INBOUND September 2014
HOW TO
LOSE
A LEAD IN 10 WAYS
EXCEED CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS
LEARN TO NURTURE LEADS 1
IS YOUR MARKETING OUTDATED? We help companies generate more web traffic, leads and customers through digital marketing.
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CONTENT 4
TELL THEM YOU CAN SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS ... EVEN IF YOU CAN’T
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LEAVE THEM WAITING
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TALK ABOUT YOURSELF
DON’T TRY TO BE SOMETHING YOU’RE NOT
RESPOND TO LEADS QUICKLY
TIPS FOR THE FIRST CALL
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TAKE OUT THE PHONE BOOK AND SEE WHO BITES
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SHOW UP WHERE YOU’RE NOT WANTED
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ASK FOR COMMITMENT EARLY
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DON’T FOLLOW-UP AFTER THE MEETING ... OR WORSE, FOLLOW-UP TOO MUCH
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SEND THE SAME MESSAGE TO ALL OF YOUR PROSPECTS
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BE THERE IS BODY, BUT NOT IN MIND
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OVER PROMISE, UNDER DELIVER
ALTERNATIVES TO COLD CALLING
DEVELOP A CONTENT STRATEGY
THE IMPORTANCE OF LEAD NURTURING
HOW TO FOLLOW-UP EFFECTIVELY
PERSONALIZE YOUR MESSAGES
ENGAGE IN SOCIAL SELLING
HOW TO EXCEED EXPECTATIONS
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HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | DON’T TRY TO BE SOMETHING YOU’RE NOT
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 1: TELL THEM YOU CAN SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS ... EVEN IF YOU CAN’T. Understanding that not every person on this planet is going to be a good fit for your product or service is an important step towards being successful. Marketing to everyone and anyone without having a well-defined buyer persona to target will eventually end up in a negative experience for the mal-fitting customers who can very publicly complain about your brand.
WHAT IS A BUYER PERSONA? According to Kim Goodwin in Designing for the Digital Age, “personas are archetypes that describe the various goals and observed behavior patterns among your potential users and customers.” Personas help both marketing and sales envisage the ideal customer you’re trying to attract, and relate to your customers as real humans. Understanding your buyer persona is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.
WHAT IS A NEGATIVE PERSONA? A negative -- or “exclusionary” -- persona is a representation of who you don’t want as a customer. This could include, for example, professionals who are too advanced for your product or service, students who are only engaging with your content for research, or potential customers who are just too expensive to acquire (because of a low average sale price, their propensity to churn, or their unlikeliness to purchase again from your company.)
HOW CAN YOU USE PERSONAS? At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone
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in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas. If you take the time to create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer (and see higher sales productivity). When combined with lifecycle stages, buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content. Click here to download our “content mapping” template.
HOW TO CREATE YOUR BUYER PERSONA Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. This includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside of your contact database. Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:
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Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service. Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
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When creating forms on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. (For example, if your ideal customer works for a large company, ask each lead about the size of their company on the forms.)
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Take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the leads they’re interacting with most. (What sales cycles does your sales team work with? What generalizations can they make about the customers you serve best?)
Once you have gathered the data, you can use this template to build your persona.
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In a recent experiment, 24% of companies took more than 24 hours to respond to a web lead— and 23% never responded at all. 6
HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | RESPOND TO LEADS QUICKLY
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 2: LEAVE THEM WAITING
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Sync your email to your phone so you can stay in touch on the move. It’s basic but it’s the first thing my fellow HubSpotters mentioned when I asked them this question.
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Get Signals (desktop and mobile). Signals is a free tool that notifies you when your leads are reading your emails or clicking through to your website so you can reach out while you’re fresh on their mind - even if it has been months since you sent the initial email.
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Set up filters in your inbox to get rid of the clutter that can hide an important email from a lead amongst irrelevant messages.
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unctuality is everything when it comes to the first date, and it’s no different when it comes to leads. Whether they come through your website, post about you on social, or send you an email directly, by not responding within 24 hours you risk losing them to the competition. There are things you can do to ensure you never show up late to the first date with your new leads.
