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good afternoon everyone or good morning depending on where you're joining us from welcome to today's session in the ready talk webinar series uh thank you for joining us if this is your first time welcome um if you've joined us before for another event in our series welcome back and we really appreciate you taking some time out of your day to do so today's seminar is entitled the onew punch of effective lead engagement accurate lists and Powerful content and we've got Brian Carol the executive director of Revenue um optimizations at Mech laabs joining us today to share some insight on the topic um again he is the executive director at Mech laabs there and the CEO of InTouch which is also part of the mech laabs group um author and bestseller of the book lead generation for the complex sale um an expert in lead nurturing has presented a number of webinars so uh we know that you'll take some good action items out of today's presentation couple of housekeeping items before we do get started today during the presentation all the participants are going to be in a listen only mode however if you guys do have some questions please feel free to chat those in at any time during the presentation in that chat box that's at the lower left hand portion of your screen and we'll be sure to cue those up for Brian then at the end during the Q&A portion um going to go back here to this Twitter slide really quick if you guys have comments or questions feel sure to feel free to carry those on excuse me on uh the social side over on Twitter with the hash Sherpa weinar and we've got also all of the uh speaker Twitter handles there as well as a reminder today's event is being recorded Wednesday August 8th and you guys will all receive a link to the recording um in the post event eil along with a PDF of the slides presented by Brian today so on that note I will go ahead and hand it off to Brian to kick off today's call thank you Simone well I'm so glad to be with all of you today uh I can't see you but I know that we have people joining us from from across the world in different time zones and you know we are going to talk about uh a one two punch to effective lead engagement and what I thought would be helpful is just give you a little bit background quickly on on Mech laabs and and myself so that you understand uh why we're thinking what we do and and really the basis to the recommendations and what we're going to be teaching you today you know my goal ultimately is to equip you um I'm here to help you and I I want to invite you during uh today's session I really want this to be interactive so as you have questions that come up um go ahead and put them into the chat I'll be monitoring those and if I can answer them in real time during the presentation I'd like to do that we're also going to save time for Q&A so let's um go ahead and just introduce Mech laab so um some of you are are familiar with mechlab some of you are are more familiar with our Our Brands um marketing Sherpa and marketing experiments but what I'm sharing with you today is really based on more than 10 years of research we've done and Mech laabs is really focused fused on discovering what really works in marketing to help Executives optimize the financial performance of their sales and marketing funnel and so we've conducted more than 10 years of research we've conducted 1300 major experiments um our work has been run on tests that have affected over a billion emails we've uh tested and optimized over 10,000 sales passs and um uh this year we're we're publishing uh hundreds of Publications and uh we're conducting uh many conferences uh here here in the US as well as uh webinars around the world so what I wanted to do is just give you a little background of me I I joined the company in 2008 um I've really grown up focused on uh really working with companies that have a complex sale and so we we don't have a lot of time to get to the history I want to drive dive into the content but I I just want to uh say that um I I can't see all of you today some of you are attending as a team in a conference room some of you attending at a desk or working from home is that uh the the whole goal today is um not for me to just share with you Concepts but really to give you some tangible ideas so again if you have questions let me know here's the problem that we're uh we're here to solve today uh I want to talk to you about lead nurturing because when you develop lead generation programs and we talked about what's our goal effective lead engagement um what I find is is that so many lead leads that are generated by marketers get lost ignored and discarded and in fact what our research has shown is 80% of marketing generated leads are lost ignored or discarded there's a lot of reasons why um our B2B Benchmark report we surveyed uh here uh 1900 marketers and we found that 80% we've actually surveyed uh year-over-year about uh 32,000,000 marketers what we found is is that 80% of bdb marketers pass raw leads to sales so one of the reasons why most leads aren't converting is that they aren't ready to engage to a salesperson and the challenge is is for salese today especially in this economy is that they're focused on who is going to buy in one to two quarters so there's this Gap we're giving leads too early many marketers are passing lead to sales people without qualification or the necessary data and these longer term leads these future opportunities often ignored by salespeople represent approximately 77% of your potential revenue and what's interesting is that we studied lead nurturing how many marketers are doing it and what we found is 73% of companies have no process to re-engage leads to nurture them after they've handed off to sales so what's this mean to you um what what this means and what I'm hoping to solve with you today is that if you can relate to any of these things and if your magnitude of your problem is just a fraction of this it's still costing you money if you think about your marketing funnel and your sales funnel um really I want you to begin thinking of yourself today more like a revenue plumber and your goal is you look at your pipeline as understand where the leaks are and where you can plug the leaks we found that the leaks are happening in two areas not having Clarity on the lead and two not having Clarity on how to nurture the process and so that's what I'm going to teach you today I