Empower your business with lead nurturing in United States

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good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and thank you for taking some time out of the afternoon to join us in uh today's webinar and the ready talk webinar series I have the Twitter hashtag up which is RT webinar and um all of the speaker handles as well if you are on Twitter feel free to carry on the conversation there today's seminar is entitled lead nurturing beyond the tool set and we are joined today by Kelly Hall from 90 octane who's going to share a little bit of uh it on the topic for us um she's worked at this Agency for seven years and has experienced in the Strategic development of um execution of online lead generation lead nurturing search engine marketing programs and she's worked with a number of Industries um with special focus on integrating new technologies so before we get started my name is Simone Ral I'll be the moderator in the call if you have any questions feel free to chat them into the chat feature that's located at the lower leftand portion of your screen whether they are for myself or for Kelly um we'll ch in if there's a break if there is one for Kelly and we'll also leave um 10 to 15 minutes at the end as well for some specific Q&A so uh be sure to send those over throughout the presentation also everybody is going to be in a listen only mode so if you guys um again do have a question feel free to to chat those in in the chat feature um as a reminder today's webinar is being recorded Thursday March 22nd um and you guys will all receive a link to the recording along with a PDF of the slide deck later on this afternoon in the post event email so keep an eye out for that and uh on that note I'm going to go ahead and hand it off to Kelly to start today's presentation all right thank you Simone and thanks everyone like Simone said for taking time out of your day for a little webinar on lead nurturing Beyond The Tool Set uh so today we really wanted to take some time to talk about the strategy behind lead nurturing and not focus on the tool actually um people often think you know lead nurturing is is a really big buzzword in the marketing Community right now now but often times It's associated with a marketing automation tool um but that's not really what lead nurturing is just because you have a marketing automation tool doesn't mean you're nurturing and you can also have a great strategy and a great tool but without the right execution you're also not lead nurturing um so today we're going to spend some time defining it and really expand that definition and give everyone a good understanding of it and uh some of the processes that we go through as an agency to help our clients uh undertake their lead nurturing programs prior to that though wanted to just talk about why lead nurturing so here are a couple quotes from some uh people in Industry so number one multiply your company's Revenue by five that's the sum of what lead nurturing could produce considering that longterm leads the ones often ignored by salespeople represent as much as 80% of your sales second the future of marketing lies in engaging your customers and potential customers to be truly interested in your messages and receive them as useful not simply as marketing so that's really about kind of why lead nurturing is important in the field uh speaks to more of the relationship behind it it's not um perceived as marketing as much anymore it's about that development of a relationship so to expand on that companies that are good at lead nurturing realize really great results so generate 50% more sales ready leads at a much lower cost cost per lead they reduce the percent of marketing generated leads that are ignored I'm sure some marketing people on the line have uh encountered that before uh you think you're doing a great job and sales is just not uh pursuing those leads because they don't find them valuable so they've there's stats that have seen that drop from 80% to as low as 25% and then also on the sales side of things there's good information out there that having lead nurturing in place having a good strategy to guide that actually helps sales rep reps make quota because what's being passed over is higher quality and it's closer to that close stage and it also helps in that ramp up time for new reps as well so lead nurturing defined this is what our definition of it is and um we're going to dive more deeply into each of kind of the bolded terms within here there's a lot in here obviously uh there's some certain elements that um indicate how lead nurturing is kind of different from just a pure play lead generation campaign where marketing is really pushing out so things like process and communication versus just marketing um and really tying back to purchase interest and you'll hear me talk about that a lot today and uh there were some questions that actually came through prior to the event um that kind of in my opinion relate to purchase interest so I'll try to touch on those throughout as well um but first wanted to get just a quick PLL from you guys on your likelihood to to employ some type of lead nurturing in 2012 so I'll leave that open for a couple minutes um aside from it being a buzzword right now or part of the reason it is a buzzword right now is the state of the economy it's a great way to capitalize on what you already have in your funnel um if you kind of think of a an upside down py pyramid a lot of us marketers were were great at feeding the top of the funnel uh but lead nurturing really helps us work in between and work with the middle of the funnel to get to those sales qualified leads and eventually sales revenue so it looks like there are a lot of people who already are which is phenomenal hopefully you can take away some some different strategic points from today's presentation to to use and uh if you're very likely um hopefully this will help guide your first nurturing program so let's talk about the first part of this discuss definition here process so let's start with example whoops I just flipped backwards example a so let's say I go