we spend on digital marketing in order to achieve our goals?”

Although budgeting is vital to any business endeavor, it’s not the best starting point for a digital marketing conversation. A better place to start involves exploring all of your digital marketing opportunities, such as:

• Search engine ads (aka pay per click/PPC)
• Remarketing ads
• Search engine optimization (aka SEO)
• Email marketing
• Paid social media ads
• Organic social media
• Video marketing
• Podcast marketing
• Paid promotion on industry websites
• Webinar marketing
• eBook and whitepaper marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Review site marketing

As you explore your options, you’re likely to find dozens of subcategories within each digital marketing category. Take, for example, search engine optimization (SEO). Unlike radio or TV advertising, you can’t just budget $10,000 for SEO and expect anything meaningful to happen. SEO involves a myriad of labor-intensive tasks that include content marketing, link building, on-page optimization, and other technical performance enhancements. Furthermore, SEO is increasingly linked to and reliant upon other digital marketing categories, such as webinar and eBook marketing. A website that generates significant organic traffic but fails to convert visitors to leads isn’t very effective. Therefore, smart webmasters design compelling digital assets that engage and convert.

Digital marketing is buyer-centric

A recent study by Forrester Research, Inc. found that 99% of respondents start their searches for products and solutions online (66% do so via search engines).* Regardless of the industry, B2B buyers are increasingly dependent upon digital information to make informed purchasing decisions.

How can your company capitalize on this trend? Enhancing your website, social media presence, and email communication is certainly a step in the right direction. After all, you can’t attract customers digitally when your digital footprint is virtually nonexistent. That being said, some companies stop short of considering their digital marketing in the context of the buyer journey. As a result, they spend a lot of time and effort building digital assets that do not actually resonate with potential customers.

A better approach starts and ends with a detailed understanding of the buyer’s needs. Think about your ideal customer with these questions in mind:

• What specific problems do our buyers have?
• What search terms would they use to find solutions to their problems?
• What tools do we need to identify related search queries?
• Are there specific websites that our buyers go to when solving problems?
• How can we help buyers solve their challenges without forcing them to talk to sales?
• What types of digital assets (blogs, whitepapers, infographics, etc.) could help buyers?
• Where does our product or service fit into the solution?
• How do competitors use digital marketing to solve buyer problems?
• How can we help buyers become aware of unrealized needs?

In short, buyers are seeking reliable partners who can help them solve their biggest problems. Although some buyers are ready to make a purchase, many — if not most — are not. Your digital marketing mix should contain a healthy blend of educational and promotional content that aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Digital marketing is data-driven

Aligning your digital marketing with the buyer journey necessitates a data-driven approach. The good news is that digital marketing (unlike most “traditional” marketing formats) is intrinsically data rich.

To illustrate my point, let’s compare two marketing initiatives.

Traditional marketing campaign: postcard mailer

Print-on-demand services have made postcard campaigns more affordable than ever before. For a minimal amount of effort and cost, your company can rapidly design and implement a postcard mailer that reaches thousands of potential clients.

The tricky part with direct mail has always been measurement. How many postcards were successfully delivered? Did the postcard make it to the intended recipient? Did the headline, creative, and offer grab the recipient’s attention? How many times did the recipient look at the postcard? How many recipients came to your website or called for more information?

You can configure vanity URLs and QR codes to answer some of these questions, but, ultimately, you’ll only have a partial data set.

Digital marketing campaign: email newsletter

Compare the postcard example to an email marketing campaign. In most cases, an email campaign requires much less cost and effort than direct mail. Better yet, most email marketing systems offer in-depth campaign analytics that provide insights into deliveries, opens, clicks, and user-level activity. With a few clicks, your marketing team gains all the data they need to measure campaign performance and ROI. Ideally, this data should synchronize to (or, preferably, reside in) your CRM, preserving a 360-degree view of each prospective buyer. Of course, if you use an integrated or unified sales and marketing CRM, then it’s easier and faster to design targeted marketing campaigns and reach customers at the right time with the right message, keeping your sales and marketing teams aligned.

Data is an accelerating force in today’s marketing world. Digital marketing programs expand your pool of corporate data, which, if properly utilized, can lead to smarter decisions that scale your business.

