BEYOND AUTOMATION:
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO
SMARTER LEAD GEN
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction········································································································3 Chapter 1: Are lead gen forms broken?··········································4 Chapter 2: Moving beyond standard questions·························5 Chapter 3: New PDF download······························································ 7 Chapter 4: Scoring leads smarter·······················································8 About Docalytics···························································································10
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INTRODUCTION Marketing automation is the new frontier of marketing — and for good reason. Automating your lead generation and nurturing takes a significant amount of manual work off of a marketing team’s plate. It allows marketers to really, truly qualify leads before they’re handed to sales. It builds the marketing and sales relationship. And, done correctly, it makes you more money — studies show that companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate.1
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Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate.
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However, marketing automation isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. Regardless of which solution you’re using, there is room to improve your lead generation techniques. Read on to learn more about how to get started.
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CHAPTER 1
ARE LEAD GEN FORMS BROKEN? Popular marketing automation platforms like Hubspot and Marketo® encourage marketers to create content and gate it to gather leads. This has proven to be an effective tactic when carried out on a large scale. However, gated content is 20 to 50 times less likely to be downloaded than content that you can read without providing information.2 That means that traditional lead gen forms still give prospects pause. There are a few ways to work with and around the traditional form to encourage more leads to provide their information. Take these actions to gather a higher percentage of leads:
DON’T GATE IT ALL. Like we discussed in Gaining the Lead: Common Lead Gen Mistakes and How to Combat Them, only certain content should be gated — content that is adding real value to the prospect’s work.3 It’s not wise to gate more bottomfunnel content like sales materials if you want to gather more leads.
TRACK YOUR UNGATED CONTENT. Consider offering the first ebook in a series without gating, but link readers to one or two more in-depth pieces. Take advantage of the technology within your marketing automation tool to track these anonymous visitors until they identify themselves. Then, you’ll still have an understanding of how much the prospect has interacted with your site and your content before they provide contact information.
SHOW YOUR HAND FIRST. By allowing your prospect to read some of your content right away, you’ll capture prospect interest. You may consider publishing the first page of your ebook and sticking the rest behind a form, or using technology like Docalytics to insert flexible, customized forms throughout your content.
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CHAPTER 2
MOVING BEYOND STANDARD QUESTIONS You’re probably familiar with the standard lead gen questions: name, title, company, email and phone. Business size, location and demographic questions are fairly common as well, but it’s important to reexamine the kind of questions you’re asking in forms. Do you really need half of the above information to begin targeting the lead?
MARKETING AND SALES RISE AND FALL TOGETHER. In order to understand the information your sales team needs, your marketing and sales teams need to come together. Unfortunately, a recent study of these professionals found that only 16% believe that their teams’ activities are aligned — and 10% said the teams aren’t aligned at all.4 That’s a problem. Many inbound marketers report that their sales teams believe that the marketing leads they recieve are unqualified — and if marketers are only providing a name and email address, it’s easy to understand why. Simply sending a name and email address is not enough. Marketers must take action to battle the misconception that marketing leads don’t count. Here’s how: Provide a story, not just a lead. The sales process is all about storytelling to get buy-in from prospects. Treat your sales team the same way by making sure that they know the story of each lead. Send a report to your sales team that identifies the lead and shows them the content that the lead has consumed. Offer the next level of information. The best way to legitimize a lead is to provide a way for your sales team to connect to them right away. Identify which content was most interesting to the prospect in each stage of the funnel. Providing a list of the content a prospect downloaded is a great first step, but remember, just because it’s downloaded doesn’t mean it was actually opened or read. Take it a step further with a solution that measures how prospects engage your content, so you can show your sales team exactly what prospects spend time reading.
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Ask for input right off the bat. The best way to make sure your sales and marketing teams jive is to get input from your sales team before you even start writing. Your sales team is on the front lines, taking to customers every day — who could posisbly know better what’s interesting to them?
ASK DEEPER QUESTIONS, AVOID ABANDONED CONTENT It’s time to start asking real qualifying questions in your forms. To ensure your content isn’t abandoned as soon as these questions are asked, it’s important to create content with lead generation in mind. The easiest way to gather information from a lead is to ensure that the questions are directly related to your content. For example:
Let’s say you write an ebook about strategies to avoid while optimizing your website for search engines. Ask your reader engaging questions throughout the sections — questions like: “What are the biggest issues you face while tackling optimization?” Your leads will already be comfortable with the topic and thinking about their own experience, so they’ll be more likely to interact than they would be before reading any of your content. Bonus: Once you understand your prospect’s pain points, you can target them with tailored content and provide immediate talking points to your sales team.