DON’T LEAVE THEM HANGING When a website visitor completes a form on your website requesting to be contacted, don’t make them wait to hear from you. Here’s what you need to do:
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Send an automated email immediately. With marketing software, you can easily set up automated emails to respond on your behalf. In the email, let them know how long they can expect to wait before hearing back from you. Note: It should never take more than 24 hours to respond to a new lead. Notify more than one person. Create a step in your automated email workflow that sends an internal email notification to more than one person in your company so that if one rep is out of the office, another can pick up the lead.
LISTEN OUT ON SOCIAL There are free tools you can use to listen for mentions of your brand or keywords across social so you can respond before your competition.
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Social Mention is a free, social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, videos, news, etc. for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, or any keyword related to your business.
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Social Inbox from HubSpot offers more advanced functionality such as monitoring specific, targeted groups of people (leads, customers, competitors) across social, as well as scheduling and responding to posts.
NEVER MISS AN IMPORTANT EMAIL You can’t always be at your desk to respond to emails from your leads, so what steps can you take to ensure you don’t miss something important?
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A Nielsen poll indicates that 90% of consumers trust their peers, while less than 10% trust an unknown source. 8
HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | DON’T JUST TALK ABOUT YOURSELF
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 3:
TALK ABOUT YOURSELF There is nothing more irritating than meeting someone for the first time and all they do is talk about themselves. They make no effort to find out about you: what makes you tick, your hobbies, interests, and the things you have in common. When you get a new lead, it’s vital to find out if they are a good fit for your product or service. Remember, the first phone call or meeting is about getting to know each other and building trust.
TIPS FOR THE INTRODUCTORY CALL: 1
First things first: Make sure you get permission to speak before you launch into your pitch at the start of the call. Ask If it’s a good time for them and if it’s not a good time, then ask when would suit them better and schedule it then and there.
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Establish authority early: You need to gain trust advisor status with the person on the oher end of the phone by providing some value in the shape of a tip or a suggestion based on what you’ve learned about them from your research.
Here are a few tips for preparing for that first phone call or meeting with your new lead:
RESEARCH TIPS: 1
Visit their website: Find out what they do and why they do it. Think about whether they are aligned to your buyer persona (ideal customer) or not. Check their news page to see what strategic moves they are making.
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Use LinkedIn: View both the individual’s profile as well as the Company Page. Take a look at: •
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Any mutual connections you have within the company. You may have spoken to a connection of theirs before, which is a good ice breaker to use. What their job involves and what they focus on specifically. What companies they’ve worked at before. What groups/companies they’re following.
If you can find a connection through any of these things, you’ll be considered more relevant and trustworthy to the lead and they are more likely to give you their time.
If you choose to talk about your business on the first call, it should always centre around how it can help the lead solve their challenges and reach their goals.
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Keep it short and sweet: 5-10 minutes is optimum. Leave enough value to be covered on the next ‘date’.
TIPS FOR THE FIRST IN-PERSON MEETING: 1
Active listening is important: Let the conversation flow and ask probing questions based on what they say.
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Use open-ended questions: Get as much info as possible, try to pick up on the pain points they mention, and then ask more questions to dive into those in more detail. Try to ask ‘why?’ five times.
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Cold calling doesn’t work 90% of the time and costs 60% more than inbound marketing.
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HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | ELIMINATE COLD CALLING
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 4:
TAKE OUT THE PHONE BOOK AND SEE WHO BITES The internet has dramatically shifted power from sellers to buyers. Today’s buyers resist interacting with salespeople until they are good and ready. So, why do we take our expensive salespeople and insist they must be good at “cold-calling” when the buyer doesn’t want anything to do with this? Don’t get me wrong. A salesperson needs to be able to communicate in an effective and compelling manner over the phone. The purpose, however, of the communication should not be getting the sale today, but finding potential customers. Cold calling is an exercise in futility and the least efficient way to find potential customers. • • •
Doesn’t work 90.9% of the time ( Harvard Business Review ) Costs at least 60% more per lead ( HubSpot, The State of Inbound Marketing ) Has a rate of less than 2% of phone calls resulting in a meeting ( Leap Job )
These statistics prove that we need to stop using our salespeople to find potential customers, and start making investments that will help create demand for our sales team and our company. With this in mind, here are several ways to create demand and eliminate the need for cold calling: 1. Create relevant resources for the early stages of the sales process and offer them as premium content on your website. 2. Invest in marketing automation software and nuture the leads that visit your website. 3. Develop a strategic TED-like conference for your industry and feature your best and brightest staff and salespeople presenting helpful information. 4. Invest in making your top salespeople sought after speakers on industry issues. Investments might include enrolling them in public speaking training courses or hiring someone to market your top salespeople as speakers. 5. Write a series of must-have industry guides that your top salespeople can give away.