Digital marketing is a business asset

Blog articles float around the web until you decide to unpublish them. Emails get clicks for weeks or months after they are sent. Recorded webinars provide buyers with in-depth answers even when your office is closed for a holiday weekend.

With the right strategy, digital marketing can be a lifelong asset for your business.

What steps should your company take to turn digital marketing into an asset? Stay tuned for a step-by-step guide to launch your digital marketing strategy!

*Take L2RM To The Next Level With A Pivot – From The Funnel To Your Customer, Forrester Research, Inc., December 18, 2018

The post What is digital marketing? appeared first on Insightly.

However, increasingly more sales and marketing leaders are choosing to leave the funnel behind, and instead view their customers in the context of a journey.

Abandoning the funnel isn’t easy, especially when departments, legacy systems, and data sets are misaligned. Let’s explore why this is the case and how your company can take steps toward a journey-first mentality.

Why the funnel is so enticing

There’s no question that the funnel is still a common concept in business. How did this come to be? What makes the funnel so attractive to business leaders?

Here are a few possible explanations.

Funnels are easily understood

Sales and marketing leaders aren’t paid to maintain the status quo. Rather, they are expected to develop innovative strategies for maximizing revenue and profitability. With this in mind, it’s understandable why the funnel became such an important element of many sales and marketing playbooks. Marketing to tens of thousands of potential customers is daunting, and the funnel offers a relatively convenient way to categorize an otherwise unmanageable list of people.

Funnel groupings seem nice and tidy

Although the specific stages of each funnel will vary between organizations, the basic concept remains the same. When a new lead becomes aware of your brand, he is said to be at the top of the funnel. As he progresses toward a purchase, the lead theoretically passes through several sequential stages. The very bottom of the funnel represents a sale.

From the company’s perspective, the funnel can seem very helpful for forecasting demand, allocating marketing resources, implementing promotional campaigns, budgeting for fulfillment and capacity, and countless other important processes.

Some customers actually make it through the funnel

It’s true that some customers progress through the buying process exactly as you would hope. They learn about your brand through paid advertising or organic search, download some whitepapers, ask for a demo, and then send their purchase order.

That being said, customers who follow your desired path to purchase are the exception, rather than a rule in today’s landscape.

Why funnel vision overlooks the customer

Funnels tend to have self-serving motivations. Of course, companies should seek to understand how customers interact prior to purchase, which is what a funnel attempts to represent. Unfortunately, in today’s world of social media, review sites, mobile phones, private browsers, and retargeted ads, categorizing a typical customer into any one particular stage of the funnel is increasingly complex, if not impossible.

Why are funnels increasingly unreliable in today’s economy? Here are a few reasons I’ve witnessed firsthand as a consultant.

Funnels aren’t actually nice and tidy

The funnel concept presupposes that leads advance from one defined stage to the next, inching ever closer to an eventual sale.

The problem with this line of thinking is twofold. First, as any marketer will tell you, it’s practically impossible to know (for sure) where any lead is at in today’s buying cycle. Web analytic systems typically report anonymous or semi-anonymous data, making it difficult to know where the leads in your CRM actually came from. As a deal transitions from marketing to sales, the process becomes even more complex as additional stakeholders and decision makers get added into the mix.

Second, the funnel seems to completely ignore those leads who do make a purchase. By its nature, a funnel only has two openings (the top and the bottom); yet, leads who fail to buy don’t exit through either point. It seems that lost leads exit through some type of “funnel osmosis,” creating a significant amount of guesswork for your CRM administrator. Should a disengaged lead be marked as lost? If so, when? The funnel mentality struggles to answer these questions, creating additional inaccuracies in your funnel’s metrics.

