Creating an engaging email nurture sequence can contribute to converting leads into paying customers, especially when scaling up.

As with many other business marketing processes, your sales and marketing effort needs to take your potential customer on a journey that builds trust and brand loyalty. Lead nurturing is a technique that drives that objective. It is a vital component in any successful email campaign strategy. From the initial lead magnet to the final sale, continuous message reinforcement ensures your prospects keep a positive momentum down your sales funnel.

What Is an Email Nurture Sequence?

An email nurture sequence is a queued set of engaging emails that are sent to a prospect or lead from a marketing automation platform or auto-responder over a scheduled period of time after they take some form of action that triggers the start of the sequence. The purpose can vary and can include educating, inspiring, qualifying, building credibility and eliciting trust.

Triggers can include any form of action that can be registered and can include subscribing to a blog, activating a free trial, downloading a content offer, completing a form, interacting via web chat and many others. Email nurture sequences tend to be conversational in tone and are scheduled according to a rhythm deemed best for a particular target audience. The marketing automation enables qualifying and personalized nurturing at scale.

Email nurture sequences are also known as an email nurture series, a drip campaign, a sales cadence and sometimes more broadly as an email nurture campaign.

What Are The Different Types Of Email Sequences?

There are several types of email sequences, and each one nurtures leads by delivering content relevant to a particular use case or lead at lifecycle stage they are, such as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) or Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Depending on the prospective customer requirements, their mindset, and where the lead came from, each campaign must tailor its approach to achieve the objective of nurturing a lead into a sale.

1) Lead nurturing email sequence

The purpose of this email sequence is to establish a lasting relationship between your brand and your target audience. Its goal is to build trust with appropriate content along the user journey. Ideally, your automated messaging campaign will enrich the customer’s experience through each sales funnel stage. A successful lead nurturing email sequence provides tailored content that drives a sale by reinforcing a personalised, relevant experience enhancing the trust in your brand.

Common email sequence triggers

The following examples illustrate the typical kickoff points for a successful lead nurturing email sequence.

  • Gated content downloads with a lead magnet such as a free ebook or trial software
  • Webinars and events
  • Newsletter subscription

2) Customer welcome and onboarding email sequence

A welcome email sequence is a series of emails you automatically send to someone after they subscribe to your email list. Its purpose is to introduce your product or service, get the new subscriber excited about your offering, and ultimately make a sale. Historically, welcome emails have higher open rates than any other email marketing campaign. Considering this fact, they provide you with the best opportunity to make an impression while your prospect is still a hot lead.

Common email sequence triggers

Common email sequence triggers for customer welcome and onboarding include:

  • Signing up for a regular Newsletter
  • Registering for a new service
  • New follow on your Social Media accounts

3) Review, testimonial or referral request email sequence

Having a trusted online presence is vital in an economy where almost every commercial transaction starts with an online search. Leveraging your existing customers to provide your business with glowing reviews and referrals helps strengthen the trustworthiness of your brand. Since reading your reviews is the first thing most people do after finding your site, you need to proactively harness the potential of this digital word of mouth channel. A review, testimonial, or referral request email sequence is a tool that can automate this crucial process for you.

Common email sequence triggers

Below are a few common email sequence triggers for this type of lead nurturing:

  • After a customer has had a positive interaction with your support service
  • When subscribers renew their paid subscription
  • At a set interval, e.g. after the client has actively used your product or service for six months

4) Upsell email sequence

A well-known fact in sales and marketing is that selling to an existing customer has a greater chance of success than closing a deal with a new prospect. Upselling allows you to leverage the current relationship and trust you enjoy with an existing client by selling them a more expensive product or service. Introducing an automated upsell email sequence is particularly beneficial if you offer higher-priced subscriptions or provide a wide range of products and services.

Common email sequence triggers

For this type of nurturing campaign, you could use the following sequence triggers

  • Sufficient time has elapsed to derive value from a recent purchase
  • The customer attempted to complete an activity that a license tier didn’t include
  • Product protection by offering a complementary service

5) Free trial expiry email sequence

The core purpose of a free trial expiry email sequence is to convert trial users into paying customers. Ideally, this campaign should reinforce the value derived from using your trial software. However, convincing a trial prospect to take up a paid subscription often takes more than one email. The free trial expiry email sequence is an automated campaign that nurtures leads, converting them into confirmed customers.

Common email sequence triggers

You should trigger your automated email campaign when the user’s trial is set to expire. However, you need to ensure you provide sufficient time to allow the user to subscribe before the trial ends.

6) Re-engagement email sequence

The purpose of a re-engagement email sequence is to win back lost subscribers. The focus of this marketing campaign should not only be on people that have unsubscribed. Those who remain subscribed, but have stopped interacting with your brand, also require re-engagement. Focussing on inactive subscribers that have engaged with you is a proven lead nurturing method as these organisations or individuals were past customers. Since they already know your brand and have used your products and services, the resources needed to educate them are far less than those required to nurture new prospects.