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WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 5:
SHOW UP WHERE YOU’RE NOT WANTED Over the last twenty years, the way people work, live, and buy has fundamentally changed, and consumers are armed with more tools than ever to block out interruptive marketing and sales messages. According to Corporate Executive Board, 60% of the buying decision is made before talking to a sales rep. This means your website and content are your de-facto sales reps for the majority of the buying process. More importantly, it means the prospect is going to have a pretty good idea of how your product or service does and does not meet their specific business needs. To ensure you show up when they’re looking for you, you need to have a solid content strategy in place.
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According to the CEB, 60% of the buying decision is made before talking to a sales rep.
Unfortunately, 56% of marketers are doing content marketing without a plan. When putting together your content strategy, you should:
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Align your content to the buyer personas you are targeting. This allows you to stay focused on who you’re creating content for. It also helps you keep your buyer personas’ goals and challenges in mind so you can address these at each stage of the buying process.
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Understand where the content gaps are in your buying cycle. Make sure you understand where the content gaps are in the buying cycle for your different buyer personas. To achieve this, you should conduct a content audit. Also, ask yourself if your buyer persona has all the information they need at each point of the buying cycle.
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Come up with content ideas and stick to an editorial calendar. Once you know your buyer personas and understand where the gaps are in your content arsenal, it’s time to brainstorm content ideas to fill in those holes.
What can be truly difficult is creating and sticking to a consistent publishing schedule. All great content plans have an editorial calendar so that people within the company can see what content is being published and what dates that content is going live.
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Gleanstar Research says that 50% of leads who are qualified to buy are not ready to purchase immediately.
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HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | THE IMPORTANCE OF LEAD NURTURING
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 6:
ASK FOR COMMITMENT EARLY ONLY ONE IN 50 DEALS ARE CLOSED AT A FIRST MEETING. Gleanster Research estimates that 50% of leads who are qualified to buy are not ready to purchase immediately. If you try to push them into making a decision right away, you will likely lose them. Instead, take a look at your existing sales funnel. How long does it typically take a lead to become a customer after his or her first inquiry? Does the sales cycle vary for different types of purchases? Equipped with the answers to these questions, you can build some effective lead nurturing campaigns and leverage this marketing channel to qualify leads and increase sales.
WHAT IS LEAD NURTURING? People engage with businesses they know and trust. The first time someone converts on your website, the likelihood that they really know who you are or understand why they should do business with you is pretty slim. Lead nurturing is an opportunity to show that you are an expert in your field. Lead nurturing also allows you to maintain consistent communication with your leads. 66% of buyers indicate that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organizations” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider, according to a Genius.com study.
STEP 1: DETERMINE YOUR GOAL The first step is to determine your goal, which will direct your entire campaign. Are you trying to reawaken cold leads? Increase lead quality?
Before you set the goal of your lead nurturing campaign, you should decide what actions make a lead sales-ready. For example, if someone downloads a white paper, they could just be doing research and may not be ready to speak with a sales rep.
STEP 2: SELECT A PERSONA The second step is to decide who you are trying to reach. What problem are you helping them solve? This is key to helping you create the content for your lead nurturing campaign.
STEP 3: REPURPOSE EXISTING CONTENT Now that you’ve decided what makes a person sales-ready, you can choose which content you should send to your fresh leads. Instead of pitching your product as the greatest thing ever, you should first provide value. Examples of valuable offers include videos, webinars, ebooks, blog posts, and white papers. You don’t have to create new content for your lead nurturing emails. If you have a backlog of content, utilize these assets.
