Qualifying inbound leads for Life Sciences

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[Music] hello everybody great to be here I came over from Dublin today and the accent is from Belfast so I sometimes talk too fast so just like wave at me or something if I'm talking too fast and so it's great to be here I've never been to Cambridge before it's a really lovely time and I work for a hub spot which is an inbound marketing software company that is based out of Boston and I'm not really here to talk to you about hope spot the tool or anything I'm certainly happy to if anyone has any questions but generally a big part of our business is about evangelizing in by marketing and so I've been working with bio strata of the last couple of years and some companies that they work with and I really started to get a sense as to hi em brain is starting to impact lots of industries but also then specifically at the life science sector as well so I as mentioned I am channellock I'm unsure I just realized I don't have a bit I have a beard now if someone could maybe take a photo of me and then like send it to me you create like a recall a hashtag in beard or something and that'd be great I have to really update that and so I work mostly with agencies in the UK and I would say working with marking agencies to help them set up their own in vine but also then as they start to bring this out to their clients and helping them to understand the challenges and opportunities that inbound can bring so in terms of what I want to talk to you about I'm gonna look at firstly why in by marketing following on from what Paul has talked about and inbound marketing and HubSpot and and the methodology that we have behind at our company and expected results in ROI and one thing I'm gonna add is is about the big question that comes up a lot when to invest in an bind in hi T actually get started so if we look at why and bind I actually thought this would be quite an interesting thing I know that you're probably not gonna be able to read this it's a very blurry ladder from 1965 from Blue Ribbon sports and this is actually a sales letter from philip hitch night to dear coach and Blue Ribbon sports were a company ad that was set up and they sold sports equipment and this is a letter written to a coach promoting a line of sports trainers that they have and a couple of things that I think are really interesting about the old way that people used to market is that there's a public really kind of key takeaways here so we've got this introspective opening where the person writing the letter says will your cross-country team be wearing the best shoe possible so it's immediately trying to draw in the reader the next thing is they've got their social positioning and so they've the the writer has said Bill Bowerman at Oregon said if I try to take the marathon she away from Kenny more weird Bell I'd have a fight in my hand so again just trying to reinforce and people are creating a bit of fear of missing art and then a testimonial here she says as one runner said the only people who will be left wearing other shoes will either be uninformed or idiots and I think there's a really great sign of saying you are no longer uninformed and then it's just brilliant and so this is I think a really good example of how people used to do it but what it actually shows to me and what we're going to get into is a lot of the same psychological tricks and marketing still exist it's just a format that on how people get their message across is starting to change and there's a lot of opportunity there does anyone know what who Blue Ribbon sports became you're right yeah so they that was the company that preceded and and eventually became Mike so we've kind of touched on a few things but a big thing that we're gonna look at and that we look at in the company is over the past decades there's been a fundamental shift in the way companies reach their audience and Paul's talked about this in that the old marketing playbook is broken and so we see people now starting to skip and not engage with the old mediums that previously used to work so people skipping TV ads not opening direct meal and are on do not call lists as well so we start to see this real focus on traditional versus inbound marketing and the shift away more from traditional and and a big thing as Paul mentioned it's technology that is leading the way as the high that has created this shift as the high people search and buy for products so when in a nutshell its marketing with a magnet not a sledgehammer so with inbound marketing and hope spot so host what was a company that was set up ten years ago it was set up by two gentleman by the name of Brian Halligan and dharmaiah Brian Halligan was the real extroverted seals guy worked for a venture capital company in Boston and Darvish was an introverted logger tech guy who and they both met in University and and what they found was Dharma started this blog where he was writing about different things that were going on online and was getting this huge community built up around the content that he was writing we're in the flipside Brian Halligan had created this I was working for this venture capital company helping companies to implement traditional sales funnels and people cold calling and finding it really difficult to actually keep people engaged so this is where the whole notion of actually engaging people in building trust through online content came about and they developed this methodology which a lot of you might be familiar with it's very much represents a marketing funnel where people are looking to attract people into your website convert that traffic into leads close those leads into customers and then delight those customers long-term so that they become promoters we retain business we can upsell into our existing client base things like that and we break down each of the various