Common email sequence triggers

Triggers that typically kick off this email series include:

  • Lead with no interaction
  • Last three newsletters not opened
  • User in the process of unsubscribing

The Importance Of Marketing Automation Platforms

Nurturing leads with an email campaign requires automation. Manually sending emails to different target groups at specific time intervals is not feasible. In fact, it would be impossible if you have a list with thousands of subscribers, each at distinct points in their buying journey.

Many automated solutions help you create, implement, and monitor marketing email campaigns. However, sending and managing email is only a tiny part of the entire marketing process. The real benefit comes from aligning your campaign strategy with your audience segments and segmenting between MQLs and SQLs. Some may have different pain points, while others are at various points in the buying cycle. Managing the entire lifecycle requires a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution.

There are a variety of email marketing platforms as well as CRMs with email nurture sequence capabilities that enable you to deploy an automated solution. These include:

  • Hubspot
  • Salesforce and Pardot
  • ActiveCampaign
  • Marketo
  • Act-On
  • SugarCRM
  • Drip
  • Prospect.io
  • Mailshake
  • Leadboxer
  • Salesloft
  • Nutshell
  • Sharpspring
  • Keap
  • Autopilot
  • And many, many others.

How To Write The Perfect Email Nurture Sequence That Converts In 14 Easy Steps

A list of contacts and an automated lead nurturing solution are only two parts when you investigate how to create email nurture sequence. The third component needed to drive your strategy is content. The words, images, and even videos you share represent the voice of your organisation as you engage with your prospects.

However, simply writing a boilerplate template for every campaign is not feasible. Poorly written or unconvincing content can harm your brand, especially if you do not personalise it or ensure it forms part of your broader marketing identity. Similarly, you need to tailor your content to speak to the various personas interacting with your brand.

1) Define the objective

Creating the perfect sequence starts with defining your objective. Although converting prospects to customers is the apparent goal, you also need to set targets to ascertain the success of your email campaigns. Defining success metrics helps you measure the effectiveness of your email nurturing sequence against these objectives. It can also serve as a benchmark that you can use to continuously refine your target audience, send intervals, and email content.

2) Understand the audience

Understanding the audience of your nurturing campaign is a core component in determining its ultimate success. As with anything else in marketing, delivering the right content, at the perfect time, to the correct target is the primary goal.

The key here is relevance. With everyone’s inboxes inundated with daily emails, you need to ensure your campaign captures the reader’s attention. By personalising the email, drawing the reader’s attention with a meaningful subject line, and delivering it at the right time, your sequence stands a greater chance of success. Understanding how to build a buyer persona can help here.

Furthermore, segmenting your target audience is vital. Since prospects have different requirements and are at various places in their user journey, aligning your strategy with these factors can also drive a higher conversion rate.

3) Plan and map the sequence journey

Once you have defined your objective and segmented your audience, you need to plan and map your sequence journey. During this phase, you need to determine if your email sequences follow a logical workflow to help you achieve your stated goals and objectives.

For instance, does each step move your potential subscribers through their buyer’s journey? Will the content and timing ultimately achieve more sales? The outcome should be a plan that details at which stage you will send each email. Ideally, each email should have some form of a call to action. Using this mechanism helps you track the progress of your prospect down the sales funnel.

You should also set metrics such as open rate and click-through, which you can measure with your integrated CRM email automation solution. Finally, you should determine the type of email sequence you need to create for each objective. For instance, a time-based series may be more effective in some scenarios than one that operates on triggers alone.

4) Ensure value, rather than sales pitches

As mentioned earlier, in addition to segmenting your audience and building automation into your solution, your email content must be relevant and convincing. Firstly, you may want to address any frequently asked questions to minimise friction and expected replies that you would need to manage. It would help if you also addressed any known objections.

For instance, if the price is a buyer roadblock, this is the perfect time to show the value of your solution and build trust. By preempting general questions and objections, you not only reduce friction but also enhance trust. Finally, the content needs to be engaging. If possible, try and tell a story with a common thread through each email you send. As humans, we are wired to listen to stories that grab our attention, maintain it, and lead us to a conclusion. The conclusion, in this instance, is the action to make a purchase or subscribe.

5) Understand how to measure success

You cannot manage what you cannot measure and with a lead nurture sequence, measuring success at each stage is crucial. The ultimate goal of any email marketing campaign may be to convert leads into customers. However, this measure alone is not enough.