Department-specific funnels trump the larger funnel

Unless your organization is very strategic about sales and marketing alignment, there’s a good chance that informal mini-funnels will develop and trump your company’s overall funnel. For example, let’s assume that your acquisition funnel places customers in one of four primary (and somewhat generic) phases:

• Top of funnel: people recently acquainted with your brand
• Mid-funnel: people who have given you some type of contact information
• Bottom of funnel: people who have expressed interest in your product
• Sale: people who are ready to buy

These categories are so generic that your sales and marketing teams have to create their own department-specific funnels to perform their day-to-day tasks. For example, your sales team might have its own funnel that groups prospective customers as follows:

• Uncontacted marketing leads
• Qualified sales leads
• Negotiation
• Contracts
• Close-won

In this situation, the sales team comes to rely on the marketing team’s funnel for leads, and the marketing team comes to rely on the sales team’s funnel to keep their jobs. Trouble is, each funnel operates independently from the other, causing internal confusion and experiential gaps for the most important stakeholder – the customer.

Getting caught up in funnel misalignment is not an enjoyable experience. A few years ago I was shopping for a new(er) vehicle. After considerable research, I identified a dealership that advertised an amazing price on my preferred model. Prior to making the 45-minute drive, I called to confirm that they still had several in inventory. Their marketing funnel worked like clockwork, but, sadly, it was all an illusion. After arriving, the sales representative informed me that they had already sold all of specially priced vehicles. I felt duped and never went back to that car dealership. I also made sure to share my experience with everyone I knew. So often, like in this case, the cost of internal misalignment extends beyond the loss of one immediate sale.

Post-transactional interactions are often an afterthought

Perhaps one of the most glaring issues with funnel vision is that it completely ignores what happens after the sale is made. Assuming even a flawless funnel experience, the reality is that the customer drops out the bottom into an empty void.

Granted, many organizations have well-structured customer support programs that ensure a seamless transition. But do these programs fully capitalize on customer lifetime value? Do they keep the customer informed of new products or services that solve their latest challenges? Or, do they simply keep customers adequately satisfied until a better solution comes along? Outside of the context of a customer journey, it’s hard to know for sure.

Overcoming “funnel vision”

Don’t feel too overwhelmed if your company seems hopelessly stuck in funnel vision. Remember, overcoming funnel vision is a continuous process that requires an internal cultural shift. The good news is that there are steps you can take to accelerate change.

Learn from your existing funnel

Completely abandoning your funnel on day one is not a prudent decision. After all, it has taken years to develop into its current form and could serve as an excellent springboard for the journey map that you’ll soon develop. Despite your funnel’s flaws, it most likely contains valuable details about pre-sale interactions, common deal progression patterns, and key terminology that is highly relevant for understanding the customer journey.

Gather input from your teams

Ask your sales reps, marketing team, and success team to anonymously share their feedback about the customer lifecycle. What is working from an acquisition standpoint? What processes are broken? At what stage do most leads drop? Which systems need to be streamlined?

Don’t be surprised if you hear comments like this:

• “The lead handoff process is broken between marketing and sales.”
• “Sales doesn’t follow up quickly enough with web leads.”
• “Leads from social media are not ready to buy our products.”
• “Small accounts seem more likely to request support.”
• “Customer success feels left out of the planning process.”
• “There’s a disconnect between our CRM, marketing automation system, and support ticketing app.”

What is the purpose of this exercise? For starters, there’s a high certainty that the feedback will validate what you already know. That is, the funnel isn’t an effective way to structure your customer management process. In addition, you may discover key insights about how prospective and existing customers interact, where they interact, and why. All of this information is vital for pivoting to a customer journey focus.

Simplify your data structure

It’s hard to move toward a customer journey focus when all your relationship and interaction data is spread across dozens of disconnected systems. Although you may not be able to completely eliminate certain data silos, you can begin to simplify your data structure.

Take a fresh look at the systems that staff use to collect customer information and determine whether or not they’re actually necessary. For example, does your CRM offer built-in email marketing functionality? If so, consider eliminating one system and simplify around a single source of truth. Or, at least try integrating the two systems to achieve a more accurate representation of each customer’s journey.

Also, it’s important to periodically reevaluate the data that makes it into your systems. Do you really need thirty custom fields for lead records? Is this information helping you, or is it just adding unnecessary clutter and complexity to your system integrations?

Start aligning around the journey

As we’ve already established, shifting to a journey mentality isn’t an overnight process. An effective transition starts with proactive alignment at every level of the company, including at the operational level. Although change can be slow to take root, you can help accelerate change by framing customer conversations in the context of a journey (rather than continuing to perpetuate funnel vision).