out and do a Google paperclick Search and I'm searching for software solutions for my company I get to a landing page that has a great informational offer it's a white paper so I go through registration it kind of asked me for more information than I'd like to part with but I perceive it has value so I still go through all of the registration and then I get passed to sales and they follow up with me am I actually a sales qualified lead now if we kind of flip this to example B same story I go through and downloaded informational white paper but because the company that I'm working with has done their research on me and understands how I'm going to make my purchase process instead of putting me through a lot of registration instead of passing me directly to sales they understand that at this point I'm just trying to gather more information and instead of making me a sales qualified lead uh and probably putting me in touch with someone too soon and I'm not ready to close they put me into nurturing and what that is is a series of communications everything from you know email to to phone conversations that really helped to Bubble Me Up essentially so hopefully by the time I get to sales I actually am a sales qualified lead this is just a potential nurture flow I wanted to bring this up because um there are a lot of misconceptions around lead nurturing one of those is that it it's very complex and then you have to go super deep and this is actually a simple flow that we actually undertook for a client and it kind of highlights the Simplicity that you can start with that's not to say there's tons of value in in uh in going niches and adding components like lead scoring but you can start small and you can still realize good results as well so that's it really on the process part of the definition we'll go ahead and move on to communicating this is a very uh important component obviously so for communicating we're really talking about the wear the channel the tactics how you're communicating out with your target audience um email is most commonly associated with lead nurture partially because uh can very easily be measured but outside of that you also have social platforms you've got um phone just phone conversations as well as SMS campaigns um you've got webinars as a potential platform for communication um and social is obviously a big one as well but you'll kind of see on this slide in particular there are arrows kind of going out um what this means is you can push your message you can try to communicate out as much as want as much as you want traditionally that's how marketing is kind of worked we go out and we have a message and we just kind of push it out there and wait to see what happens but really what lead nurturing is about is going to be about the the dialogue the communication so you want to elicit that from your target audience and to get that you have to have the right timing you have to be saying the right thing which is via message and content or what we refer to at our agency as an informational offer and you have to juxtapose that to your target audience in their purchase process so internally we have a model that we use to to accomplish that and we'll get to that in a little bit but just something to kind of keep in mind so when we say communicating it's not it's not just the paper cook ad that you're running it's not just the um the the tweet that has a white paper out there it's about the dialogue and the engagement that you're creating so communicating is going to have two different facets it's going to it needs to be predictive and it needs to be meaningful predictive encompasses a lots of different things I use the word predictive instead of regular lots of definitions kind of use regular um but that kind of gives the idea of what we call a drip marketing program and that may be something like you you have a predetermined amount of emails that go out once a week and that's just how it is there's no room for um really working with the prospect in terms of how they're engaged with your brand so knowing knowing where or predicting where they fall in the sales cycle guides all of what Falls above time and sales cycle in a really profound way um something in the B Toc space the sales cycle is going to be much shorter so the time that you have to communicate with someone the time to purchase the window is much smaller so uh nurture campaigns around there if they're utilizing something like email it's not uncommon to see an email go out you know a thank you email post registration and then maybe another email 2 days after that whereas with a purchase cycle that's looking like maybe in the manufacturing space 18 months are longer uh and you know you're in the research phase of that you're not going to try to it's not going to behoove you to push someone to marriage essentially uh when they're still dating you so you may time the communications out um much much longer out even monthly in addition a predictive is Meaningful and this is really where the purchase process starts to come into play and this right here is uh an example purchase process that use internally we really follow just to make sure we have all of our ducks covered that's not the right word but uh ducks in a row I guess we we cover the most complex B2B sales cycle out there and there will be more to come on that as well but we really try to hit every portion in there so the meaningful portion of communication is you can you can communicate you can push but you have to create meaning and you do that via offers and the content that is within those offers so when I say offer here um particular particularly for the B Toc space that's often times um considered to be more of a promotion but when I say offer I'm really saying informational offer something that's going to address the needs of the Prospect and their questions where they are in the purchase phase and you'll notice we actually go post purchase in this in this cycle as well and that's a really important component of lead nurturing too it's not just about that initial sale the goal is absolutely the initial sale but lead nurturing has a place in your