Ideally, it would help to calculate and analyse key metrics at each sequence stage. Understanding where leads fall off in the email series is vital if you are not achieving your conversion rate. For instance, your initial email may be a choke point that talks to a content issue or missing call to action. Alternatively, if they engage throughout the sequence but fail to take the final step and purchase, the problem may be price or an onerous buying process. The point being, you cannot unpack underlying issues with your lead nurturing sequence unless you obtain meaningful metrics during each phase.

6) Decide sequence triggers

The next step in the process is to determine your sequence triggers. For example, you could wait for the user to perform a specific action in email 1 before sending email 2 and email 3. Alternatively, you could send your emails in a time-based sequence. A hybrid strategy may be needed in particular use cases where you send email 2 or email 3 if the prospect hasn’t triggered the next action.

The trigger sequence you choose depends on the email campaign type. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. You will need to align your series with your particular circumstances and refine your strategy as you implement subsequent campaigns.

7) Write the first email

The subject line of your first email is probably the most essential piece of content you will write for your email nurture sequence. It must be compelling and intriguing to ensure the subscribers open the email. As mentioned, people like to read stories, so write your email using a story-telling format where possible. This opportunity is also the best moment in the campaign to ask the reader to link to your social media accounts.

Another great technique to grab a reader’s attention is breaking a long piece of copy with a relevant quote or use case. Something that is not too long but compelling enough to get the reader engaged with the rest of the text. Where possible, keep the email as short as possible. Your copy needs to get the readers interested, drive home your product and service benefits, and conclude with a call to action.

8) Write an email for each stage of the sequence journey

Once you have completed the draft copy of your opening email, you need to write the content that you will put in the subsequent lead nurturing emails. Again, keep the copy as short as possible in this follow up email list and hook the reader with a quote, statistic, anecdote, or case study.

Using images is another tool you could use to grab attention. However, you need to optimise these for email delivery. Email clients, like Microsoft Outlook, may not download the image as a security precaution, so make sure your copy can stand alone.

The core purpose of any follow up email is to build your story and guide the user along the buyer journey. You, therefore, need to write with your final goal in mind. For example, address your prospect’s pain points and illustrate how your product or service addresses these.

9) Edit / review

With your draft copy complete, it is time for editing and reviewing. Run it through a spell and grammar check to make sure you eliminate any glaring errors and align to writing best practices. It also helps to get someone else to read it and provide feedback. When writing copy, you often overlook mistakes as you are so entrenched in your words. During this phase, you can also benefit from reviewing your sentence and paragraph structure and other elements such as font and colour.

10) Implement in marketing automation platform

Once you have completed reviewing and editing your automated series of emails, your solution is ready to implement. Upload it to your chosen marketing automation platform and review and edit your copy again. As some platforms apply formatting to the text, your email may need some readjustment. Many platforms also offer a test feature that allows you to send the email and check that everything looks and works as expected. You could have these delivered to your mailbox for a final internal review before user testing.

11) Test

Selecting a small percentage of your customers during this phase and initiating the marketing campaign to test your solution is the prudent next step and in line with deployment best practices. Taking this cautious approach will help you identify any significant problems that internal testing did not uncover. Since you are only deploying your lead nurturing solution to a limited set of prospects, you reduce your risk significantly. In addition to the risk mitigation advantage of following this route, you can also use any feedback or gathered metrics to refine your email marketing campaign.

12) Deploy to live

Once you have tested your solution on a subset of your prospects, you are ready to deploy the solution to live. Needless to say that you need to refine your solution with any insights you gained from the test phase. Depending on the type of campaign, the go-live may differ slightly. For example, if you implement a lead nurturing campaign, you can set the launch date to align with other components in your marketing strategy. However, if you are kicking off a trial expiry campaign, the trigger event needs to align with the trial expiry date of each potential subscriber.

13) Track metrics to measure success

As mentioned, you need to track metrics to measure the success of your lead nurturing emails. The test phase is ideal for setting a baseline to ascertain the expected outcome you anticipate. For instance, if you get a conversion rate of 15% during test but have a stated objective of 30%, you can track the effectiveness of the refinements your made post-test. Additionally, keeping track of email open and click-through rates can help you determine if your lead nurture sequence requires some adjustment. For example, if you see good metrics for email 1 and a significant drop off after that, the issue could lie in your first email’s call to action. Alternatively, your content may be lacking the substance that sets the audience up for the following email.

14) Review and edit content based on data

Once you have completed your first production run, you can take the metrics and lessons learned and refine your campaign further. The key to success is constant readjustment and alignment until your lead nurture sequence achieves the goals and objectives you set. Ultimately, your campaign must deliver the business result of transforming leads into customers.

Want To Nurture and Convert Your Leads At Scale With Email Nurture Sequences?

Contact us to identify how email nurture sequences can transform your lead nurturing and conversions.

For a comprehensive overview of how email marketing functions as part of your content marketing, visit Digital Marketing for Technology Companies: An Introduction.

