The one trend we have been following consistently in business to buiness marketing technology is how it’s moving towards being able to identify prospects for your business even before you have spoken to them. Right from lead data capturing, lead nurturing to lead qualification, technology has been evolving to help automate the demand generation process and help marketing and inside sales work smarter.

Website lead capturing for building marketing data has been right at the forefront of most marketers strategy to build in inbound leads this year. It’s scalable, the leads are more qualified and often already partly educated on your offering. Whether they come from form fills, landing pages, rss subscriptions, webinar registrations or downloads, these are now regarded as some of the most qualified and actionable kinds of leads that can be generated. But these are business visitors who have committed enough to give you their contact details and are ready to speak to you. How about the more casual visitors who are interested in reading about your offering or company but perhaps not warmed up enough to fill in any information. Do you have to let these slip through?

Not any more. There are a few very useful applications which not only allow you to track the volume of visitors and their content viewing patterns but also go a step further to help you identify which company those visitors came from which effectively capture potential leads from a simple visit and not necessarily a form fill.  Netfactor’s Visitor Track - Web Leads Technology is one forerunner in this field and helps capture visitors to your company website and also translate which company they are from. Some others include OpenTracker and LeadsExplorer which help identify companies who have been showing an active interest in your website. Although it may not always yield completed data such as the actual visitors name and title if coupled with a data append and lead qualification service, these can be great ways for sourcing more leads which can be nurtured and then developed into actionable business leads.

This is certainly a step in the right direction for marketing automation and online lead generation in making the process more intelligent.

This last week has been fun trying out an early beta version of Nurture an ‘easy to use’ lead nurturing application. Though there are one or two small bugs to fix since its still in the earlier testing stages and not live for everyone to start using yet, it looks promising and worked well for me. The application is built to be a simplified lead nurturing solution to which leads can be added, you create and schedule email campaigns, define rules for campaigns, track activitiy and score leads based on activity to help identify which of them are sales ready and keep nurturing the remaining. What I liked was its a no-nonsense application which does exactly what it says it will and does it well without the bells and whistles.

I started my campaign by designing a set of email templates which point to a landing page we created specially for this reach out to capture leads. The email templates included different formats and copy for follow-up emails for those who dont open the first one and also different ones to follow up after discussions with sales reps. Once there were setup, I uploaded a small list of target contacts and tagged them with the campaign name by which I could identify them by later. The ‘tagging’ feature is quite a nifty one in the Nurture application and helps being able to associate a set of leads or contacts with a specific word like a campaign name, lead owner etc. I setup the campign which was quite simple and set a rule to send a follow up email within 12 days of a lead not opening the initial introductory email. Once that was set, the campaign was good to go. 

The exciting part is definitely watching the activity stream which is displayed well on the dashboard as well as the activity stream for each individual contact in the Nurture system. It helps you identify which of your target leads opened their email, how many of them clicked through a link on your email, which of them went on to read your website, what pages they went through, which of them went to your landing page and also which of them filled in a form. Based on all this activity, the application scores each lead with a point system and helps you identify what is sales-ready. The rest of them remain in your Nurture cycle and further actions can be set for them.

It was very useful for the smaller campaign that I carried out and I also enjoyed the simplicity of being able to add individual decision maker contacts on the fly without creating a campaign and send out emails to them through the system as an alternative to contacting them through my outlook account which wont let me track what happens next. This application may not rival some of the bigger players in the lead nurturing and marketing automation space but then again it was not meant to. It can be compared to the ‘Basecamp‘ of lead nurturing by being a smart sleek application thats simple, great to use,  does the job and does it without fuss. Though the application is a few weeks from going live, you can drop your email on the main page for an update and an early bird discount so check it out here!

Testimonials are one of the best sales tools ever and there is nothing like it. A good testimonials can lead a hesitant slow moving decision making business contact to close quickly after feeling assured and confident by reading or hearing testimonial for your product. Likewise, even the hottest lead can turn cold reading a not to good or an iffy testimonial or feedback from your customer. It is important for you to realize the value of testimonials and how get every customer to write a testimonial and one that matter and helps you close. 