Citing independent, third-party data (such as this report from Forrester Research) can help awaken others to the validity of the customer journey. Also, find creative ways to leverage your own firsthand analytics, such as customer churn trends and conversion rate data. Such metrics can bolster your advocacy of the customer journey concept, serve as an effective benchmark for goal setting, and help you track the impact of a “journey-first” approach.

Get visibility into your customer’s journey

I hope you’re enjoying this multi-part series about the customer journey. My next post will dive deeper into the customer journey and explore potential impacts to your business — both in terms of day-to-day operations and revenue performance.

Read part one of the series: What does customer journey mean?

*Take L2RM To The Next Level With A Pivot – From The Funnel To Your Customer, Forrester Research, Inc., December 18, 2018

The post Why you should abandon “funnel vision” appeared first on Insightly.

• Sales & marketing alignment: People, processes, systems (Part 1)
• Sales & marketing alignment: 3 best uses of data (Part 3)
• Sales & marketing alignment: Leadership (Part 4)
• Sales & marketing alignment: Cross-functional teams (Part 5)

Building on my recent conversation with Insightly’s CMO, Tony Kavanagh, in this piece we’ll discuss a real-world example of sales and marketing alignment: the sales blitz. We’ll also explore how to convert alignment into pipeline that moves the needle.

What is a sales blitz?

“Sales blitz” can have different meanings depending on the company, industry, and product or service. That being said, proactive outreach is usually at the core of most sales blitzes.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll define sales blitz as a marketing-led, designed, and supported outbound sales campaign. It targets predefined buyer segments in a single or multiple territories, within a specified timeframe, with a single, consistent message. The goal of most sales blitzes is to generate pipeline.

“Sales blitzes get everyone talking about a particular topic or feature,” says Tony Kavanagh, CMO at Insightly. “Properly implemented, sales blitzes create tremendous internal energy, resulting in high-impact outbound that yields substantial pipeline in a short period of time.”

If you’re a marketer, you might be wondering how a sales blitz relates to your role. After all, your job is to build pipeline by driving web traffic, converting visitors to form submissions, and nurturing web leads via drip campaigns. As Tony points out, however, truly effective blitzes require tight coordination between marketing and sales.

“To maximize the effectiveness of a sales blitz, marketing teams must get out in front of sales, inject content into the process, and augment outbound activity,” says Tony.

In other words, the best sales blitzes don’t just happen on their own. They’re the byproduct of sales and marketing working together to achieve a common goal.

Prepping for a successful blitz

So, how can you design and implement a blitz program that successfully aligns sales and marketing? Like most things in business, you need a rock-solid game plan.

Long-term planning

Leadership from sales and marketing must connect early on and develop a mutually agreed-to blitz calendar. The blitz calendar provides a central source of truth from which both teams can mobilize resources and hold each other accountable.

“The blitz calendar fosters alignment between sales and marketing by establishing a shared set of goals and objectives,” says Tony.

At a minimum the calendar should specify the date, topic, and team-specific responsibilities for each blitz. Of course, creating a blitz calendar may unearth additional considerations that must be ironed out, such as:

• How many blitzes should be on the calendar at any given time?
• What is a reasonable blitz cadence (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly)?
• Where should ideas be organized for future discussion?
• Should blitzes align with upcoming product or service releases?
• Who is responsible for maintaining the calendar?
• How often should the leadership team meet to discuss changes to the calendar?

Finding answers to every question may not be feasible or necessary on day one. What’s more important is that both teams walk away with a clear understanding of the agreed-to expectations, timelines, and next steps.

Pre-blitz planning

With the blitz calendar in hand, it’s time for both teams to get busy doing prep work.

“Everyone goes to work understanding that there are T-minus X days until the big day,” says Tony. “Marketing, in particular, plays a critical role leading up to the blitz.”

Let’s take a look at some of the pre-blitz priorities:

Refine the targeted audience

Randomly selecting and dialing contacts in your CRM isn’t a winning blitz-day strategy. Customers and prospects don’t want to be contacted simply to be contacted. Rather, your B2B customers want real solutions that help them increase revenue, reduce costs, and gain a competitive advantage.