Leads are the lifeblood of any business growth strategy. B2B lead generation strategies are developed and tactics deployed to generate demand and acquire new leads to convert to customers.

But, where do leads come from?

Business leaders look to marketing and sales teams to generate, qualify and nurture leads without necessarily considering how or where to find leads. But these leads don’t just come from anywhere random. The reality is that there are specific lead sources, sometimes called acquisition channels, where leads can come from.

The best lead sources are obviously those that provide targeted opportunities that match a buyer persona to engage with qualified leads and customers to convert more sales for your company. Identifying which lead sources perform best for your company can be challenging though and requires the right marketing tools, data analysis and insight.

It’s important to know which lead source channels perform best for your business so that you can focus your lead generation efforts and budget towards finding and nurturing quality leads with a higher propensity to convert customers for a product or service in a shorter period of time.

Here are 10 most common lead source channels for your business.

Your Database

Your existing database may represent a significant lead source for you initially, particularly if you haven’t engaged with your database in some time.

Even if you don’t have a large database of leads, or aren’t actively capturing them at the moment, your company likely still has hundreds of contacts spread across applications or locations, e.g. in email accounts or business cards collected. These people or prospects are still potential customers, so engage with them to identify any potential opportunities.

Tracking and nurturing leads is where a CRM plays a crucial role. With the right CRM software, you’ll be able to manage every lead from initial contact to close. When a database has become a large unsegmented list of contact details over time, investing effort in segmenting and lead tracking will deliver significant returns.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads in your database or CRM include:

  • Database development
  • Email marketing
  • Social media advertising (Paid social)
  • Lead scoring

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • CRM

Your Website

Your website represents the most significant marketing asset of your business. It’s where the value proposition and differentiation of your business is articulated.

Your website also represents the key hub of your marketing and demand generation. It is where you funnel most of your prospects and opt of funnel leads to. Many of your other lead source channels will point to your website to give you the opportunity to capture interest or intent from your prospects and leads.

Organic search, or people finding your website by searching topics or researching answers to their questions online, represents a significant source of attracting prospects and leads to your website.

When your website is integrated with your CRM or marketing automation platform, you’ll be able to capture prospect details and track how they interact with your content. With lead scoring in place, you’ll be able to identify Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) for your sales team to engage with.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads from your website include:

  • Content campaigns
  • Search engine optimisation (SEO)
  • Landing pages
  • Content offers and lead magnets
  • Forms, pop ups and calls to action (CTA)
  • Video marketing
  • Case studies
  • Marketing automation software

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Content Management System (CMS)
  • SEO tools (Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, SurferSEO)
  • Performance tracking for any third party tools (video hosting, pop up forms)

Social Media

Social media can represent a great source for generating new leads by providing an opportunity to engage with net new prospects and transition them with content to your website.

While it would be your website and other channels that then converts and qualifies the lead, from an attribution perspective the original source would have been social media.

It’s important to recognise that generating organic leads from social media requires an ongoing investment and has a medium to longer term time to impact. This is because it takes a longer time to reach and build up social audiences.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads from social media include:

  • Social media marketing

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • Social media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)
  • Social media marketing tools (e.g. Hubspot, SproutSocial, Buffer)
  • Google Analytics

Digital Advertising

If reaching net new leads organically takes time, digital advertising represents a lead source that enables you to attract attention and put content in front of prospective leads at scale.

Digital advertising is used here as a catch all to encompass pay-per-click ads on search engines, paid ads or lead gen forms on social media platforms, and placing display ads or sponsoring content with media or trade publishers.

A major benefit of digital advertising is you get all the metrics you need to monitor, optimise campaigns and measure ROI.

It’s important to remember that digital advertising requires an appropriate investment over dedicated periods of time. Short bursts of activity with limited investments may not deliver the results a business is looking for when first starting out. If there is already a history of digital advertising, shorter-term or targeted campaigns can make a more rapid impact.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads with digital advertising include:

  • Digital ads
  • Social media ads (Paid Social)
  • Search engine marketing (SEM, Paid Search)
  • Sponsored content
  • Sponsored EDMs

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • Digital advertising platforms (e.g. programmatic platforms, display ads, Quora for Business, Reddit Ads)
  • Social media advertising platforms (e.g. LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Facebook Business Manager)
  • Search engine advertising platforms (e.g. Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising)
  • Google Analytics

Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising such as outdoor or print advertising can represent a lead source for a B2B business, though is more difficult to track and quantify results.