1. Choose the timing carefully. Right after a successful delivery or project completion, send a quick note asking for them to write a short testimonial about their experience and feedback about your company and its solution. 
2. Follow-up rigorously. Testimonials can be requested and not asked for. So its important that you come up with the right style and strategy for follow-up until you get the your customer to write a recommendations. 
3. Help them a bit. When requesting a testimonial, feel free to share a few past testimonials or suggested examples that help them to write one for your faster. Sometimes customer don’t write one because they can’t figure out how to articulate. A little help from you can get what you need done much faster. 
4. Rinse & repeat. Follow-up with all customers until you get a testimonial and repeat the same for every customer you work for, however small the project or engagement may be. 

Every testimonial is a great sales tool for you to leverage and you will be surprised who long testimonials continue to work. LinkedIn is a great tool for gathering testimonials and recommendations from customers and partners and keeping them organized. Try simple email or use LinkedIn and see what works best for you. 

I just finished an interesting conversation with a CEO at a security software company and he told me something that made me think about the underlying strategy. He said a well known startup in the email space that was acquired by a large public company started off with one part of their sales and marketing effort focused on selling into accounts that were using their competitors product. At the face of it, it might seem strange and unnecessary. But if you think further it can be a very good strategy for some businesses:

• Targeting your competitors’ customer defines the target market for you very easily. You know that the customers have a need, suffer a pain point and are using something. You, obviously, have to show something to differentiate from your competitor, but this strategy solves an important issue of finding target accounts who have a pain point. 
• If you can sell into your competitors’ customers it helps you to validate your product and build confidence in its ability to address well defined requirements of customers who are already using another solution and have their requirements clearly identified. It helps you to whet your product and sales pitch very well. 
• If your customer has a large customer list, then focusing on those customers may be a good for your startup to go out and get some quick wins without having a heavy duty list building, lead generation, lead qualification and appointment setting process. You can go straight to the decision makers and pitch. They already know what you are trying to sell them. 

How to go after your competitors’ customer is a topic for another post that I will cover soon, but dwell on this and see if this is applicable to your startup. 

Decision makers and buyers are a busy bunch. Everyone of your peers is trying to sell to them and how much ever they may have liked you, they WILL forget about you over time unless you do something about it. This problem is a huge one for trade publications who rely on their subscribers to not ignore the renewal notices and pay on time. However, very often, subscribers are too busy to pay attention to this and even thought they have the intention to renew, they just don’t get to it. This is an ideal scenario to innovate on how to get subscribers to renew. MarketingSherpa has a very insightful case study about how the VP of Membership at Society of Marketing Professional Services solves this challenge and created a winning formula. Here’s an excerpt, and here’s the link to the full article: 

Two and a half years ago, Tina Myers, VP, Membership & Chapter Development, Society for Marketing Professional Services, grew weary of members who ignored invoices and let their memberships expire. The SMPS was losing between 100 and 120 members a month. 

The organization needed a more sophisticated messaging approach, Myers says. They sorted through and tested new ideas before implementing an email-anchored strategy to entice marketing executives, directors and staff to renew and rejoin after they quit. 

Tinkering and tweaking led to a campaign that combined an email and postcard with occasional backup from phone reps. The multi-touch approach has paid off in lifting their retention rate from 71% to 82% – a 15.4% increase. 

Recent email data suggests that they’re zeroing in even more on their targets. Their June email saw a 62% conversion rate, a 34% open rate and a 13% rate for clickthroughs. 

“These percentages are beginning to become more typical,” Myers explains. “Our results over the last year have been getting better and better.”

This example is actually applicable to generic B2B lead nurturing and you can take a lot from this example and come up with your own recipe to keep relationships with your prospects fresh and active, and most importantly figure our ways to make it easy for your prospects to buy from you. It is important to understand that you are not the only thing on their minds and if you make it easier for your prospects to reach you, place an order and pay you, then you have it all good to go. Easier said than done, I know, but very few companies have truly explored how they can do this. Its time to do it now.