Talented sales people have known for years that the best way to keep the pipeline full is to identify prospects, develop relationships with them and then close the sale when the time is right.  But, if it were that easy, very few sales people would ever find themselves “excused” from work due to lagging numbers.

Most sales people are very skilled at the last part – closing the sale – but lack the time or resources to spend cycles identifying the leads and developing the relationship.  This scenario is where lead nurturing can fill the gap.

We think of lead nurturing as the process of developing a relationship with potential leads and engaging them in quality conversations to assess their level of interest and sales-readiness.   Marketing automation software can play a valuable role in lead nurturing strategies by automating these relationship-building communications and sending recipients down different decision-trees, based on their interactions.

Sounds like a great plan, right?  Marketing qualifies the prospects using a systematic lead nurturing approach, and once the leads are deemed qualified, sales scoops in to close the business.  However, much like the thought “if sales was easy, no one would get canned,” if lead nurturing were that simple, every company would be doing it.

With that in mind, we’ve taken a moment to run through 4 objections to lead nurturing from various internal departments and how to successfully overcome them…

• “I don’t like turning my leads over to someone else because who knows what promises you’ll make or what you’ll do with them.” – Johnny Sales Wizard
  Overcome this sales’ fear by working together to road map the communication cycle and listening to what sales has to say about how they sell successfully.  See if you can emulate some of their one-on-one dialog on a lead nurturing scale of one-to-many.

• “I don’t have time to develop a bunch of articles, emails, case studies, etc. and implement it…my day is already jam-packed.” – Sue Marketing Guru
  Help marketing come aboard the lead nurturing train by identifying existing content that can be repurposed for the nurture campaigns.  And don’t be afraid to start small with a 4 or 6-week cycle of communications that can be expanded as nurturing efforts take shape.

• “You people are always spending the company’s money on some new tool or system that no one uses after 3 months.” – Richard Bean Counter
  As much as it pains us, the CFO has a legitimate point.  Shiny new toys don’t do anyone much good if they aren’t used.  Have your game plan and content mapped out with both sales and marketing’s buy-in beforehand. If you’ll be using a marketing automation tool to streamline the processes, check into CRM integration or an API so you can manage your contact’s activities from one centralized place.

• “Does lead nurturing really help or is this another complicated excuse for why sales and marketing can’t work together?” – Mitch E. CEO
  The key to overcoming the dreaded “does it work” question is to first establish metrics that denote success.  While the end-game goal will always be more opportunities and closed deals, that probably won’t happen overnight.  Maybe the first metrics are improved email interaction and content downloads. Set realistic expectations and metrics from Day One.

With these tips in mind, you should be able to get buy-in and ideas for shaping your lead management and nurturing efforts.  Happy nurturing.

It’s hard to believe how fast marketing automation is evolving – and the wealth of information available about the space.  If you have a Google Alert set for “marketing automation,” you know what we mean.

With that in mind, we’d like to give a quick shout-out to a few folks that help the rest of us think about demand generation, lead nurturing and marketing automation in new, creative or fun ways.  Each person’s name is a link to his/her Twitter account for easy follow-ability.

Disclaimer: while many marketing automation vendors are posting great information and articles about these topics, we wanted to keep the list vendor-neutral and focus on individual contributors (who are listed in no particular order).

1.    Carlos Hidalgo – with over 1,700 Tweets, you just know that at least once a day, Carlos is going to share something insightful about marketing automation, especially from his clients’ perspective.
2.    Matt Heinz – his blog “Matt on Marketing” is fresh, funny and contains tons of free tips and advice about more than just marketing automation – from lead nurturing emails to print collateral tips, his posts are worth a read.
3.    Laura Ramos – her knowledge and insights about using marketing solutions and technology to cut through the noise in complex B2B sales cycles are delivered in a clean, no-nonsense style.
4.    Jep Castelein – with the promise of helping clients uncover untapped revenue in their database, Jep launched LeadSloth as a resource center with useful marketing automation tips from an unbiased viewpoint.
5.    Andrew Hunt – his Blog “From Clicked to Closed” gives readers practical inbound marketing advice in an anecdotal style that is refreshing, informative and fun to read.
6.    David Raab – an experienced analyst with a keen eye on using the latest technologies to enhance marketing, his blog “Customer Experience Matrix” provides its readers with useful information, especially during the all-important vendor selection process.
7.    Ardath Albee – her book “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale” is chock full of actionable information and Ardath is a talented and savvy contributor about hot topics such as marketing automation, social media, lead nurturing and more.
8.    Craig Rosenberg – so the name the Funnelholic makes us crack a smile every time, but Craig backs up his “addiction” with great tips and strategies about B2B marketing, lead generation and lead nurturing.
9.    Mac McIntosh – with 20 years of advertising, marketing and sales experience, he helps readers and clients understand the “big picture” of lead management from pre-pipeline to a closed sale.