thought it'd be helpful to begin with a case study and I I wanted to give you this uh this case study is an example of a company doing a simple lead nurturing program just to talk about the power of what could happen if they re-engage the leads they already have and here's here's the thing you guys right now um many of you are on fiscal year so we are in the midst of third quarter a lot of you are B2B marketers who have a complex sale we also have some business consumer marketers on today but generally speaking for considered purchases um the leads you generating right now this month may or may not impact 2012's Revenue I find that most of the time when we study sales Cycles what makes a complex sale the leads you generate this month may actually impact January of 2013 so what can you do to move the sales needle and this is what one company looked at and and I'd like to encourage you if you don't have a lead re-engagement process the fastest way I find to get Roi is to go further with the names you already have and so that's what this group's doing they're a B2B company with a short sales cycle they were focusing on launching an email series and this is a test protocol 31985 their goal was to invigorate leads that have passed a 30-day window which most clients are likely to convert and some of you have attended other web clinics that I've done um I I recognize uh someone who's attending today's webinar I did an event with David David and I did uh uh a webinar today hello to you David where where he was showing the velocity or followup increases conversion so they focused on leads that were Beyond a 30-day window and the question was is what tactics could be implemented to re-engage existing leads and ultimately uh turn those leads from uh typically being lost ignore discarded to recapturing Drive Revenue so here's what happened I I just want to set up and say Here's the result and then I'll spend some time telling you how to what they found as a result of addressing the leads they already had is that 37% of their customers of their closed sales were from leads generated over three months ago that's significant think about it over a third of the revenue was from leads that were older than a month now if if you focus just on engaging leads right now that became converted gave to your sales team in 30 days and followed the the common logic in this case this company would have been losing a lot of Revenue and over 20% of their revenue was from leads generated over one year ago so the takeaway here is that you do need to focus on Fresh relevant leads the ones you're generating right now but don't neglect the one that are three or month three or more months ago and so what I want to teach you is this concept of re-engagement and these are the steps that they went through and we we'll get more in the Tactical how-to the first thing this company did is that they focused on leads generated through content downloads and they identified specific topics or themes lead generation at itss cores about building a relationship and you want to keep the conversation going um and so what they looked at is where that conversation started and what the topics were to keep that conversation going the focus of nurturing or re-engagement is to progress most leads aren't ready to talk to salesperson right away so they identified uh four key topics and what they did is they developed uh an email series that was weekly a week one and then they did a pass for week two and a pass for uh having a call to action and the call to action was straightforward this was a two-e process to have a call to action to sign up for an online software demo so this company uh sold software as a service and what they then did is based on what people did is if they signed up for a online software demo then they were moved over into either being a sales ready lead that they were ready to engage the team they determin this based on universal lead definition we're going to talk about that in a moment but then those that weren't ready they moved into lead re-engagement and what I want to spend time is uh those leads that moved to re-engagement the ones that didn't convert in that first 30-day window this is the process they went through if leads finish the initial nurturing Series without converting the initial two-e nurturing series the team sends two other types of email to the audience the first thing they do they put together a monthly email newsletter this included short columns from the the CEO as as well as information from industry events and book reviews but the goal was is this was designed around topics they knew were relevant from Their audience the the other thing they did is they set up a a second type of email which was uh that they set up a monthly webinar invitations you guys are all attending a webinar here sponsored by ready talk um what they did is they uh sent out a monthly webinar invitation the term webinar and the subject line they they personally addressed it they described the event and the goal here is that they gave people the opportunity to manage their subscription of what path they're in from a nurturing standpoint their um email management marketing automation system software allowed them to do it the the third step they did is in addition to the newsletter and webinar invites uh they had a bi-weekly email series and what this was is they focused on marketing tips and practical information for uh leads that were older and so this series happened shortly after that what the goal was it was mainly to keep in contact with this audience sharing articles they felt would be relevant the difference here between the other two is they there was not a strong called action so that was deemphasized as opposed to focusing on the demo and um they also set up in in terms of the the program itself uh an email tip series and what this was what I thought was interesting is they had a active option opt out the the danger when you're sending out regular email Communications to your audience is you don't always know what's relevant the other thing is is you may be sharing things that's relevant to people but the timing's off so you need to connect relevancy and timing with with your audience and what what I thought was very interesting is they proactively allot they went above and beyond that audience and so you can see here keep me keep the marketing tips coming or I'd rather not receive your marketing tips and um by doing this their