STEP 4: SET UP A TIMELINE Your business has a typical sales cycle, and so should your lead nurturing campaigns. Typically, it’s a good idea to space out your emails monthly. With lead nurturing, patience is a virtue. It’s important to remember not to rush into the sale.
STEP 5: MEASURE AND IMPROVE The last step to setting up a lead nurturing campaign is to ensure the accurate tracking of your emails. You need to make sure you know what’s working and what’s not. Have metrics in place that tie back to the goals you created in step one.
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80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact with a prospect.
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HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | HOW TO FOLLOW-UP EFFECTIVELY
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 7: DON’T FOLLOW-UP AFTER THE MEETING ... OR WORSE, FOLLOW-UP TOO MUCH The purpose of the follow-up call is to engage the prospect, receive an update, schedule a call, or simply check for vital signs. Here are 3 simple ideas for following up effectively:
GOOGLE ALERTS Set up a Google Alert for your prospect’s company, competition, and industry key words. Google will pull a variety of resources that you can use to re-engage a prospect while focusing on their business goals and challenges. Build your email title and body around an emphasis on what you’re sharing, then ask your prospect to get on the phone.
LEVERAGE EXISTING CONTENT Use content to further educate your prospect on what they are looking for help with. Provide the content and make a recommendation on how this will help them.
LINKEDIN GROUP RECOMMENDATION Head over to LinkedIn and find a group that focuses on the industry your prospect is a part of, a group for people in a similar job role or a group of their customers. Recommending this group to them via LinkedIn will show that you understand their challenges.
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Personalized emails improve clickthrough rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%
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HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | PERSONALIZE YOUR MESSAGES
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 8: SEND THE SAME MESSAGE TO ALL OF YOUR PROSPECTS If you’re a Netflix user or have ever purchased something from Amazon, you’ve experienced the awesome effects of a personalized experience; it’s tailored to suit your specific interests, wants, and needs. This is a good part of the reason Netflix has acquired over 50 million subscribers. Below are 8 marketing personalization tactics you can implement to get more personal with your prospects, leads and customers. 1. Send email messages from a human, not a company. This is probably the easiest way to start creating a more personal experience for your email recipients. Instead of having the sender/ from name be Company X, make it the name of a living, breathing member of your marketing team. In addition, consider adding their photo and email signature to the body of the email to show that an actual human took the time and effort to craft the message and will field any responses. 2. Use recipients’ real names in email messages. “Dear friend,” “To [FirstName],” and “Hi Customer” are all unacceptable greetings for your email communications. A prospect or lead’s name is one of the easiest pieces of lead intelligence to gather. If they filled out a form, you have their name and email address, right? Otherwise, you probably shouldn’t be emailing them.
3. Segment your email database and personalize messaging. Want to generate a better response rate for your email campaigns? Segment your email list. You can go about this in a number of ways using the information you’ve collected from prospects and leads. In the simplest way, you should at least segment by marketing persona. 4. Target content to speak to the specific needs of various marketing personas. Similarly, create new content or modify existing content to address the specific needs, problems, and language of your various marketing personas. 5. Create targeted landing pages geared toward different marketing personas. If you don’t have the bandwidth to create content targeted at each of your business’ customer personas, you should at least create targeted landing pages for your various offers. 6. Use marketing automation tools to trigger lead nurturing campaigns based on content interest. While you may address different industry issues and topics within your content, that doesn’t mean that all prospects are interested in all topics. If a lead downloads an eBook focused on Topic X, for example, use marketing automation tools to automatically enter them into a lead nurturing campaign that delivers content relevant to that initial topic. 7. Create targeted LinkedIn Company Product Page variations. LinkedIn Company Pages offer a targeting tool that enables you to personalize the products/services a LinkedIn page visitor sees when they visit your company product page. You can target based on industry, job function, and geographic location. 8. Experiment with Google+ to target content. Use Circles to create a few different topic Circles depending on the various interests of your target audience. This creates an element of exclusivity and personalization.