elements looking that the attract fears this is all about turning strangers into visitors and a couple of key things that we can look at and I know Craig is going to talk about a number of elements in a breaking down each of these these various sections in his presentation but looking at the attract phase we're thinking about things like blogging writing content that is useful to the people we're trying to target optimizing it for search engines so if I'm a buyer what is it that I'm going to Google or Yahoo or Bing and putting into the search bar that you ultimately want your company to be ranking for and then social is becoming an increasingly more powerful way to actually amplify that content right the social media channels are always changing and Facebook I don't know if people from much like Facebook but there are 90 huge strides into the business the business marketplace and I think that's gonna have an even bigger play where it may be traditionally it was sort of seen as more business to consumer as well the next part then is about converting this traffic into leads so a lot of people will write up great content they'll drive traffic to their blog people will read the content and leave the website and never come back and what we want to do is try and capture a percentage conversion rate typically maybe somewhere in the region of two to five percent traffic to lead conversion area and where people are reading down through a blog article and that there's some sort of offer content offer and the people will want to engage with and give details so that we not capture their lead information so this can take many forms like a white paper or an e-book or an event or a webinar or a good at video many different ideas and I'm sure a lot you may already have be using these things in your own businesses and but also very important to think about the conversion path and how people are going to defined and convert on that particular offer so you find it through a call to action they click on that brings them to a landing page they fill in a form and now we've captured their lead information and from there we can start to build and nurture that relationship the next part then is once we've captured this lead is we want to continue to build trust with that person so what a lot of people will do is that they get a lead in and they pick up the phone to them and that might be fine depending on what they've engaged with but the vast majority of people who are coming to your website you're reading content offers aren't reading pieces of content and blogs they're very much at an early stage educational fears they're looking to understand more about maybe their problem before they start to identify potential solutions that your company might provide for them so this is where we can use things like email and create automated workflows to nurture the relationship by promoting different pieces of content so a good example might be you've downloaded this piece of content I hope you enjoyed it here's another piece of content along a similar topic line that that might be of interest to you let me know if you've got any questions it's a very kind of simple automated email content that could be a nice follow-up the big thing is with all of this is this is analytics and I'm a real firm believer of this as a marketing funnel and that the more that you can get in at the top if you can follow the rules you will you will see results out at the bottom as well so a really good thing is to be able to analyze all of this and as much as you can add to be able to desync this activities with your sales organization so that you can actually see of the leads that you have generated as marketers what is that actually resulted in in that you've new business and this whole world of in by marketing is now starting to change the way the sales teams actually operate and much more of this information is now going to be able to empower your sales teams to have much and have enriched conversations with the prospects so we think about this as giving them a 360 degree view of your leads where you can start to see who's visiting the site what pages they viewed which content offers they've converted on and older how they've other hard they've engaged with other channels such as social things like this and we have a really nice way of actually managing all this through a contact record so this might be a typical type of information that a sales rep would see and hope spot where we can see here if you can see down at the bottom the page is that this person has viewed on the website and then up at the top here we can manage it through the CRM to be able to put a call in to that person and email so I worked as a sales rep for HubSpot and this is a lot of the day-to-day activity I would have been doing where I can see this person has downloaded a piece of contents say prove the ROI on my social media so I pick up the phone to them and say how did you get on with that piece of content and it's social media something that you're investing heavily in how is it difficult for you to prove the ROI and immediately pay the fact that we've now got can see what content they've downloaded it gives me an instant pace to start building rapport on relationship with that particular prospect the next thing then is to think about all of this in terms of a funnel as I've mentioned but not just stopping it as a marketing and a sales funnel and thinking about the two separately but thinking about them all in one this is the sales funnel that I used to manage my day with and so if I knew I needed to get one sale I'm we were selling a SAS software product so it's very different I know tell out of the products you would be selling but it's still a really good exercise if you haven't done this to be able to think through these steps at to get some of the metrics around this so what the way I used to approach