When refining the targeted audience and segmentation criteria, it’s vital to think like the potential customer. Do you feel confident that your offers, features, and benefits delight your target customers? If not, keep refining your list.

Develop the messaging & collateral

Once the audience has been established, marketing should craft messaging that’s backed by data. “Tightly segmented CRM data is a foundational element for understanding the customer and building compelling messaging,” says Tony.

Dynamic messaging is crystallized in the form of branded collateral, such as:

• Direct mail components (letters, flyers, brochures, slicks, etc.)
• Digital product information sheets
• Sales pitch decks
• Customer stories
• Pre-blitz nurture email campaigns
• Sales email templates
• Post-blitz drip email campaigns
• Digital ads (banners, text ads, retargeted ads, etc.)
• Battlecards and competitor matrices
• Pre-planned social media posts

Some assets can be used in advance to “warm up” the list and create pre-blitz buzz. Other assets — such as sales pitch decks and battlecards — are more useful for day-of activities. Either way, all assets should complement one another and avoid sending mixed signals.

“Clear messaging and clean collateral go hand in hand to form a positive brand image, which leads to better sales blitzes,” says Tony.

Get the sales team up to speed

With the blitz day rapidly approaching, it’s time for sales and marketing to reconnect. At a minimum, marketing should be prepared to:

• Deliver collateral, segmentation data, and messaging best practices
• Provide updates on pre-blitz promotional campaign results
• Share lessons learned from pre-blitz activities
• Answer any questions from the sales team

The sales team should use this forum to make any final requests from marketing, such as additional collateral or more data about the intended audience.

Running the blitz

All the preparation and planning culminate in the big day. The sales team has everything it needs to engage the target audience. Marketing team has become subject matter experts and is standing by to assist wherever needed.

And, as the first dial is made, the real fun begins.

“Sales starts banging the phones, doing outbound, and getting customers talking,” says Tony. “Marketing gets pulled into conversations as subject matter experts. Blitz day has a really cool central command experience that is unparalleled.”

Although the blitz itself may only last a few hours, the potential upside can be huge. “I’ve participated in blitzes that deliver millions of dollars in pre-pipe opportunities,” says Tony.

Having a well-structured CRM is pivotal to fully capitalize on the flurry of opportunities. After all, you want your sales reps focused on customer engagement — not doing manual data entry or scratching down handwritten notes. An inbox-integrated CRM, such as Insightly, can accelerate sales blitz engagement, squeezing even more pipeline out of an already productive day.

Recapping the blitz

Finally, it’s always wise to host a retrospective session and discuss what worked or didn’t work. Don’t just rely on anecdotal evidence to measure success of a sales blitz. If used properly, your CRM should be a treasure trove of information that delivers data-driven answers to these questions:

• How much pipeline did the sales blitz generate?
• How effective was the sales team at getting leads on the phone?
• What was our lead-to-opportunity conversion rate for this blitz?
• What percentage of sales emails were clicked?
• Was marketing effective at “warming up” the list?
• How do these metrics compare to other blitzes?

“Each blitz should be catalogued, compared to similar blitzes, and used as a powerful data source for subsequent blitz planning,” Tony.

Align for successful sales blitzes

By aligning the right mix of people, tactics, and technology, your team is well on its way to running successful sales blitzes that produce pipeline, foster internal collaboration, and elevate overall performance.

Looking for more best practices about alignment? Stay tuned for my next article that identifies common ground between sales and marketing and draws from my conversation with Insightly’s VP of Sales, Mark Ripley.

Interested in learning about Insightly CRM and how you can use it to align your teams?

Request a demo

The post Sales Blitz: Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams appeared first on Insightly.

At Chanty, we had to learn a lot about lead generation as well as try new things before we found what actually works for us. Today we are sharing the best of our lead generation advice. Some of the hacks work well for us to get the precious sign ups for Chanty, others have proven to work great for well-known SaaS companies.

1. Lead generating content

Content marketing is nothing new. Unfortunately, there are still companies that invest into creating content, but don’t get the outcome they’ve hoped for. The good news is content marketing, if done right, could bring amazing results. Let us share our hack #1 that brings us a steady stream of customers.