We suggest asking more sensitive questions later in your content, but if you can be successful in getting prospects to answer these types of questions more immediately, you can provide a more tailored path and warm them up more quickly.
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CHAPTER 3
THE NEW PDF DOWNLOAD (Hint: it’s not a download at all)
When prospects provide their information and download your ebook, what do they do with it? Do they stash it away and read it later (and if this is the case, do they ever get to it?)? Do they read it once and forget all about it? Do they really examine the content and use it to their full advantage? These are great questions that most marketers simply canot answer. By putting new practices in place or leveraging tools in addition to your marketing automation solution, you can get more information. You’ll not only know whether your prospect has looked at the content, but understand these two important factors: 1. How much they read. Did your prospect read the whole ebook, the first page, or something in between? There’s only one way to find out. 2. The content that they’re interested in. By tagging sections within your content, you’ll have a quick snapshot of the content that each lead finds most interesting. This information can be used for nurturing, which moves leads through the funnel faster. Speeding up the sales process is an imminent concern — during the last five years, the average sales cycle has become 22% longer with an increasing number of decision makers.5 The new PDF download is keeping your content online so you can track it beyond the first time the prospect touches it. This matters for marketers whose strategies revolve around marketing automation because gated PDF content is a large piece of the marketing automation puzzle — and as you read in Chapter 1, gated content isn’t always best. By keeping your content online, your marketing team can leverage it from many entry points, such as the traditional landing page, email, webinar and more. Still want to offer a PDF download? Decide how far the prospect should get through the content before they can download it or offer it at the end.
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CHAPTER 4
SCORING LEADS SMARTER There is no set-in-stone way to set leads. Of course, marketing automation tools offer suggestions, but lead scoring is different within every organization.6 That leaves a lot of room for interpretation. According to MarketoŽ, less than 25% of new leads are ready to enter the sales process — that’s why we score leads to rank their readiness to move out of the marketing lead pool and head to sales.7 There are two basic components of scoring leads: 1. Demographic Lead Scoring. The first piece of scoring leads is relatively simple: marketers assign a score to industry, role, job title, revenue and other demographic information. 2. Behavioral Lead Scoring. Behavioral scoring can be based on many different factors, such as visiting web pages, opening emails, responding to offers and more. When evaluating behavioral score, marketers are instructed to drill down by type of web page (ie: visiting a pricing page is more valuable than visiting solely the home page). However, web traffic insights are still relatively surface-level in the big picture of insights that are available to marketers today.
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Getting deeper behavioral insights allows marketers to score leads more effectively. Using the information discussed in the previous chapters, you should assign a score to the most valuable post-downloaded behaviors such as:
Amount of ebook read: The prospect reads the full ebook (high score!), or reaches a certain threshold defined by your marketing team. Interaction with content: The prospect highlights, copies or shares content within the book. Information provided: The prospect filled out information in a certain number of progressive lead generation forms.
This data gives marketers specific, actionable insight that will help them better score leads, understand how to nurture each lead, and gauge sales readiness. Want to learn advanced ways to nurture the lead? Keep an eye out for our next ebook, Beyond Automation: The Definitive Guide to Smarter Nurturing, where we’ll discuss how to nurture leads based on smarter scoring.
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ABOUT DOCALYTICS Docalytics’ powerful cross-platform technology allows customers to track user interaction with documents and sales collateral such as whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, presentations, sell sheets and other documents. Docalytics empowers businesses to produce better content, get more sales-ready prospects and prioritize sales outreach. For the first time your sales and marketing teams will be able to track exactly how prospective customers engage with your content — while more efficiently capturing lead data as a prospective customer engages with the document versus having to capture everything upfront before a visitor can determine the relevancy of the content. For more information, visit www.docalytics.com.
1
Hubspot Marketing Statistics: www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
2
B2B Marketing Insider: www.b2bmarketinginsider.com/demand-generation/lead-
generation-when-to-use-registration-forms
SOURCES
3
Gaining the Lead eBook: doclib.docalytics.com/v/gaining-the-lead-common-lead-
generation-mistakes-how-to-combat-them?cid=embed-widget 4
Demand Gen Report: www.demandgenreport.com/industry-topics/industry-news/
1896-sales-and-marketing-alignment-absent-at-most-b2b-firms-survey-finds.html#. U2k8Y61dX7J 5
Technically Marketing: www.technicallymarketing.com/index.php/2012/08/23/10
-alarming-stats-that-should-get-you-on-the-lead-nurturing-band-wagon/ 6
Marketo B2B Marketing Cheat Sheet: www.marketo.com/_assets/uploads/Lead
Scoring-cheatsheet2-10.pdf 7
Marketo Examples: www.slideshare.net/Macromator/lead-scoring-marketo-examples
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