objective was to keep this audience from emotionally unsubscribing so um the the takeaway is that you want to avoid overwhelming your audience and so as you think about doing something simple this was a pure email-based program and I found right now if you're going to do lead re-engagement one of the tactics or channels uh that most companies are employing today is email it's a great way of doing it but you want to avoid overwhelming your audience so um in this case they they did a couple of things they worked with their sales team to stop emailing sales ready leads that had uh scheduled a product demo because they had a separate stream of emails that their sales team was working on and then what they also did is after um someone filled out a download and that they um that they didn't engage that they didn't move to being sales ready uh they would allow people to start the process over but that any leads and long-term series that filled at the form to download more content they were taken out of the long-term Series so if someone responded to the call Action the down of the demo the objective ultimately for them as they looked at their sales path is customers who download software typically are more developed in their need than those who haven't and that's where they put them in a different nurturing path so what what I want to do you guys is this is a case study we're going to get more into principles but the the key takeaway here is this if you don't have a nurturing process in place I would encourage you to look at re-engagement as one of the things that could give you a lift this year and um this is one of the fastest ways I know to drive Roi because what you're doing is you're going further with the budget you've already spent so I know you're going to have questions and uh I'm going to spend some time just quickly giving you a definition we've talked about lead reengagement lead nurturing we haven't defined it yet and um what I what I want to do is is as you have questions again put those into the chat and I'll I'll look to address them but let's say what is lead nurturing lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialogue with viable potential customers regards their timing to buy and the goal of nurturing is this is that you are um really focused on progressing people from early interest to consideration that's really the objective of nurturing you have to have Clarity though to at what am I nurturing people to to what stage and when I find there's a lot of confusion with marketers is they think they're doing nurturing but they aren't clear about the destination to what point I would like to say the first objective at least if if you look at this from a lead generation perspective is you're looking to nurture people until they reach this point of being sales ready and so what I want you to understand is that um you're really looking with the nurturing process to develop an approach so that as you think of your marketing and sales right now you'll notice that the marketing Pipeline and the sales pipeline are separate I'm just showing this for illustration really they're all connected from a customer point of view they don't see things from a marketing or sales pipeline what they see is is they're looking at a conversation and they're trying to understand how um what am I searching for how are my needs going to be met how can I get my questions answered but what's happening here is you notice there's a step called inquiries and what I'm talking about is inserting a step called nurturing and as opposed to handing off leads here as being sales ready and I'm going to just make a note so you can see this is that um we're adding the nurturing step here because our goal is to get clarity at what point do we make the handoff process take place um I was pleased you know some of you are watching the the Olympics um right now I wasn't able to tune into the 4x1 100 relay but was really great is um I don't know if many of you remember the the previous Olympics in the 4x100 relay the men and women's team were both supposed to win the gold medal they were heavily favored and guess what happened they both teams did didn't even finish the metal round they didn't even qualify why they dropped the Baton um this year the the the women actually beat the world record and they won the gold medal and um what I want to say is is that you got to get clarity of when you hand things off because it doesn't matter if you have the best team in the world the best Marketing in the world if you drop the Baton um you're not going to win and so you need to be clear on when you're going to hand that off and this is going to help set the stage for the steps we're going to talk about today there's four key steps that I want to teach you so that you can um optimize your lead process and drive more effective lead uh engagement and we're going to go rapidly through a lot of content today again I can't see you if if I could I'd be looking at your eyes to say are you tracking is this making sense to you so how am I doing so far i' just like to see some of the comments uh from those of you attending any any questions so far okay um Kevin Kent brings up an observation I see marketing coach confusion about nurturing some place it in the pre-conversion stages other plac it in postcon conversion and post sale stages it seems like appleson gges to me that is uh that's a good observation and what I would say Kent is that nurturing is a process that can be applied in in both postale as well as pre-sale um conditions nurturing uh really can be called accountant development when someone's a customer it applies there there is confusion I think the biggest thing is is uh as Stephen cubby talks about is you need to be clear to what your objective is of why you're nurturing so begin with the end in mind and U Joselyn asked a question will the slide deck and audio be available yes um this is going to be we're going to make the slides available via PDF for everyone so you don't need to if you're scribbling lots of notes I want to you know you'll have the deck to go to as a reference but there's going to be some things I'm going to be bringing up in a moment that I'll tell you to write them down because they're not going to be in my slides and it sounds like we're we're doing um we're doing good uh I'm I'm glad you guys are giving feedback so here's the four key steps we're going to talk about the database how to design a Content