Here’s a simple path you should follow:

• Determine your top competitors in the niche
• Make a keyword research for ‘Competitor Name’ alternatives, as well as ‘Competitor X’ vs ‘Competitor Y’
• Choose the keyword phrase with the best balance of monthly search queries and keyword difficulty (could be checked in Ahrefs or SEMrush)
• Write an in-depth article targeting the keyword. Among other alternatives mention your product. Highlight why it’s better than your competitors.
• Acquire some backlinks pointing to an article
• Enjoy the deluge of sign ups

This article on Slack alternatives in our blog is a living proof of this strategy in work. It’s the easiest way to go if you have a prominent competitor in the niche. If you don’t – well, there’s still the traditional inbound marketing for you to try. Determine your buyer persona, learn their pains, solve them with your content, educate, engage and provide value. Create a downloadable asset such as an ebook or a comprehensive guide and offer it in exchange for visitors’ emails. Visit Hubspot Academy to learn how to do it in details.

2. Resonating ads

I can’t help, but mention this tactic, used by Ryver, our competitor. With the obvious leader in the face of Slack, team communication and collaboration niche is pretty hard to enter. You have to explain how you are different from Slack to their millions of fans and fight for your place in the sun. Ryver made a power move and set up the aggressive ad campaign in Twitter confronting their main rival.

Ryver says they’ve seen incredible engagement with these promoted tweets compared to other tweets where they’d speak of their advantages as a team communication app. Eventually, this approach helped them generate buzz around the product, got them noticed by thousands of potential customers and resulted in the long awaited sign ups.

I don’t encourage to go against your competitor with your ad campaigns. The ethical side of this approach is controversial and completely up to you. The bottom line is it works and gets you the precious emails.

3. Referral traffic from Quora

So many marketing channels, so little time. Referral traffic could become a great acquisition channel as well. After spending one week answering questions on Quora, I was surprised to discover its traffic converts at impressive 6%.

Here’s a priceless hack we’ve learnt – wiki answers. Rather than asking friends to upvote your content and fighting desperately to rank higher among other answers, here’s what you should do.

Whenever you find a question related to your niche e.g. it’s something like “What are the best Slack alternatives?” for us, hit the three dots menu and choose ‘Create Answer Wiki’. Once you post it, it’ll be reviewed by Quora staff and, if doesn’t violate their policy, it’ll be approved. Not everyone is aware of this hack so hurry up to make use of it asap.

4. Pricing model matters

Marketing isn’t only about promotion. There are still the three other P’s, remember? It’s hard to overestimate product pricing when it comes to generating leads.

When marketing thinks of leads, business thinks of sales. Not all leads are made equal. There are leads that turn into paying customers. There are also leads that churn after a free trial or remain freemium forever. Freemium, free trial, premium or other models you employ to price your product will result in different levels of lead generation. I’ve written more about various pricing models here. Let me highlight a few points.

I’d recommend to stay away from freemium unless you are a big company backed up by investors. Freemium sounds better than it in fact is. It means customers can use the lite version of your product for free for as long as you want. With all the virality you might get by going with freemium, you should consider the cons carefully.

Think of the number of free users you’ll have to maintain in order to get a handful of paying customers. Although it may look attractive, you can quickly find yourself in a freemium trap – answering support tickets of free users and developing the features that freemium customers request.

The bottom line is price the product wisely and learn about pros and cons of each pricing model. Generating leads is good. Generating leads that eventually become paying clients is even better.

5. Conversion rate optimization

No tactics or hacks will work If your website isn’t optimized for conversion. I’m not going to repeat what’s already written on the other blogs. Let me just share our experience on this.

It is a good idea to encourage those who already signed up to share the love with friends. Offer something in exchange, e.g. we’re offering the early bird access to our app if the potential customers share the word about Chanty in social networks. This helps us increase brand awareness and attract new clients to our team messenger.

I know pop ups are annoying. That’s why I didn’t choose to put up distracting windows that appear when you are in the middle of reading an article. Instead, we’ve opted for an exit pop up. Once the user is about to leave your website, it comes out. The results have exceeded our expectations – it now generates about 10% of our sign ups.