it is in order for me to get one sale I knew I needed to do two demos and you needed to have for goal-setting calls which is a kind of longer strategy planning meeting tan exploratory calls which would be an initial 30 minutes conversation and in order for me to get 30 exploratory I needed to speak to 30 people on the phone and in order for me to get to speak to 30 people on the phone I needed to have a hundred leagues so there's a certain proportion of the leads they're not going to come through the funnel and we're not going to be able to make contact with them but what I would be looking at typically a 1/2 tanh conversion ratio of opportunity to from lead to opportunity you might find you your conversion rates are completely different I have seen once as high as one and three you know one in five so again it's a really good exercise to be able to think through this and the step beyond this is to say okay well if we need a hundred leads how much traffic then at a particular percentage conversion rate do we need in order to be able to get a hundred leads and it is a a really useful thing then to be able to track it right through to we this was the marketing activity that went in at the top of the funnel and then we can actually track and see what came right at the bottom of the funnel so I am putting together this presentation I thought about a couple of key takeaways that I thought would be useful for everyone to they could go away from today and be able to start to think about and maybe look at their own marketing and sales funnel to be able to implement so these are the couple of the big tips three three tips on marketing three tips on sales that I would recommend to you the first thing is to link conversion offers to blog content you write again I've mentioned this is a lot of companies will write great content that is well researched maybe took a Content writer half a day or a day or maybe even longer to put together an article they're driving traffic to it people are reading it and then they're not converting on anything else there's nowhere else for them to go okay they might become a subscriber to their blog they might click on another blog but what we ultimately want is to get them to give us their details so that we can start to build that relationship with them it's not going to happen to for everyone but if we do it in the right way we will get a consent agenda on it the next thing to think about is how conversion offers for different stages of the funnel and every product and service is going to be different and so this is something that you can think about and you may already have offers in this in this respect but we might look at something like a white paper or a video for instance as being a very educational top of the funnel if someone comes to the website and downloads one of these pieces of content I'm thinking to myself this person is purely an education stage they're not probably ready to speak to your sales rep they're not ready to purchase from us if they're not starting to convert on something like a consultation request or maybe a trial or requesting a demo or some other type of more that requires a higher level of engagement this night immediately it starts to make me think okay this this person is now may be ready for actually a sales call and so having people I convert the different types of offers allows you to profile what type of leads you're actually getting which can we'll tailor your follow-up and then the third and final thing is email nurturing again a big thing I see with a lot of companies is that they might write the great content which is actually the hardest part of this writing great content is the most work by far of all of this they maybe convert leads and then they just let them sit in a database and they don't do anything with them so really important takeaway is to be able to nurture the relationships of these new prospects continue to promote different educational pieces of content to them and also another really good group to nurture is your existing customer base because they're gonna they want you want them to be your brand advocates to refer and share your content and also gives you an opportunity to if your business is based around retention so you want customers to come back and repeatedly purchase from you or indeed that you want tax to be able to sell additional products to that existing customer abyss email nurturing is a really good way of keeping these people engaged so that's on the marketing site on the seal site big thing that we're now starting to see is connecting sales and marketing activities together so by being able to put systems and processes in place which make the delivery and management of it easier so hopefully less and less companies are viewing their sales and marketing teams as being at odds with each other and I'm sure it still probably happens but and to be thinking about this in terms of it's one funnel and you know you're both if you're win and you lose together really and having systems that you can empower the sales reps so that they can actually see what content a prospect is engaging with hi there view I think different pages of the website all of this is going to have the extremely valuable in helping them to be able to close sales which if we can track it and we can be able to attribute that back to your marketing activities to look also then at analyzing your existing client base so asking the question how did they hear about you and invest in the things that are working and change the things that aren't so again I'm not saying in mind is going to be the Silver Bullet um it might be for your company it might not it might form a part of your overall marketing spend for the for the company and but thinking and looking at and comparing it to other marketing channels and seeing how it's actually working for you is really imperative a really good