One tactic that technically falls into traditional advertising or traditional marketing that is important to consider is telemarketing and appointment setting. Phone-based outreach represents a significant opportunity to reach leads fast through cold calling, lead nurture and setting appointments for the sales team to qualify and convert.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads with traditional advertising include:

  • Outdoor advertising
  • Print advertising (magazines, newspapers)
  • Direct mail
  • Telemarketing and appointment setting

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • Cloud-based VOIP to measure call outreach (e.g. CallHippo, RingCentral, Aircall and many others)

Referrals

Word-of-mouth referrals from existing or previous customers, as well as from strategic partners, is one of the most ideal lead source channels for your business. This is because the lead has already identified a need or pain point, has discussed this with a contact, and that contact was provided a warm referral or introduction to you business. Organic referrals are the direct result of customer service and product excellence.

Creating scenarios to ask for elicit referrals contributes to this lead source channel.

Partnering with businesses that deliver tangential services or products to the same buyer persona or operate in the same channel ecosystem and don’t directly compete with your business may be a good source of referrals. Developing a referral partner program to formalise and structure these referral relationships adds trust, ensures mutual value and may increase the lead referral volumes as a result.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads with referrals include:

  • Word-of-mouth
  • Referral partner program

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • CRM

Events and Sponsorships

Events such as webinars, presentations and ‘lunch ‘n learns’ represent a great source of leads when executed as part of campaigns. They enable you to immediately register some form of interest or intent and provide your sales team with qualified leads to engage and nurture.

If you’re participating in events such as conferences or trade exhibitions where prospects or decision makers in your target market are likely to be, then sponsoring these events can be a great source of new leads. It’s important to remember that there are many other brands sponsoring these as well, so achieving cut-through and gaining attention will require clever planning.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads with events and sponsorships include:

  • Webinar
  • Event or conference sponsorship packages
  • Strategic sponsorships (sports teams, venues, associations, NFPs

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • CRM

Networking

Meeting people is a great way for your business to generate leads. Networking events are perfect for making new contacts, so you can follow up with them later on when they’re in need of your services.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads by networking include:

  • Networking events
  • Social media networking
  • Volunteering (NFP boards, committees)

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • CRM

Prospecting

Prospecting is the process of finding good-fit prospects or target accounts that match a specific set of qualification criteria.

Prospecting involves searching and sourcing these good-fit prospects either manually or by other digital means to target with marketing activities. This is often the first step in an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) program.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads by prospecting include:

  • Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
  • Database development
  • Sales prospecting tools and software (LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoominfo, Prospect.io and many others)

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • CRM

Your Sales Team

Each sales team member you hire will bring their ‘black book’ of contacts with them. These contacts could be some of your best leads. As sales leaders will know, this source of leads is limited and the sales person will need to have impactful prospecting and other forms of sales development activities in their repertoire to hit their sales targets.

Common lead generation tactics for this lead source

Marketing tactics to uncover, qualify and nurture leads from your sales team include:

  • Telesales

Common tools to use for measuring this lead source

Marketing and sales tools to measure lead performance include:

  • CRM

Want To Identify Which Lead Sources Are Performing Best For Your Marketing and Sales?

Every company always wants more leads, but you have to consider what kind of leads you’re getting and from which lead sources.

Contact us to identify which lead sources are performing best for your business and how to focus your marketing efforts.

Sales Qualified Leads take on unique meanings for different organisations.

Lead definitions and qualification criteria need to be agreed on by Marketing and Sales to clearly define the right leads. This is a crucial part of the lead management process to ensure leads progress through different buyer’s journey lead stages toward sales conversions. 

When it comes to sales, one of the relevant lead stages is Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).

What is a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?

Sales Qualified Leads are leads who have been qualified to a point where the Sales team can work with these leads directly by nurturing them into Opportunities, and then converting those Opportunities into sales. 

An SQL has already expressed interest or intent as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), and also meets additional lead qualification criteria relevant to Sales. 

Sales Qualified Leads represent an important stage of a lead lifecycle. The SQL stage generally comes after the MQL and before the Opportunity stage.

What Is The Purpose Of an SQL?

The purpose of SQLs is to enable focus for your Sales team. 

Effective qualification based on criteria relevant to your business means that a Sales team can focus their attention on the right leads to determine the likelihood of converting to an Opportunity or likelihood to buy.

Correctly qualified SQLs should shorten the sales cycle in time. Tracking MQL > SQL > Opportunity conversions will deliver insight into target prospects, buyer personas, lead qualification criteria effectiveness. Understanding the quality of conversations Sales are having with SQLs delivers insights to Marketing to continuously improve prospecting and MQL qualification.

What an SQL Is Not

There are common misconceptions about SQLs. 

1. SQLs aren’t automatically sales

SQLs represent a lead stage in a funnel and do not guarantee sales outcomes automatically. It is the responsibility of the Sales team to identify Opportunities and nurture those Opportunities into Sales. Determining lead velocity between the stages can provide a clarity.