Library how to measure and tweak and then cycle this process back so the first thing is is I I want to say the to optimize the process you need to have foundational database and to do that build your nurturing database I find that a lot of marketers don't have uh the CRM or the marketing animation tool to do it some of you may have lots of data sitting in various Excel spreadsheets you may have webinar attendees in one area you might have um trade shows in another you may have downloads coming to a form that sits in an email box what you need to do is you need to bring all these things into one place all your nurturing list sources from your sales team past event attendees newsletter subscribers so you can begin understanding who's there and um and bringing this all into one place those that do have a more advanced process you're you're well ahead already because you can begin looking at your data in a way and here's the things that you need to be looking for um the the thing that I found is is that with your lead nurturing process bringing all your data in one spot allows you to do an analysis to understand who's in your database what are the titles in there and and I'm going to encourage you to look at doing a regression analysis in simple terms it's looking at your data understand what's there who are the titles where are your inquiry sources coming from that gives you clues about how to keep that conversation going what what campaign or call to action do they respond to and um what you need to be doing with your database is that you need to apply on top of that to two things an ideal customer profile and Universal lead definition the difference between the two is this and we're not going to talk about ideal customer profile um I'll give you a web address you can go to and we actually have a how-to guide for that I want to spend time on looking at your your database and here's some things to know um marketing doesn't need sales to accept leads what what you do need to do is as you bring things to the databases you need to get Clarity and confirm with your sales team when a lead has met your Universal lead definition that's agreed upon and I'm going to spend some time um teaching you how to create a universal lead definition why is this important when I wrote my book in 2006 it was published and uh it's it's still selling across the world being translated in Russian I was informed is that uh one of the key ideas in our research showed is 90% of companies don't have a universal lead definition since my book's been published and there's been um a lot of other companies talking about this we've improved a lot right now I'm still seeing about 60% of marketers don't have a universal lead definition and what is it the the key thing here is you need to have Clarity on what makes a good lead um we won't have time to go through all these questions but the the idea here is this is you need to get your sales team and marketing team together to get clarity on what makes a good lead these are some of the questions you're going to want to ask and um I'm going to give you a web address you can go to the B2B lead round table you can have access to an agenda and I find in about an hour or two hours sales marketing sitting down you have the right people in with sales you have the right people in marketing you can do uh a webinar session you can have everyone in the room however you do it get everyone together to develop a service level agreement on what exactly the word lead means and the the the biggest question you're trying to answer is this and this isn't in the questions this is something you're going to write want to write down for us to be 100% certain when we develop a lead and hand it off to you as the salesperson what are the musthave questions that you need to have answered for us to know that you will act on this lead and provide feedback 100% of the time that is the question I could repeat it but I'll repeat it in an bridged way for us to be 100% certain when we give you the salesperson a lead that you will act upon it and provide feedback 100% of the time what are the musthave questions you need answered that is a very important question because what you're coming down to is this is your goal with lead generation ultimately is to help the sales team sell you want to hand leads on that are actionable and when you get clarity in this definition it tells you when you're going to hold leads back and nurture so your goal is to nurture leads till they reach that point um you need to get clarity of this question before you implement lead scoring lead scoring will not replace the human touch it's going to help you prioritize that but these are some of the questions you're going to want to get answered what information is required to qualify a lead being sales ready these are follow-up questions again we won't don't have time to go through them today you're going to get a copy of the deck so you'll have these um and what your goal is is this use the UL to delineate sales ready leads from nurture leads and uh what what I want to make sure is that you're clear is that you're only then supposed to um to do this is get clear on developing Universal lead definition of what a sales ready lead is so that you can send leads to your team that they can act on your nurturing leads that get to that point and what you can prevent happening is having your valuable leads these relationships you started getting lost ignored or discarded so this is really foundational because it's going to drive your database you're building two things a database to nurture and then you're building a a a framework of when are we going to hand things from marketing to sales um a gap that I find a lot of people face is designing um I want to nurture I just don't know what to say or I don't have the content to share it right now um you'll see phrases of content marketing or you'll hear inbound marketing both of them are really talking about we're using content as a valid business reason and the big struggle for salespeople is this they probably have leads in their database right now and sales training has taught salese to follow up the problem is is sales training hasn't taught people how to have relevant followup and this is a big struggle for salespeople is they don't want to just call to touch Bas or call to check in to the customer it's just basically saying are you ready to buy yet so what you want to do with your content is your