tip for people starting off I think a content strategy is to be able to if you're a marketer to ask the salespeople what are the typical common questions you get on a day to day basis from prospects because chances are if they're asking those questions to sales reps they're also searching for those answers online so that gives you them really good sense of keywords to actually go and start creating content around and then the final thing is send content to delight customers so again this the content you produce let's say you produce an e-book or a white paper while you're gonna have that on your website and you're gonna try and drive traffic to that to get them to convert that content is also an asset that you can start to promote to your sales teams to be able to actually share with the prospects they're speaking to and with the people who have gotten cold on them anything like this I've used it many - this tactic many times before where I've said oh bill I remember we were speaking at the other day and you mentioned that you were having a challenge with this well our marketing team actually just wrote a piece of content on that so I thought it would be really useful like as a prospect if they're getting something like that it shows them that the sales rep actually cares about this person that they're thinking about them and it's not just sort of blanket emails that are being they're being sent out they're actually trying to be really targeted and build more of that trust by leveraging the content okay so those are my sales tips so then the next thing that I always get asked is when and how to invest in in bind and one of the I suppose realities is that there's sometimes never a great time to invest in him bind and in that there's always gonna be things that are gonna be distracting and there's you know what sake it maybe means an additional resource and it is one of these things that is requires a long-term investment there's pieces of content that we wrote back in 2007 when hope spots started that we still drive traffic and leads to so all of these things you're developing assets that are going to continue to provide you with benefit and so a good thing to think about is okay well hi can we actually get started and approach this and the first thing that I would suggest is to define your business goals and break it down to revenue figures like I showed you with the funnel is actually say well where do we want where does the company want to grow to okay so how much of that is marketing going to be actually responsible marketing and sales going to be risk before can we attribute a figure to that and also very useful to see how are we actually trending towards that if you have a 2017 go high has the marketing and sales actually performed so far in the first five months of the year what could we actually do differently in order to be able to try and ramp it up and if we're behind and to hit those revenue figures by the end of the year the next thing is then to decide the optimum percentage of business coming from the website and I think a really good thing that if you're able to have the conversation and figure I've metrics right okay we know we want to we need to grow by another million in revenue this year and we want 30% of that so we want 300,000 coming from leads that have been generated by the website that is because our average sales price is 50,000 we know we need six new customers before the end of the year in order to be able to hit that specific target that's the kind of level of granularity that I would encourage you to get to because it really just puts a it makes all of these other marketing metrics are so much more real you want to be able to analyze your existing metrics so look at what is the current traffic level the amount of leads that you're generating if you do know how many customers you're getting from the website and this is really really useful information and it gives you a point to be able to see okay what could we do to be able to ramp this up a lot of companies might find that they're actually doing really well in one part of the funnel so that there may be driving loads of traffic but that they're not converting enough of that traffic so what we might say is okay well for the initial next three months we're gonna focus on trying to roll out a conversion campaign that's going to get more of that traffic converting on an IndyCar funnel really useful thing is to be able to compare to other companies we have a big kiss that he's database where you can actually look at companies with with similar within your industry see how they've grown over maybe a two or three year period and try and ascertain some similar metrics that might be relevant to you and then to break it down into various stage plans so develop a 90 day six months 12 months and long-term plan and remember again that in mind is the sort of thing that you want to be thinking about it's going to be providing you the work you do now is going to be providing you with benefits over the next five ten years and beyond because you're developing content assets and you're developing workflows that's gonna nurture your databases all of these things I think if taking that kind of first 90 day plan a really simple example might be that you want to roll light an initial content Campion so we're going to run a webinar series that's gonna be held on the 30th of June and we're gonna start from the 1st of June and try and drive activity to that and what we're gonna do from the 30th of June we're gonna have that webinar and try and drive new leads back into our funnel that our sales team can then work we're gonna get to the end of August and then we're gonna actually measure the success of that particular campaign so that that could be a really simple example of your first 90 days and I think a really good starting point for that first campaign is to start with