You must engage with your contacts. Right now, almost every industry is affected by budget constraints. Organizations, small and large, are looking for ways to be more effective with their marketing campaigns. Sometimes, you don’t need to generate more visitors to your website or social media channels. The key is to improve conversion rates by reaching decision-makers and influencers at the right time, with the right content.
Update your CRM platform
It’s vital to get the basics right before you start making changes. When was the last time you reviewed your properties, tags, and email lists? Thought so 🙂 ! Creating behavior-based rules and call-to-actions will help your leads and prospects move through your funnel more effectively.
Target the right prospects
Who do you want to sell to? Identify your target audience by creating detailed buyer personas to better understand the attributes your ideal prospect has. Creating buyer personas is a team effort, including sales, marketing, and product teams. Everyone needs to sing from the same hymn sheet to set your organization up for success.
Client intelligence
What do you know about your prospects and clients? Creating client profiles gives you critical insights into whether they are a good fit for you. A good client profile includes the company’s size, locations, organizational chart, competitors, and the challenges they are currently facing. Client intelligence helps you create powerful and relevant content for all stages of the buyer journey.
Start small
In our previous posts, Think BIG and Is your website driving growth, I covered how important it is to plan before starting a new initiative. Don’t go ‘all-in’ from the start. Select a smaller audience based on geography, demographics, industry, or another criterion relevant to your organization. This will help you qualify leads better and better understand the prospects you are targeting. My experience tells me a combination of emails and outbound phone calls yields the best results. This phase allows you to identify hot leads and those in need of further nurturing to proceed through your funnel.
Choosing your channel
We can measure the effect of email campaigns, social media posts, and online advertising in granular details. But how do you know which touchpoint was the one that convinced your prospect to become a client? I usually call this ‘the sum of all parts, ‘ meaning the more times a prospect sees you, the more likely they will engage with you. Go back to your buyer personas and select the channels your prospects are most likely to engage with you on.
How do you qualify your leads?
So, you have a long list of leads, now what? The leads will have come to you via various sources such as using a free service you offer, content download, blog subscription, and event attendance. What do you know about them? Are they decision-makers or influencers? What is their timeframe for purchasing a service like yours? Now is the time to qualify your leads through campaigns helping you and your sales team focus on the marketing and sales qualified leads. Use a combination of phone calls and emails to achieve the best results during this exercise.
Engage with your clients
It sounds like a no-brainer, right? However, many marketing and sales professionals are not paying enough attention to the personal meeting. A useful and relevant email workflow will help your lead understand more about your organization, and the benefits your product or service will give them. A great webinar will educate them further on your services. But nothing beats the personal meeting, especially in the B2B tech industry. People still buy from people, so spend time with your prospects, whether it’s on phone calls, online meetings, or face-to-face.