goal is to understand what's relevant to your audience and and how you can connect the dots with that and what when you design your Content Library and you're doing lead nurturing here's two things just to keep um keep in mind again we're looking to do two things build the business case why do lead nurturing and how to um companies that nurture have a double ratio they have uh double the amount of wins and nurtured leads versus leads that aren't and the other thing that's really interesting is this was data that had been published by demion report is nurtured leads delivered a 47% higher average sale value a higher average order value um we just published our lead generation Benchmark report at marketing Sherpa and we found that companies that do lead generation and then they add lead nurturing to the process drive a 45% higher return on marketing investment than those companies that just focus on generating leads so when you get your Content Library uh put together uh I want to share with you some tactics of how to go about doing that the first thing you need to do is you need to understand the the personas involved in the process I encourage you to sit down with your sales team if you aren't clear on this um you need to look at who typically are the main drivers of our customers buying process these are some of the examples could be a project leader a CIO could be a contact center leader could be field service center staff there's executive sponsors you need to be clear and if if you um are unsure where to focus I would encourage you to focus who the key driver is in the buying process sometime that's that's going to be your Champion other times it's going to be uh the economic buyer it's going to be one or both and I want to have you start simple if you haven't done this start with one Persona and what a Persona is is it's helping you understand the profile who the people are that are typically interested and engaged and in initiating the buying process or doing the research so you want to understand and those key stakeholders this is a simple approach that um one company put together and uh this is uh a research partner we worked with we put together a very Simple Plan Three contacts deep uh where we saw the main drivers for them actually was the IT director but we needed to uh also add two other personas the CIO who is of the economic buyer the IT director was the champion and the IT manager was the influencer in the process where where would you begin well if the the main driver and champion in this case and their database showed that most of their titles that were engaged in their content was it directors that's where we focused our energy we added the other personas later and as you think about the process of your Content Library you need to understand who's in your database you need to understand what they're engaging because this is going to help you understand what contents likely be relevant and from that uh there's a lot of choices you have with your nurturing Content Library um as you think about your content there's four main channels you can share your content the phone doing events doing things online and via email these are some of the examples of content related to those channels that you could share um you could print the slide out and use it as a way to brainstorm as you look at your process I want to give you an example though because again I said the the answer or the question a lot of people people have is where do I find this content how do we go about that process well the first thing I would say is this number one repurpose too many companies feel that they need to create new stuff when you already have content that's inside your organization start by leveraging your internal experts how can you harness the knowledge that exists already in your company create a process to capture the expertise and share it and develop your own thought leaders the the other thing we found in in what many leading companies are doing is they're Gathering and filtering relevant content based on message mapping message mapping is understanding the personas and the theme what what is the the typical question someone's asking the buying process so that we can provide content that answers those questions and and then using that to filter the third party content I want to show you an example of repurposing and and this is just taking idea of how can I take what I have and extend it this is an example uh of a research chart This research chart that was done to um compile data and learn something could be repurposed a lot of different ways that research could be shared in a webinar that webinar could be turned into a a video clip that video clip could be turned into a tactical download or that research chart could become a blog post and then that blog post could be shared via an email with a link so this is taking one simple content piece and being able to expand it multiple different ways and as you look at your personas and how your audience is engaging your content we'll spend a little bit of time talking about messaging the idea here is that you take your quality content and if you don't know right now I encourage you to sit down with your team or yourself of doing an inventory of your content portfolio what do you have that is valuable um so any questions that you guys have let me know around this area we'll certainly come back to it in terms of your content the other thing is is thinking about the value your content Beyond acquisition as as I had been asked um earlier by by Kent around this idea of confusion you can look at your customer buying process and see who else can benefit from this so your sales team the same content you're doing for nurturing might be able to be repurposed to help your sales team nurture their database and Their audience towards accelerating the pipeline so this could be also used to nurture your existing customers um it could be aligned for upsell loyalty and retention um we it could also be applied in your group around recruiting or training or customer service training and education there's a lot of different ways we're right now focused primarily on lead generation but I just want you know the benefit of this process it goes well beyond just helping us optimize the the sales and marketing funnel so you we've talked about developing your foundational database devel designing your Content Library you now need to look at is what I'm doing working how do