We picked these 9 experts because they provide great information, but we know this list is far from complete.   If you’d like to suggest your favorite demand gen or marketing automation expert, please comment below or send us a tweet @NetResults and we’ll include them in a future post.  Happy automating!

While it’s a no-brainer that your hottest leads are the highest priority and warrant attention, what about the rest of your contacts whose interaction with your email campaigns is just so-so? With email interaction becoming an increasingly important consideration in keeping your status as a white-listed email marketer, should you continue to send emails, even though their lack of engagement can chip away at your reputation as an above board email marketer?

This question is a tricky one, because removing them from your list could eliminate these leads from becoming a potential customer, but keeping them on your list could damage your email marketing integrity. While you rarely want to completely remove a contact from your database (unless of course, they’ve opted out), you can use your marketing automation software to create segments of “cooler” contacts that you communicate with on a less frequent basis.

Right now, stop what you’re doing and take a moment to define what constitutes a more (or less) qualified prospect in your organization. This discussion can be quite ‘animated’ to say the least because sales may be rejecting leads from marketing as unqualified, while marketing thinks sales should be…well…selling. Once you’ve navigated this slippery slope, bridged this communication gap and defined the characteristics of qualified leads (ta da!), it makes sense to segment these leads from the cooler ones. With differing levels of interest, these segments within your database should receive customized streams of communications. Leads that are cooler could receive more educationally focused information such as newsletters and product updates, while more qualified prospects could go into a nurturing campaign to receive more frequent communications that are relevant to their areas of interest.

By thinking of more than just your hottest prospects, you’ll be able to further segment your database into lists associated with different levels of interest and readiness. Once these lists are in place, you can send communications at a pace that feels more comfortable and tailored to each segment of leads. Your lead database will remain in good shape, you’ll keep your integrity intact as an email marketer – and the most interested prospects will rise to the top – making your lead nurturing efforts shine.

Although Marketing Automation is certainly not “New” it’s also not a concept that is deeply engraved into the mind of every marketer.  Net-Results provides one of the most effective and user friendly marketing automation platforms out there, but we too must send our own sales soldiers out to encourage consumers to shed the shackles of basic marketing and learn to love the web 2.0.  In our efforts to spread the good word, we come across every size, shape and color of marketer, and gather quite a few interesting questions on the way. One of the most recent, which seems to be quite common, is the unsettling rebuttal to our pitch: “But I already DO marketing!” Read more

• Cleaner look – more options! The NEW Visitor drop-down. Upon logging into your Net-Results account, you may have noticed something different in the Visitors tab. You may notice some things missing, but not to worry…just scroll over to the right to the tools drop down icon, and click the down arrow. Voila! The Google, LinkedIn, and Jigsaw integration icons are now all in a convenient drop-down menu.

• Email the Details Quickly & Easily. Pass those leads onto sales faster than ever! If you’ve looked at your  Visitors page and noticed a particular visitor has come back numerous times or spent countless hours on your site, you can get that information into the right hands—right away. You now have the power to “Email Details of a Visit,” right from your Visitors page so that your clients’ sales team can catch prospects at the height of interest.

• Flag as an ISP. This is a new easy way to keep your Visitors view more pristine and efficient. With more and more regional and local ISPs entering the marketplace every day, we don’t always catch the new ones. Now, you can tell us if you think there is an ISP that we don’t have listed that you’d like to have moved out of your results—making it easier to identify the best and brightest prospect.