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25% of consumers who complain about products on Facebook and Twitter expect a response within 1 hour. 20
HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | ENGAGE IN SOCIAL SELLING
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 9: BE THERE
IN BODY, BUT NOT IN MIND In order to be successful in generating new business from social media, you have to listen and engage with your prospects, leads and customers. While 93% of businesses have a social media profile, many think that just showing up for the party is enough. In reality, social media presents an opportunity to sell yourself, your business and your product or service. This is called Social Selling.
WHAT IS SOCIAL SELLING? Social selling is really just great selling empowered by the reach and direct engagement that social media platforms provide. Below are a few important ways that managers can help salespeople succeed at social selling. 1. Encourage salespeople to contribute thoughtful content online. Buyers will engage with salespeople who offer thoughtful commentary, share content and ask questions that relate to the buyer’s business issues and opportunities. Consider where your company’s prospective buyers might go to seek out information, and place your content there. 2. Help salespeople see the value of establishing a personal brand. Sellers who want to be seen as opportunity creators, problem solvers and brokers of valuable resources need to put some effort into their online profiles and messaging to ensure that their personal brand message is clear.
3. Guide their social engagement toward the desired outcome. Encourage your salespeople to consider new ways of moving prospects down the buyers journey. 4. Measure the impact of their effort. A sales manager can encourage some discipline by helping salespeople to track their online efforts. For example, they could track how many times a salesperson is able to convert social media contacts into real, live prospects. 5. Take a long-term view on social selling. Social selling may not give salespeople the kind of immediate gratification that they’re looking for, but perseverance will pay off. 6. Ensure buyer focus in all that they post. Salespeople must not violate the basic rules of communication with buyers just because they are posting on LinkedIn or Twitter. Buyers are no more forgiving of sellers that push their own agenda online than they are of sellers who do so offline. 7. Help them draw the conclusion that the world of buying and selling has changed, and old methods are becoming less effective. If salespeople don’t pay attention to the way potential buyers want to interact online, then eventually, they’ll have no one with whom to interact! The manager’s task is to help salespeople see the risk of not changing and the potential payoff of engaging with buyers in a more effective way.
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It costs six to seven times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one.
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HOW TO LOSE A LEAD IN 10 WAYS | ENGAGE IN SOCIAL SELLING
WHAT NOT TO DO NO. 10: OVER
PROMISE, UNDER DELIVER
Whether you’re in sales or marketing, the temptation to over promise in order to reel in a new customer is always present.
HOW TO RETAIN CUSTOMERS
It takes courage to be honest and tell a potential new customer that your product or service is not right for them. In fact, it may cost you new business, your salary or even a promotion.
As mentioned earlier, never promise that your product or service will do something that it can’t. Remember that it’s always better to exceed expectations than it is to miss expectations.
However, over promising when it comes to signing up new customers will always come back and bite you.
2. Offer superior customer service.
CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE (LTV) LTV is the estimated revenue that a customer will generate during the entire span of their relationship with your company.
1. Be honest with your prospects.
Allow customers to use a breadth of communication channels for customer service, respond quickly to problems, and make it easy for customers to resolve any issues with your product or service. 3. Be proactive.
It takes into account not only the initial purchase, but also how much a customer is likely to spend in the future as they purchase more products and services from you.
WHY LTV IS IMPORTANT Research has found that a mere 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%. The same study also found that it costs six to seven times more to gain a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. The moral of the story: retaining customers is a lot more profitable than trying to acquire one.
Instead of simply being reactive to your customers, be proactive. For example, monitor the pages that your customers navigate to and use this data to proactively reach out to them via an invitation to chat, or an offer, or a multimedia tutorial - at the right time when assistance is required. 4. Stay in touch. Use social media and email to keep in touch with your customers and find out how they are feeling about your product or service.
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IF IT’S NOT GNU MARKETING, IT’S OUTDATED MARKETING. Let us walk you through how inbound marketing can transform your business, and why it’s the proven method for doing business online. Request your free assessment and learn more about what we can do. Call us today at 1-888-755-1482 or visit www.gnucreations.com.
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