customer retention and growth strategies as well so listed here are some offers that we found particularly useful in our space um the lists can go on and these are semi- segmented out to where they fall within the purchase process so if you know you have a design engineer for instance who's just starting to spec something out it's uh really good to get in front of him with a brochure first and then follow up follow that up with a pertinent tips emails um um for those guys as well later down the sales cycle we will utilize something like a webinar like this where they can get really specific design information and get their questions answered one important note on this though is these offers depending on the content how you how you frame them they can fall in different phases of the purchase cycle still it's really about the content driving it um case studies you know if if there's a lot of information and it includes detailed numbers that are you have to register for that's going to be farther along in the purchase process than a simple you know short snippet of a customer success [Applause] story so just some questions asked to help you gauge whether your content is is going to be meaningful or not if you go back to that previous slide if you can address the specific pain plan Point your target audience is facing at each one of those phases then you know you're adding meaningful content um alongside that if what you're offering is actually to help the prospect instead of just help your marketing efforts then you know you're you're adding meaning to the engagement and then those next two bullets that really speaks to how content is digested some depending on the target audience some people you know they may go for entertainment value in content versus a very technical audience really wants um you know a 12-page white paper with multiple paragraphs and it's it's not something that um we would generally deem online friendly so to speak so it's really important to think through how your target audience likes to likes to receive their information I guess or digest it and internally we use a methodology we call fuel um that helps us take a look at the target audience and understand what their content needs are and and how they're inter interacting with content both online and sometimes offline um I mean if you look at someone like my dad when he's making a purchase decision he's he's got a couple Generations on me um so he's going to be much more likely to reach out in a more physical way or go to an event or something like that versus interact in an online manner that last one I also just put kind of as a warning cuz we've seen this happen in some client situations um it's great to say I've got this comparison guide but if you put someone through registration and it's actually more of a brochure it's it can be pretty detrimental to your nurture process and to just your brand because it's not meeting expectations for what the prospect is looking for so this communication portion is really about the the Prospect and how do you how do you hit their needs which leads us to purchase interest so this is that fullblown out model from start to finish and and we've got numerous different decision makers in here that all play different roles at different portions this model is um you know internally with your organizations you um I'm sure have have different variations of this and that's what we always Advocate using is whatever internally you have um but this is just an example and again you'll see post post that choice um we're still interacting on the implementation piece or the post purchase and this purchase interest is really going to be the backbone of nurturing CU if you can work through this model you'll have a good enough understanding of what your prospect needs and how you can fit it to guide all of your nurturing efforts um if you look at this if you have a question at each portion and an answer to go with it it will guide you through to post implementation and that's the first thing you're going to want to ask so really what questions are your prospects asking so we go through and it's really as simple as question what question do they have at this point in the purchase process uh are they actually looking for product information are they still identifying that they have a problem those are really important things to Think Through in terms of how you how you guide the content and this again you have to start from the prospect it's really easy to you know our company has a great message and we're going to evangelize that message but it's not going to make any sense unless the prospect is is already asking that question so if you can align the message that you have with what the prospect's asking then you're going to be in a much better situation that's really what we do on this slide so after we've gone through we'll sit we'll sit down and we'll go through the personas and say This Is How They how they interact online or how they interact um you know at trade shows or however we're however we need to reach them these are the questions and the communication needs that they have and this is then how we can answer them so we may have the best answers but then the next step is saying what content do we have to provide those answers what informational offers do we have to provide those answers and often times by the time we get to this point we notice that there are holes like we have case studies here in an Roi calculator but we don't have the middle of the purchase cycle covered and that's something we uh often see on a nurture program you've got tons of great content but it's all in data sheets or you've got tons of great webinars um but you don't have you don't have the data sheets um so it's really going through and doing more of a Content audit the last thing we lay on top of this is kind of the idea of a relationship and this is really what you need to demonstrate to your customer along the way so there's there's the the idea of providing them what they need to answer their questions but there's also this idea of relationship to demonstrate that you're going to be a good fit for