2. SQLs aren’t automatically Opportunities

An SQL is still considered a lead or prospect. While they are strong candidates for sales opportunities, it is the responsibility of the Sales team to uncover those opportunities. 

3. SQLs are not SQLs forever

Lead cannot stay in SQL stage indefinitely. Having displayed some form of interest or intent at MQL stage, and having met additional criteria to enter SQL stage, it is important to have a system in place for these leads to be interacted with by Sales in a timely manner. 

How To Qualify MQLs To Identify SQLs

The strongest indicator of an SQL is still their willingness or likelihood to buy. There has to be an identified set of qualities to know their purchase intent.

In qualifying leads, here are some attributes to help determine where the qualified leads are:

  • They have identified their needs. They perceive the business as a solution to their problem.
  • They are the decision-makers, that is, the ones in authority buy or commit. 
  • There is a clear sense of urgency to make a decision. 
  • They have established trust with the business.
  • They are invested in listening to an actual pitch from sales managers.

How To Track Sales Qualified Leads Using a CRM and Lead Scoring

Identifying lead activities is one thing, but tracking leads shouldn’t just end in MQLs. The most important strategic goal of a business in tracking SQLs is to amplify its marketing automation strategy, which increases lead nurturing and ultimately sales revenue. 

A CRM will unlock the ability to determine key metrics, such as lead conversion rates and lead velocity.

Mapping out a lead scoring strategy and assigning points depending on the leads’ stage can further narrow down the sales qualified leads and determine their readiness to buy. 

Using your marketing automation platform and CRM, prospects increase in lead score progressively as they take action on your website, interact with content and interact with your people. Setting lead scoring thresholds means that once a lead passes a score, they advance in lead lifecycle, for example transition from SQL to Opportunity.

How To Define an SQL In Your Business 

SQLs, like any other lead, need a clear definition for the business that is agreed on by both Sales and Marketing teams.

Here are some ways to get started:  

  1. Set up a point system and criteria within your marketing automation platform. Assign specific points on the platform so that the contacts get automatically scored based on the criteria set through the level of interaction. 
  2. Set up an automation rule to push SQLs into automated lead nurture to scale up Sales team interactions. The automation rule can help avoid oversight of contacts to move toward the sales pipeline and reduces friction. 
  3. Consider the BANT (budget, authority, need, and time) technique to qualify sales leads. Ask questions using this framework to gauge their level of commitment to purchase. 
  4. Be open to changes — revisit the SQL definition regularly.

Don’t forget that it is crucial to complete multiple follow-ups with SQLs, with each interaction representing an opportunity for more information to be gathered or more qualification to occur. When nurturing leads, reaching out to them will help further segment the level of purchase intent of the SQLs. This discovery call aims to understand their interest about the products and provide a window to ask all the questions to know if they are sales lead material. 

Remember that SQLs are halfway through the sales funnel. They need to pass through the sales opportunity before they can be converted to an actual customer. 

How Many MQLs Do I Need To Find To Uncover an SQL?

There isn’t an exact figure to determine the number of MQLs you need to find an SQL. Every business is unique and setting your targets is pertinent to reaching a definite number of SQLs. 

With the right strategies and tools in place that are relevant to your sales cycle, investing in identifying and tracking SQLs to achieve highly qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, and more closed deals is well worth the investment.

Want To Discuss How SQLs Can Help Your Sales?

Contact us to discuss how we can help you take a strategic approach.

Attracting, qualifying and converting leads is essential to driving business growth, but understanding the difference between MQLs vs SQLs is commonly not well defined.  Each lead will have their buyer’s journey or buying process. Aligning your sales funnel and lead lifecycle stages with the buyer’s journey enables you to streamline your lead nurturing process and drives conversions.

Common lead lifecycle stages consist of:

  1. Lead
  2. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
  3. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
  4. Opportunity
  5. Customer

Prospects should undergo a rigorous qualification process to produce high-quality leads. This process usually starts with marketing team and transitions over to sales. Not defining this process can lead to confusion and frustration, and inhibits clear metrics.

This article focuses on MQLs and SQLs, clarifies their differences and includes several reasons why marketing and sales departments should be in agreement and working together.

MQLs vs SQLs: The Importance Of Defining Leads

Before discussing MQL vs. SQL, it’s paramount to understand the importance of defining leads and why sales and marketing should be on the same page.

Studies show that 73% of leads are not sales-ready. Establishing the definition between MQL vs. SQL will create a solid foundation for the handoff process of leads. In fact, 1 in 4 companies that aligned marketing and sales achieved faster growth rates.

It’s important to keep sight of the end goal for both marketing and sales is to increase revenue. There is obviously a broader mix of responsibilities, but put simply, the fundamental purpose of marketing and sales is to grow the business.

When marketing understands how SQLs deliver results for sales, and when sales understands how MQLs function for marketing, agreement on lead definitions is achievable.