I measure and tweak the process so as you tie your content to a specific conversion your objective in sharing things from a nurturing point of view is looking at how do I measure what's working what isn't with a research chart let's say you do it via a webinar you're going to look at things like how many regist we get how many attendees how many replays a video clip you'll measure things in a social standpoint based on views likes dislikes and social shares with a blog post you're going to measure page views comments social shares or with an email uh you're going to measure opens ultimately the purpose of email is to get a click so you'll measure click throughs and some of you may also have social aspects so you measure it that way um with the Tactical tool download this is something where they'd be coming to a landing page or to a form so you'll look at the amount of downloads and how many leads you're capturing the the key thing in measuring conversion from a nurturing standpoint is that um going back to the foundational database you're going to have a lot of different metrics um this is where marketing automation can help bring these metrics into one spot and being able to measure the level of Engagement people have we we could spend an entire hour talking about lead scoring uh I'm not going to focus on that today but what I want to do is just say as you're measuring engagement your goal is to understand what's the conversion what's my objective in sharing this content um when you're doing a simple nurturing process like I shared the case study earlier they were sending emails the emails were measured based on what people did with as a result of that email and the call to action and then that they use that to trigger what additional nurture path they put them in so you just need to really be clear at how you're going to measure that and you're going to do it two ways quantitative so this is using your analytics to look at how you're driving engagement you're also going to do it via form so this is quantitative um you know did the form tie back to the database how is the prospects engaged and you're going to look for patterns this is going to help you um measure and make adjustments to know well this content's played well with our audience we have a higher level engagement here we've had more leads or inquiries come as a result of this then there's a qualitative side and um this is important as well because you're going to talk to your sales team their feedback to you is going to be qualitative as well um comments of what people are making on your database based on blog post articles what your sales team hears in terms of feedback from the prospect so th this is going to help you bring these two pieces together and ultimately what you need is to have tools that make it easy for you to understand the process this is where um lead nurturing automation tools marketing animation tools measuring um the results and there there's a lot of different things you can do and again um each of these areas I want to again equip you is I'm trying to put things in order in terms of understanding the foundational database being able to put the the pieces together to look at um your Content Library measuring and tweak and then ultimately what you want to do is feed this back in your database to improve it um and and drive the conversation forward so going back to the beginning cycle back improve your database this is a real world example of showing the web web inquiries social media all this coming into one place some of you don't have a system as I talked about I've seen marketers duly nurturing manually they're doing it by bringing everything into Excel or into an access database so that they're able to measure the touch points uh and it might look like this you know the path of they attended a workshop and they're going through a series of things from February um through it it started here as a contact page all the way to the step that they went through through the process and this helps you understand where John Smith is and how I can engage that um something you're able to do as well as part of feeding data back in your database uh is that think of the process is a series of micr conversions um this is a sample of a group where they have in their database they already know this information so when they send an email to someone to have a uh a form to download that information they're just asking for the data they don't know and so instead of presenting this form they're presenting a shorter simpler form to help fill out the profile so think of the micro conversions that can take place in the process and feed that back into the system and so um as I said I could spend an hour talking about lead scoring but the at its just your measuring to to really get to the core what you're looking to do is measure Things based on phone email interactions website visits collateral downloads event attendance um information requests it just know when people engage your content it doesn't mean they're ready to talk to a salesperson it doesn't mean that their sales ready yet what it means is that they were engaging that content and your your task is understand um two things what question were they trying to answer and how you can help progress that conversation forward and so when someone downloads a white paper you're not going to um call them and assume they're ready to be sales ready I've seen I I won't name the company but I I downloaded a white paper I got called by sales rep the sales rep wanted to qualify I was ready for the demo I was really just looking to research the issue and the white paper answered some of the questions so what I suggested to this person is saying instead of calling me in this level and this is what what we've tested is to be able to instead say hey I saw you downloaded our white paper and a lot of people who downloaded are trying to answer questions for themselves or someone else in their company what was the question you're trying to answer um so I I can provide information to you that would be relevant what how can I help and then moving to qualification the the other way is is let's say someone attended a webinar um giving and equipping your sales team to have a follow-up content piece that extends the value of that webinar so rather than following up to a webinar attendee and saying I saw you attended a webinar move immediately to qualification it can be that same thing I saw you