them um almost relationally so that leads to relationships this is a model that we use internally so the true goal isn't to close a deal we've talked about this it's to Foster relationship that leads to ongoing sales and then often often the goal really transcends that to have a mutually beneficial partnership um where kind of what we call true passion so this is what we call a spectrum of trust this is how we work with clients to to get their prospects understanding that they're a good partner and it's also how we just work with our clients to develop Partnerships with them um but you always have to start at the bottom with this so lead nurturing is great to take you between step one 2 3 4 and and develop that relationship and then it's also great post that initial development to maintain the relationship too the final component of lead nurturing the definition is sales qualified leads this is what everyone is striving for this is the the bottom line for every marketer those sales qualified leads and the the revenue that's going to originate from those so when we talk about sales qualified leags there's a lot of different definitions I've been in client meetings where it's seriously anyone we can get on the phone I don't care if they want a birthday party were sales people and we will sell to them to someone who's selected ready to buy which is you know great I'd love if we could always deliver someone who's selected ready to buy um not always the case unfortunately um so this leads to a lot of misalignment issues between sales and marketing in fact marketing Sher just came out and said 60% of sales and marketing teams actually have an alignment issue um so I wanted to ask you guys if you have a currently agreed upon SQL definition between your sales and marketing teams or is this something you're currently kind of striving toward so I'll take a minute to go through that and Alignment is going to be key just to speak more on that alignment is going to be key because um you know lead nurturing really focuses on the marketing portion of it but we have to have that sales Buy in we have to honestly have the knowledge of the sales people and they're on the front lines we have to understand their interactions with the with the prospects to have the best program and then after the fact close the loop too it's all about proving that marketing investment and without their help it's it's really hard to do that so SQL definitions um not uncommon at all sales misalignment sales and marketing misalignment is is a big one and it's um also been top of mine for marketers this year so a couple things that we've we've had success with internally in helping develop that definition we've actually created sales and marketing ATT tack teams we call them smarketing teams and what those teams are they're set up at the beginning of a project so at a campaign level uh we'll go out and the first time we did this it was really finding someone who was who a sales guy who was interested in what marketing was doing and willing to invest the time and start the project with them to Define what the deliverables are um what the registration is and at what point that's going to be a sales qualified lead and over time when sales are in our experience when sales has been involved like that it tends to spread like wildfire because they see that they're being their input is being included in campaigns and oftentimes the campaigns are a lot more successful because we have the sales input as well so that's kind of our Crim to lacrim approach obviously that's not always going to be possible so a couple other things sitting in on sales pitches even if you have um you know inside sales teams often times have calls have the call recordings those have been really helpful to um listen to and then ask questions about and it's all about asking questions what's the ideal profile if you see someone come in um with this profile are they worth your time are they not worth your time why and then the next best step to that is really asking sales to identify top four characteristics of a sales ready lead and we limited at four um because there can be so many potential characteristics this is a really good starting place it's also it's a difficult one to get to because um every salesperson approaches their leads differently um but if you can go through these interviews and ask these questions ask what the characteristics are you'd be surprised how often you can get at least a theme to Benchmark off of and that's not to say it's it's going to be perfect the definition of a sales qualified lead is is generally a constant Evolution for an organization um both from an internal understanding perspective and from a market change perspective as well another thing that helps is just developing other definitions so what's not sales qualified essentially if you can back out what's not sales qualified a white paper isn't sales qualified you'll get to that sales qualified point a lot more quickly and then the biggest thing uh is utilizing a constant Fe back Loop so what that means is as sales is getting leads if you have a um sales automation platform that's awesome salesforce.com is is something that's good for that um but we've even worked with clients to utilize basic Excel workbooks to gather feedback on the leads as simple as red yellow green with notes on why it's red and um utilize that to work on the SQL definition and then back that into the nurture program to make adjustments ingly so those are really the facets of what we call lead nurturing so the process of communicating it's got to be predictive and meaningful it needs to it needs to happen regardless of purchase interest level all along the way needs to be relationship focused and if you can do all of that eventually the sales qualified leads will come so I wanted to just spend a couple minutes talking about how to get started it sounds like a lot of you are already started the biggest thing that we recommend to all companies undertaking lead gent or lead nurture starting to is starting small crawl before you run you can have a big impact without having a massive campaign that goes