The last, but not the least – signing up at your website should be incredibly easy. It goes without saying, you should remove CAPTCHA and other challenges in the way of your potential customers. Unless you are a well known app like HubSpot, avoid multiple fill in forms at the sign up form. Email is, in fact, all you need. OK, ‘Name’ is another appropriate field to add. Just make sure it’s doesn’t become this:

Source

If you have user-unfriendly forms that still convert, my best guess is you are holding a complete monopoly over the niche.

Conclusion

Marketing a SaaS product is complicated and involves a series of various activities. The bottom line, however, is the number of sign-ups these activities generate. These are the metrics that every founder and CEO will keep in mind when evaluating efforts of a marketing team.

Therefore, try to strike a balance of promotion, price, product and placement to meet the business goals. Staying on the ethical side is equally important. Try the lead generation and conversion optimization hacks we’ve shared in this article to boost the number of sign ups on your website. Feel free to share other tips that worked well for you in the comments below.

The post 5 SaaS lead generation secrets to try in 2018 appeared first on Insightly.

For consultants (like me!), few sentences are sweeter to the ear than this one. In addition to boosting next year’s revenue forecast, new clients help you hedge against uncertainty. After all, you never know when an existing client will decide to unexpectedly change course.

As great as new clients can be, there are also a few tradeoffs to consider. In this post, we’ll discuss the costs and risks associated with adding new clients and how a CRM for consultants can help you with opportunity management.

Preliminary Sunk Costs

Before you ever bill your first hour, you’ve already dug yourself into a hole. Allow me to explain.

Let’s say that you own and operate a growing IT consulting business. Your company specializes in network and web security, and most clients are within driving distance of your office. About one month ago, a new prospect filled out a form on your website and requested a free consultation.

It turns out that this lead (a well-respected software company) represents a very large opportunity for your firm. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’ve been putting you through the wringer – with no end in sight. You’ve already visited their headquarters on multiple occasions, pulling your top IT minds off important projects to attend the meetings. After several rounds of proposals, you feel no closer to a closed deal than on day one. To make matters worse, you have a bad feeling that even if you do win the contract, it’s going to be a very one-sided arrangement (in their favor).

The last thing you want to do is pass on the opportunity (especially this far into it), but you can’t help acknowledging your sunk costs:

Lost billable hours: Time is money. Had this lead never requested info, you could have freed up additional billable hours. Instead, your team invested substantial effort in preparing proposals, brainstorming solutions, and engaging with the prospect (for free).

Switching costs: Jumping from one thing to the next increases mistakes and decreases productivity. With so much attention being paid to a single lead, your team must work even harder to keep everything balanced.

Administrative costs: Each meeting brings the inevitable set of follow-up activities. You’ve smartly organized all of your contact records, meeting minutes, tasks, and project milestones in Insightly. That helps out, but there’s still a quantifiable amount of administrative work to go around. Things don’t get done on their own.

Legal review fees: A wise man once said, “The only thing worse than no deal is a bad deal.” Being the prudent business owner that you are, there’s no way you’ll sign something without having legal counsel look it over. That’s smart, but it’s also going to cost you something.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Yes, Matt. These are indeed sunk costs, but that’s just part of doing business. You win some, and you lose some.” I wholeheartedly agree with you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue new business. I’m simply pointing out that there is a real cost that’s associated with any pre-sale process – especially when you’re doing complex deals. Surprisingly, some business owners never consider how much their sales pipeline is actually costing!

Ongoing Obligations

Finally, you receive the email that you’ve been waiting for: the software company is ready to move forward. Considering it’s Friday afternoon, you decide to take the crew out for ice cream and celebrate the victory. Everyone is very excited about the outcome.

Then, Monday morning rolls around…

As you stroll into the office at 8:02, you can immediately tell that it’s going to be a stressful day. You glance down at your phone, and you’re surprised to see several texts from various contacts at the software company. Your inbox isn’t much better. The first email is from the client’s accounts payable department, asking you to fill out a ton of paperwork. Another email, from their legal department, is asking you to complete something called a “new vendor due diligence packet” – before the close of business, of course. And, to complicate matters, your IT manager won’t be coming in to the office today – or the rest of the week, for that matter. His wife just went into labor a few weeks early.