registered for a webinar it looks uh like you had a chance to attend it I wanted to get your thoughts was it helpful to you to answer your questions and then for that sales rep give them a business reason to connect saying a lot of people who attended our webinar um were looking for some key takeaways and what we did is we put together an executive summary of the of the big takeaways for webinar I just wanted to pass it along to you and the goal again is to have every touch be adding value um something that's not in my notes but I just want to say how do you know when you're nurturing how do you know if you're doing a good job re-engaging your leads is um to do this is the content you're sharing with your potential customer valuable even if they never buy from you and if the answer is yes you're doing nurturing if not you really need to investigate and and make a decision are you sharing content at the at the right time with that person or are you trying to present information that's too far along and they aren't ready to engage that yet so we've talked about four key steps and the the key idea here is you need to pull together building your database and your Universal lead definition and then from there having a Content strategy to progress people and so we talked about developing a foundational database designing your Content Library measuring a tweak and then improving that and I wanted to leave you with some takeaways so here's your action items number one you need to determine your Universal lead definition let's say you have one if you haven't revised it with your team and Clos loop I can guarantee you that you're probably not giving your team exactly what they want and I would encourage you to go back and revisit your Universal lead definition to make adjustments it's an iterative process and it requires feedback for you to make those improvements number two before you begin nurturing uh build a three-month track for your top three personas what I'm saying here is I find too many marketers develop the first touch and then they're scrambling in month two to figure out what else they want to say so what I want you to do is think at least three steps ahead this is going to help you be proactive so you don't wonder what are we going to talk about next and this is going to help you be consistent in the process because what we talked about is lead nurturing is having an ongoing meaningful conversation with viable potential customers regardless their timing to buy this third step is you can take one content piece and look at how you can extend that into four so your takeaway here is I want you to look at your current content and ask yourself how can I extend the value of my most valuable content so you're not creating new stuff you're looking at how do you go further with what you already have and as part of this when you're sharing the information as you share it track the the objectives and set goals to increase them right now there's a lot of metrics there people ask me well how am I doing versus my competitors and the question really you should be asking yourself is how well is my content resonating with my audience to drive better engagement focus on that and make steps in to improve the level engagement with your content with your audience that really is your objective fifth you need to take this touch points we call them touch points some some call it digital body language others are going to call it um engagement or U meaningful moments whatever term you use we'll we'll call it touch points is you need to bring all this data into one spot so you can understand how your audience is engaging your content and profiling that and um the the last and not least is I wanted to share some resources with you we're going to move to Q&A and I wanted to um let you guys start thinking about questions that you have I certainly have some common questions that people are bringing up but I'd encourage you you can visit um the B2B lead blog and that blog we literally have hundreds of Articles it's all howto there's a search engine there so if you have questions on how to build Universal lead definition type that into the search engine um I also want to encourage you to look at the uh B2B lead Round Table we have over 11,000 professionals who uh who are connected together online via LinkedIn and this is a place for you to connect with your peers I started this group as an experiment just as a way to learn and have um marketers Network and understand and what I love about this group is I'm constantly learning from the comments of of the group our our role we mainly just moderate it if you're aren't a member I'd encourage you to to look at that and I know that ready talk has an ongoing series that they're presenting as as well so um thank you for for having me we're going to move and and use this time for Q&A I certainly see some that's come through and Simone I'm going to go ahead and hand back to you thanks for having me I hope you found this uh content useful and and helpful and I look forward to hearing about your success as a result of what you learned today sure so I will uh queue up a couple of the questions here one is um you know do you have any research on the impact of mixing business development calls with an email nurturing camp campaign and you know maybe give us a few pointers on have you seen that be successful not a good approach definitely in fact uh we actually published a case study on um marketing Sherpa of a company that simply combined email with uh with doing follow-up tele prospecting calls and drove a 300% increase in their number of sales ready lead conversions so um what the the answer to the question is yes if you have an insight sales team or you have a business development team doing two things combining the phone and email together and what this company did um is that they they had their inside sales team they would send an email based on what people did with that content uh if they engaged it they had a follow-up email piece for their business development rep to share with someone and uh what what happened as result and I'm just looking up the the company name as we speak is that they were able to drive um 300% more Roa from combining email and the phone together in this event um if if you guys uh want to jot this down go to marketing Sherpa it's case study 32177 and it has steps and how to and the and the creative that was used for this so the bottom line is is that it it