Why Are MQLs and SQLs Different?

MQLs and SQLs tend to be considered part of a Consideration Stage in a buyer’s journey, but they are entirely different lead stages.

MQLs are those people who have shown interest in a business and are more likely to be converted to customers. MQLs are based on lead intelligence, backed by closed-loop reports and analytics. They are not yet in the buying stage, but their level of engagement with the brand, such as website visits, email sign-ups, or content offer downloads, are strong indicators that they have the potential to be.

SQLs on the other hand, are those leads who have either shown clear intent to buy or are seen to be have the right potential and the right fit for the target market profile of the business. SQLs are nurtured by the sales team to identify Opportunities and then convert those into Customers.

To summarise, the difference between MQL and SQL is in the lead stage; MQLs are hand-raisers, while SQLs are ready for or are already in the buying cycle.

How Does an MQL Become an SQL?

MQLs need to convert SQLs in order for sales to pursue, nurture and convert.

When MQLs and SQLs are both clearly defined, an MQL becomes an SQL when the lead meets the criteria set out in the definition.

This transition can either occur automatically where a CRM with lead scoring and marketing automation is in place, or the transition is done manually by marketing to transfer the SQL to sales.

How Many MQLs Are Needed To Find One SQL?

Every business is different and you will need to identify or reverse-engineer how many MQLs on average are needed in your sales funnel in order to produce an SQL.

A key metric that adds value is lead conversion rate.

The MQL to SQL conversion rate is about identifying the percentage of MQLs that transition to SQLs.

This metric is used to determine the marketing activities, investment, analytics and tools that the marketing team uses to find net new leads and qualify them. Achieving accurate numbers also help maintain the efficiency of the sales pipeline for the sales team.

A basic formula to get the conversation rate of MQL and SQL is:

MQL to SQL conversion rate = MQLs/SQLs x 100

Through historical data, getting the conversion rate can determine realistic targets to set for both lead types. It could also help give an accurate representation of the entirety of leads in the pipeline.

By following lead nurture best practices, you can produce 50% more sales-ready leads at a third of the usual cost.

It only makes sense that both teams should employ respective nurturing strategies because whether that’s an MQL or SQL, it’s still a lead. It has a long way to go before it becomes an actual buyer.

The Importance Of Tracking MQLs and SQLs With a CRM

Using marketing automation tools such as HubSpot CRM will ease the burden of tracking your MQLs. In fact, 80% of marketers believe that marketing automation will help them get more leads (and conversions).

With automation tools, there is less manual preparation for sales calls and personalised emails and give more opportunities to scale up practical strategies.

Tracking your MQLs and SQLs should come after setting qualification criteria. This way, you will be able to maximise channels that drive revenue more than just leads.

A CRM will unlock the ability to determine key metrics, including:

  • Close rate- comparison of closed deals vs. total number of leads
  • Upsell rate- for example, for every 1 out of every five customers to upgrade their purchase, the upsell rate is 20%.
  • Length of each sales pipeline stage – helps gauge the average lead time in each stage
  • Customer acquisition cost (CAC) – the total sales and marketing spend required to seal the deal
  • Revenue generated by the campaign – the bottom line of the sales funnel

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Finding or being found by potential prospects who can be qualified as leads that your team can nurture is an important aspect of efficient marketing and sales strategies. Analysing your strategies in place is crucial to prevent high ad spending with low conversions. 

When you understand your buyer’s journey, you will be able to determine what your next course of action should be. It starts with vast marketing efforts that can be funneled in with a set of criteria. 

Creating a systematised marketing lead qualification process will help you properly pin down your audience and help you figure out if pursuing a lead can result in a sale. 

These leads are called Marketing Qualified Leads.

What is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)? 

Marketing Qualified Leads or MQLs are those leads who have taken some form of action or combination of actions with marketing activities that indicates interest or intent. 

Their activities and level of engagement, like website visits, email sign-ups, or content offer downloads, show that they have the potential to become prospective sales opportunities according to marketing

Marketing Qualified Leads represent an important stage of a lead lifecycle. The MQL stage generally comes after the unqualified subscriber and general lead stages, and comes before Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and Opportunities stages.

What Is the Purpose of Marketing Qualified Leads?

MQLs are great investments for a business to achieve potential growth. Because MQLs have made initial contact and taken the first steps to learn more about what you’re offering, they are promising leads and more likely to become a paying customer than a cold lead. 

MQLs are acquired through the right nurturing and retargeting strategies, and doing so can help them transition from MQL to SQL.

What an MQL Is Not

Keep in mind that MQLs work best to a certain extent but: 

1. MQLs aren’t automatically sales 

Although MQL shows a clear interest in your efforts, there are considerations before they move down the sales funnel and be a full-fledged customer. It takes time to nurture MQLs, and knowing that they are not in the buying stage yet can help you approach these leads accordingly. 