into multiple markets um multiple markets is a great goal to get to um but you're going to learn a lot from that first small campaign that you can then apply and be more effective moving on definitely make sales and marketing alignment a priority lead nurture is designed to get to the sales qualified lead if you don't have uh operating definition of that it's it's you're going to run into the same common marketing issue of passing over leads that they don't feel are identify your ideal customers go through and use personas do the research to find out where they're taking in content how they like to be communicated with if they're more entertainment value or if they're more technical focused um go through and identify what a lead is when it does become an SQL on the content level figure out how you're going to be relevant to your ideal customers so once you have them identified go through that purchase decision model identify what questions they're going to be asking during the purchase and figure out how you can you can help them how can you be of of interest to them that ties to identifying the questions to ask along the way this is more of a registration function so one of the great things about lead nurture is you don't have to ask for somebody's birthday and social security number on the first engagement you really wait until they're closer to the end of the cycle and that um you know if you can keep your registration forms to four to six Fields tops even you'll see a much better conversion rate than if you go out with a registration form with 12 plus Fields And even honestly the shorter the better we have clients that um um for instance if you have an e newsletter that's really designed to just promote engagement at the research level and stay in front of them something as simple as name and email nurturing is designed to pull them back in as you pull them back in you can get that additional information identify how deep you want your nurture program to go so do you want to if you are using a system do you want to use utilize lead scoring models um how do you want to utilize the um drip functionality and the logic trees that tie into that identify the sales process don't forget to say thank you this is a really what I mean by this is every time a communication goes out every time somebody has an engagement with your brand definitely send a thank you email with another call to action in it we see a lot of success off of that simple thing I downloaded a white paper I've gotten an email that says thank you you may also be interested in this that's a really great way for you to stay top of mind and also um get information on where they are in the purchase process and then optimize definitely don't expect to go out and do this 100% the first time it's about learning we're really big about it iterative strategy um here at 90 and what that means is you go out with the best strategy possible but you are constantly fine-tuning it that's a function of the industry that we're in and and how our customers buy so that brings us full circle to the key message which is that it's not tools first it's strategy marketing automation does not equal lead nurturing so now to be fair tools are sometimes necessary thing so some sometimes um or instances where a tool may be helpful is uh if you're running multiple campaigns in multiple markets um every Market that you pursue should have its own strategy behind it if you uh have a very distributed sales Force tools are great too um if you find yourself email uh let's see having more than four emails a week that's a lot of volume to handle so from an efficiency standpoint that may be a good time to start looking at a tool but even if you decide to go down the tool path you have to start with the strategy the tool is there to execute your strategy but you have to have the strategy first and then once you get into the tool really think about the business requirements that you're going to need to get the the strategy executed there are tons of bells and whistles in these tools which are absolutely amazing but make sure you have your bases covered first so lastly um I guess thank you for your thank you for your time and um here's some information to reach out and get additional information on lead nurturing that bottom one is a link to a synopsis of a chapter one of our partn wrote in a book on targeting offers to the purchase cycle that's a really big thing for lead nurturing is really that purchase cycle so again thank you for your time and if anyone has any questions I am all ears yeah so we had a couple questions uh come in and um again if you guys something kind of trigger something in your brain while you hear these other questions feel free to chat yours in into the the chat feature and we'll be sure to cue those up um for Kelly so one here in particular um you know so is kind of the whole question about lead scoring you didn't really mention anything about lead scoring does that fit into this process or what are your thoughts about that yeah definitely lead scoring is an important one and um that's one place where a tool definitely has its advantages there are in terms of lead scoring you can look at implicit factors which are what they're doing and how they're engaging with you or explicit factors so you have a Target company list you're looking into so a tool is really good for that but that's not to say again going back to that sell workbook um we've worked with clients to have leads scoring um ing to the offer that they've come in because we know that that's a hand raise for instance an online calculator that is a total cost of ownership that's a pretty good indicator that they're they're getting closer to making a decision um and we've documented that more on a manual basis too so that's definitely an important one to consider great thanks um another one I would say it was kind of important to this conversation um if you to switch back to the list here that you covered really quickly um you'd mentioned you know ask the right questions along the way what do you mean by that exactly what kind of can you give an example of some questions that might