does work to combine that and by doing so they saw 40% more appointments and um 82% % of the appointments were generated from a follow-up phone call instead of email uh so it was email that showed where the human touch should be prioritized great thank you so hopefully that kind of helped uh answer your question there Jennifer um another question too and hopefully I phrased this right and Jennifer correct me if I'm wrong but um how do you get the contact um excuse me how do you get the opt-in contact info for personas per company and I'm not sure if go ahead sorry yeah as I understand I would start this uh two things I would start looking at your customer database and uh and understanding who the contacts were in the buying process so look at the recent closes that have happened or the recent wins uh the the 10 most recent wins in your database and um you can find this in your CRM or contact manager and see who the titles are that are in the process uh the second thing and the is sitting down with your sales team to talk through who are the key drivers in the buying process for what we sell so you want to take the quantitative data looking at what what your data shows and bring the qualitative of talking with your sales team and and I'm a big believer that the more frequently sales and marketing are huddling up um the the better the ROI is going to be for your legion because you're going to just be a lot better aligned so I'm glad you were able to answer that better than I was probably able to State it so uh thanks Brian so um I'm going to give you guys a couple more minutes here to chat in any additional questions um that you might have again look at Brian's contact information there if you happen to have additional questions or you think of something after you jump off the call which always is usually what happens to me um he's given some great resources I'd be sure sure to check out um some of these links that he's uh provided here and we can also include that um in the post event email um in addition to that um we partner with uh with Mech labs and marketing Sherpa on this webinar series and like Brian said um we've got another one coming up in the fall and a previous one that we did just a couple months ago you can find all those recording on our uh ready talk.com uh website under the webinar section and uh just a special offer to today of of partnering with Mech Labs if you guys are curious about um you know ready talk services or or similar um webinars series that you know that we've done with Mech Labs um if you guys are interested in a free trial um or a demo and just chat yes into the chat feature we're happy to pass along um a copy of Brian's book lead generation for the complex sale um we'll be sure to have someone follow up with you right away um it looks like Kent had an additional question here and he says I sense that most cold call techniques go by the wayside um with some of these campaigns what's your Insight or feedback on that Brian well Kent that I I think that um there's definitely truth in that the coal call techniques would go by the wayside the traditional but what we found is is uh suring B2B buyers uh marketing Sera did a study of of just busines to business buyers and one of the questions we asked him is is are you receptive to receiving Co calls I think you'd be shocked by uh what the response was 92% of business to business buyers said yes they would be receptive to a coold call as long as it's relevant and what I've been teaching today really is when we look at content when we talk about building personas putting together message Maps is messaging in a relevant way and so what you need to understand when you're engaging someone is especially when you do a re lead re-engagement someone who hasn't heard from your company and let's say it's a lead that was generated in January hand it off to the sales team and for all intensive purposes it was ignored they haven't heard anything from your company you know you need to look at how do you re-engage them and the question is is what's a relevant way to do that that's where that research um and and understanding your audience is going to be really helpful so um traditional cold calling techniques are are uh going to go by the wayside which is making irrelevant calls and this is a question every B2B buyer asks is this person or company relevant to me or to someone else in my company and this is where researching understanding being clear on your value proposition understanding the the hot button issues and using content um as a valid business reason to connect with someone so your goal isn't to necessarily pitch them it really is instead of looking to close for a lead it's looking at how you can help and so um someone uh I I did a webinar with uh um John Miller uh a while ago and and he said the quote you know moving from always be closing to always being helping and I agree 100% with that so um traditional techniques are by the wayside but people are receptive to Coal calls as long as you're looking to be relevant and and help them great so uh Kent hopefully that's helpful as well and um we've definitely followed a lot of Brian's tactics and suggestions here with our own um sales and marketing Ops at ready talk and uh definitely found the the benefit in that cold call piece even though sometimes it doesn't seem like it might be all that relevant but um a good tip there for sure just from experience so um any closing comments from you Brian before we jump off of today's call I just want to say thanks to everyone again I wasn't there I hope you found value and in today's session and and we're here to help so if you have questions you can uh certainly email me yeah you can Twitter um if I can help you directly I'll connect with members your team and and I want to thank uh Simone and ready talk for uh bringing this content to you today you bet and we uh really appreciate you taking some time out of your day also to to join us again as a reminder everybody you are going to get that post event email with um the PDF of the slide deck and the recording link here just look for the later on this afternoon um obviously we'd also love your feedback um so as soon as I quit talking here I'll stop the meeting and a post event survey would pop up we'd love to hear what you have to say about the event and uh hopefully you do join us again for another event on our Series so thank you everybody thank you Brian and have a fantastic day