The next thing you know, your office clock strikes 7:00 pm. What a day! As you walk toward your car, another reality hits you: this new client is already changing your company’s work patterns.

Incremental staffing costs: Your IT manager’s absence is a stark reminder of your team’s fragility. Should you hire additional staff to support new and existing clients? Doing so could be a wise move, but it also comes with a big price tag.

Non-billable requests: Some aspects of your client relationship simply aren’t billable. Submitting the vendor due diligence packet is the perfect example. On the other hand, failing to submit the packet would probably result in an unhappy ending for your firm. There’s an opportunity cost to fulfill these types of requests.

Other administrative “stuff”: If you want to get paid on time, invoices must get generated. Overdue invoices must be pursued by your accounts receivable team. Paid invoices must be reconciled in your general ledger. And, at year end, you hope that your 1099 will match up with your books. If not, there’s more work to be done. All of this has a cost.

Ongoing Risks

We’ve discussed the hard costs associated with servicing new clients. But, what about the unknown risks? Here are just a few to watch out for:

Nonpayment: Most customers pay on time. Some customers are forgetful and occasionally require a gentle reminder. Others aggressively push the envelope on payment terms in order to optimize cash flow. Remember, you’re not a bank. An occasional past-due invoice will happen, but a pattern of delinquency is detrimental to your own cash flow and stability.

One-and-done: The client’s work agreement has you locked in for a twelve-month period. That’s great for your current P&L, but what about future years? There’s no guarantee of renewal, which is all the more reason why you need a best-in-class CRM system. You essentially have a twelve-month window to lock in renewals and identify upsell opportunities. A tool like Insightly can help you manage such opportunities, reducing the likelihood of “one-and-done” clients.

Refunds (or worse): While most clients are very easy to work with, some can be quick to point the finger when things go wrong. You’re not planning on anything going wrong, but nothing is 100% certain in business – especially when it comes to the IT world. Until you establish a better relationship with the customer, refund requests are a possible outcome that you want to avoid.

Bad relationships: Consulting engagements are more than just the exchange of services and cash. Lasting engagements are built upon an interpersonal relationship between vendor and client. Like any relationship, however, some are better than others. Both parties must proactively work on the relationship. Otherwise, it’s destined for failure.

Balancing Cost vs. Reward

Clearly, there are many costs and risks associated with taking on new clients. In fact, at this point in the article, you’re probably tired of thinking about them all. I sure am.

So, should you dwell on all the downsides? Absolutely not! On the contrary, the smart consultant simply acknowledges them and creates systems to drive profitability. A CRM for consultants, such as Insightly, can be invaluable for doing exactly that. Here’s how.

Efficient Pipeline Tracking: The moment a new lead enters your pipeline, Insightly can bring clarity to every aspect of the sales process. How many team members (and hours of work) have been dedicated to closing the deal? Where is the most recent proposal deck? Insightly integrates with the industry’s most widely used document systems, allowing you to quickly attach and link cost estimates, tracking files, quotes, and proposals. The built-in opportunity tracker brings key dates and milestones into the forefront, such as the forecasted close date, time spent in each stage, probability and deal size, and much more.

Effective Service Delivery: Unlike some CRMs that only track the sales process, Insightly provides a seamless transition from sales to delivery. Converting an opportunity to a project ensures your pre-sales information remains intact throughout the customer’s journey. No more jumping between your CRM, project system, and document system. Insightly CRM for consultants brings it all together, ensuring a more cohesive client experience and effective opportunity management.

Upsell Management: Turn your “doers” into your best sales reps. As clients share their frustrations, challenges, and goals, your team can easily add new opportunities on the fly. They’re already using Insightly to coordinate tasks, projects, milestones – why not turn them loose to also identify upsell opportunities?

360-Degree View of Profitability: At the end of the day, you’re not a charity. You need to know if each client is contributing (or detracting) from your overall profitability. Insightly can help you get the answers you need. The library of prebuilt and customizable reports brings life to your CRM data. Pull together client project information, revenue forecasts, and booked business to make more informed business decisions.

Are New Clients Worth It?

If you find yourself routinely asking this question, it might be time to implement a more robust client and opportunity management system.

The post Measuring the true cost of new consulting clients appeared first on Insightly.