be important to ask in that process um questions so this this one is more specific to a registration form so that's the idea when you're just dating someone um you want you want to know what they look like you want to know that they have a nice smile and they're fun to hang out with um but as you get more serious there's a lot more questions that come into play and you may ask about marriage and kids and the your form so to speak gets longer so we undertake the same philosophy when we're working with prospects if they're just looking for something high level we may not even gate the content it may be a free resource and when they come back we may ask for a name and email and then when they come back again we may ask for their company and we start building this profile of the user both based on that explicit and implicit engagement okay um so I guess kind of along the lines of you know putting together a process and we've we've got started we've gone through this list when do we get to the point of okay now we're hitting them with too many lead nurturing options so going to the point of you know we're nurturing but we don't want to be pestering somebody can you kind of speak to that a little bit the yeah yeah definitely um I'm sure all of us have have had that happen where it seems like simple form and then you get sales calls for about a week straight um really that purchase decision model working through that is going to be the best indication understanding how long it takes for your for your ideal Prospect to go from start to end so you can time your Communications um some I mean general rules of thumb um always send it like I said always send a thank you email people don't perceive those as pestering it's just a nice Gest um but then from there um you really don't want to if it's a longer sales cycle we really Target once every two 3 weeks until they get closer to the end of the cycle and um speed up those those Communications um once they're about a month out to close is there um and it may be different again depending on where they are in the Sal cycle or what their position is if they're a you know they're the decision maker or they're just a an influenc any idea of how long maybe some of these nurturing tracks might be or uh you know again there's kind of that the frequency piece but how long or how short makes it maybe most effective or just does kind of depends on where they are in the process um it depends mostly on the product sales cycle for you so for instance for some of our large manufacturing clients it's an it's an 18mon purchase cycle from getting a design engineer to spec something in so our communication with them is going to be once a month really unless they show that they're engaging more and we'll then we increase the frequency to maybe once every 3 weeks or once every two weeks um but the best way to really understand if you're hitting them too hard it's it's it's a lot of trial and error it's very um there's not a single best practice I'd say it's very dependent on on your company but the easiest way to understand is if you start to see a good dip in your response rates that is a clear clear clear indication to back off gotcha yeah definitely um good words to to take to heart in any marketing department for sure um maybe one last question here if we have any additional ones coming in but um are there any specific tips that you can give to someone who might be serving multiple markets like a they're catering to both B Toc and a B2B Market any tips there that might be helpful or do you think it kind of these tax tactics apply across you know the board whether or not you have you're hitting one or two different types of audiences I guess I think the the high level strategy applies across the board but certain things to keep into consideration oftentimes what we see particularly on the B2B side are those markets aren't as mutually exclus exclusive as we'd sometimes think they are so we still we may have you should have a separate nurture strategy if you're pursuing a market um but we also include um simple things within those Communications to help them cross sell themselves essentially um oftentimes if they're in one market they're they're sometimes playing in a couple other too and then on the beta C side it's if you're working in both at the same time I guess the biggest thing is to make sure you you change that filter in your head of of how they're how they're buying and what's going to be important yeah messaging is always uh key when you're kind of deal dealing with those two different types of um markets well great do you have any um kind of wrap up uh points that you want to make before we close out today's call I don't think I do thank every thanks again everyone for your time cool well thank you again Kelly we appreciate it thank you guys all for being um attentive sticking around on the call for us if you have any questions again of Kelly after the webinar here is a lot of contact information be sure to um utilize what they give you here especially the um um the the link to kind of the case St what did you say it was at the very bottom there Kelly that link it's a synopsis of a chapter that one of our partners wrote oh book chapter yep really speaks purchas yeah so you guys definitely take advantage of that if you have any questions specific um to ready talk or what we do feel free to just chat yes into the chat feature um we'll be sure to have somebody follow up with you and then the last thing too um we would love it obviously both from ready talk side and from Kelly's side if you would just take a minute to fill out the post event survey um very brief we'd love to get your feedback um what did you learn what did you hope to take away what are some additional topics that we can provide you on the on the webinar series here that would be of benefit to your business process so I will go ahead and close out today's meeting that survey will pop up on your screen again thank you guys for taking some time out out of your afternoon to join us and we hope you uh can join us again in another webinar um on our series thank you everybody have a great day