• Checkbox and Radio Button Capture. When mapping your web forms, Net-Results can not only capture drop down boxes and free response fields, but it can now capture check boxes and radio buttons for more efficient and effective web form capture.

With all of the opportunities for lead generation out there, one of the easiest and most effective ways to capture your potential customer’s contact information is through your web forms. These forms are valuable tools that let you collect crucial data so that, once qualified, you can funnel those prospects into the sales pipeline. Not only do these forms provide invaluable information to you and your sales team, they are also key players in achieving sales success with the Net-Results Marketing Automation platform. Once a visitor has done you the favor of filling in their coveted contact information, Net-Results can then identify that customer down to their company name, first name, last name, phone number and email address each and every time they come back. Not only when they come back, but how long they are on your site, what products and services they are interested in, and what their navigation through your site is.

So, all you need to do is just build a few simple HTML “Contact Us” forms on your website and the leads will just start flowing in, right? Wrong. As technology continues to advance, so do threats of SPAM, ID theft, and email address selling, making visitors to your website more hesitant than ever to just hand over their contact information. Because of this SPAM fear that has been deeply instilled in your prospects, you must use your forms to barter with your prospects for their information, provide something they can’t get elsewhere, and something that is more than worth their email address. You want your prospects to come in, check out what you have to offer, be amazed and intrigued by those offerings, and gladly give up a few pieces of personal data in exchange for the obvious benefits your site and company provides.

There are a few simple ways to ensure your visitors will WANT to fill out your forms and WANT you to contact them-

Create A Need

Give your customers a taste of your offerings, without exposing everything. Giving them a bit of very useful information, and asking them to register for the rest, shows them that you do have credibility, but you want to establish a personal relationship with them before discussing the rest. This sample creates a need for the end of the story. Providing a few paragraphs of a white paper or informational document can be intriguing enough for a visitor to submit their email address to finish the piece.

Trade Up

Everyone likes free stuff, and if you say you don’t, you’re lying.  Creating an offer with a promotional price, coupon or free item in exchange for personal data provides the customer something that they didn’t really have to work that hard to get. Your visitors will be a bit more willing to exchange their email address when there’s a free donut at stake.

Make A Deadline

We’ve all given up our email address in exchange for an offer that ends today, tomorrow or in 3 weeks. We absolutely know the offer will still be available next month, but we do it anyways. Giving your customer a deadline to get information, get a promotional price, or get insight into future exclusive events, adds a sense of urgency and exclusivity.

Members Only

Making visitors part of a “cool kids only club” to get insider information on product releases, events or updates, provides another sort of barter for information. You’ve let them into an exclusive club where they will get the best deals, have access to the best information, and get invited to the best parties. (Well maybe not the last one, but you get it)

Breaking your website visitors of their commitment phobia (or at least web form phobia) will not only help you to better utilize the power of the Net-Results platform to increase your revenue and marketing ROI, but also give your potential customers a better idea of your credibility and insight into the important products and services you can provide to them.

Article marketing, blogging, pay-per-click advertising, banner ads, search engine marketing and optimization, social media, web design and development- These ideas and strategies that were meaningless 10 years ago were the hot topics at the Direct Marketing Association conference in San Diego this year. Net-Results showcased their state of the art intelligent email marketing and lead management automation tools in the exhibit hall amongst the industry’s latest in technology, services, and strategy providers including conglomerates like Google, Experian, and Kodak. Read more

I met with a client this morning who currently uses Net-Results to track website visitors and identify companies coming to her site. When she sees one who could be a good prospect, she picks up the phone and attempts to call the person who came to her site. She doesn’t always get to the right person, but she does typically make contact with someone in the organization and has a good initial prospecting call. When I asked her how she normally follows up with those prospects, she said she generally handwrites notes and mails them. I thought that was a great idea – very few people do that because email is just easier – so it really makes her standout. But, I felt that the combination of handwritten notes and automated lead nurturing could further enhance her follow-up strategy and give her greater insight into the actual interest level of her prospects. Read more