the low-hanging fruit and what I mean by that is if you've got an existing database of people you've spoken to in the past people your sales team have engaged with whatever it is that's a that's a really good asset just target your first campaign with because the low-hanging fruit is the people who already have heard about you you're gonna send an email to them promote a piece of content like a webinar or an e-book that you've just created and that is going to get a certain percentage of those back into the funnel so I think that's a really really good place to start you can get a lot of the quick wins from that as well we produce a return on investment report every year through MIT and this is our metrics and that were taken from 2017 and we look at the increase expected leads across all of our environments which is a varying range of different industries and products and price points etc but these these kind of give you a flavor of some of the averages we actually view the amount of leads that you're starting with is a really positive asset that will actually help you to kick on and I'm actually generating more leads so you can see some of the connects pected increases in database within six months one year and within two years as well so this is this is online and again we can share these resources after if it's something you're interested in being able to figure iton and put together a model what it might look like for your company if you were to go down in this region and the next thing then is to analyze the specific elements of your marketing so looking at your traffic as we talked about so you can look up be looking at things like your keyword rankings the amount of page views you're getting blog visits and subscribers social media rates social media message analytics social media channels I think a really powerful metric to look at is the organic search results that you're getting and if you're getting somewhere in the region of forty percent plus in organic search that to my mind is saying that's there's a large proportion those people who are finding your website before ever hearing of your brand iam the direct traffic that's people who know company abc.com and they're sticking that straight into the search bar and it's people who if they're typing for keywords that are related to your brand that that's actually bringing you into they're bringing them into your blog first and foremost that's extremely powerful the next thing then is analyzing the leads so looking at your various different lead generation channels landing pages emails different pages you might have on your site and hi that's actually growing your contacts database and also we have this notion of MPLS and sqls which is a slightly more advanced thing in terms of just classing everything as being a lead so mt l stands for marketing qualified lead and sales and SQL sales qualified lead so a sales qualified lead for hobb spot would be someone who has contacted seals requested a demo and requested to speak with someone marketing qualified lead would be someone who has started a trial of our product has requested an environment assessment which is an offer we give in our website or has maybe say completed one of our free Academy courses so again we want to try and drive as many sql's as possible but we can actually start to score our leads at the various different life cycle stages and then the final thing is looking at our customers so Paul talked a little bit about this in terms of our sources return on investment so what we ultimately want to try and get to is to be able to say we invested this much of time and resource into growing our social media channel we can see how much traffic generated for us how many leads are converted and then how many customers we generated from those leads so that's gonna be really really useful in creating an ROI metric around your your your marketing looking at the number of customers and then the life cycle summary as well here's just some very high-level metrics in terms of again what we see the average customer experiencing in terms of investing and hope spot but also with an image strategy and very much host part as a piece of software but it's it's about as you get out of it as much as you put into it and use the analogy it's like a gym membership you know you need to be able to actually invest the time in it because while it's a great turtle it's not going to do the work for you so in terms of of inbound marketing with HubSpot and again I'm more than happy if people want to chat about this after and we are a company that helps compare companies to mileage this entire funnel through one platform so with this you can create an embarking funnel by using multiple different point solutions and the advantage with HubSpot is that a consolidated into one platform so we can manage all of the track fears driving traffic to the site writing blogs SEO etc managing the conversion strategy building at a close and nurturing sequence and then delighting those customers long-term so it's a it's a full management of your immense marketing and sales funnel I can a good takeaway that I would suggest if anyone wants to learn more about this is we have a number of free certifications on the website a really good thing to start with is an inbound certification which is free for everyone to do where it's delivered through our hope spot Academy which you can go onto our website and find and it's a it's a four and a half hour video course which will give you basics and all of the various different stages of the funnel so you can go through that you can take the tasks and get the certification you can stick it on your LinkedIn if you want and again it's just going to give you a really good basis but all this stuff I'm more than happy to speak to anyone after after the presentation or indeed if anyone wants to follow up after we certainly can you