2. MQLs aren’t Target Accounts

A marketing qualified lead is better than a regular lead because that there is more engagement for your business based on their behaviour. For example, a regular lead would probably scroll past a social media post online, but MQLs are invested in knowing more about a product’s feature which is shown on their site activities and engagements. 

3. MQLs are no better than SQLs (and vice versa)

All leads play a role in growing a business. Regardless of the type, the goal for sales and marketing should be to acquire high-quality leads. Once you hand over MQLs to become Sales Qualified Leads or SQLs, converting will be more seamless. When marketing has a system to qualify leads, it can help sales do what they do best: winning deals and earning revenue.

How To Qualify Leads To Identify MQLs

Establishing qualification criteria will determine how to effectively qualify MQLs.

Marketing tactics are needed to attract and monitor the level of engagement of these leads. This is usually achieved by registering some form of interest or intent from your target audiences and prospects. Interest or intent is commonly recognised by actions taken by your audiences.

Examples of actions that display interest or intent in the qualification process 

The ideal actions taken by target audiences need to be recognisable by your marketing systems.

  • Signed up on your lead form for a discounted product offer
  • Engaged with your ad that directs them to your site
  • Watched a demo video of your product
  • Downloaded a free ebook or product trial
  • Signed up for your regular newsletter 
  • Spent ample time to visit your site and navigated through multiple pages
  • Clicked through your CTA to find out more information 
  • Interacted with a chat representative 

Identifying the specific user activities is vital in order to categorise the efforts that work and analyse each activity’s performance. 

Generally taking a single action doesn’t mean a prospect is qualified as a Marketing Qualified Lead. You will need to determine what combination of actions need to occur for your business to qualify an MQL.

How To Keep Track Of MQLs Using a CRM and Lead Scoring

Using marketing automation tools such as HubSpot CRM will ease the burden of tracking your MQLs. In fact, 80% of marketers believe that marketing automation will help them get more leads (and conversions). 

With automation tools, there is less manual preparation for sales calls and personalised emails and give more opportunities to scale up practical strategies. 

Tracking your MQLs should come after setting qualification criteria. This way, you will be able to maximise channels that drive revenue more than just leads. 

A buyer’s journey progresses from one stage to another. You may be able to develop metrics for your MQLs like: 

  • Tracking conversion rate from MQLs to SQLs. Determine how much of your MQLs have become SQLs. 
  • Determining sales opportunities for your MQLs. SQLs become sales opportunities when the sales team gauges the lead to an actual prospect to nurture. 
  • Converting MQLs to your work-in-progress pipeline. Once it’s identified that the sales opportunity is highly likely to buy through any form of commitment from the potential buyer, it moves to the work-in-progress pipeline. 
  • Turning MQLs into closed/won. Closing deals is the main goal of the business. Leads are moved here when they make the payment. 
  • Specific marketing channels where the closed deals come from. Monitoring the channels that get the highest conversion is vital to leverage your strategy on those.

Another way to best track your marketing effectiveness is through lead scoring. Lead scoring will help you identify how you can shift your MQLs to SQLs. 

Using your marketing automation platform and CRM, prospects increase in lead score progressively as they take action on your website, interact with content and interact with your people. Setting lead scoring thresholds means that once a lead passes a score, they advance in lead lifecycle, for example transition from MQL to SQL.

Determine implicit and explicit lead scoring strategies to narrow down the scoring process. Implicit lead scoring could go as far as the lead’s IP address and location to help you gather more information before making them an explicit lead. With explicit scoring, it’s a straightforward approach and can proceed to sign-up forms where you get their data for your marketing efforts.

How To Define an MQL For Your Business 

There are different definitions of MQLs depending on the nature of the business and you will need to consider what criteria constitute an MQL for your business. 

Define an MQL for your business by taking the following steps: 

  1. Sales and marketing should agree and work together on a clear definition of MQL
  2. Go back to your buyer persona to build your audience profile and buying cycle
  3. Align with the sales team and determine what a qualified lead is for them
  4. Identify the key factors like demographics and psychographics on a qualification basis
  5. Be open to changes — revisit the MQL definition regularly 

What Do You Do With MQLs?

Whether it’s a content strategy, social media, or any type of ad, marketing is always the initial stage to establish your target audience, prospects and leads.

Engagement is the ROI for marketing so it’s imperative to filter prospects and determine the highest-quality leads based on the criteria that were set for the business. 

Once the marketing team gathers MQLs, they can now devise a handoff process with the sales team. Sales will then do their qualification standards and pick out the top-tier prospects from the pool of MQLs and assign SQLs.

Through MQLs, the sales team can work hand in hand with the marketing team in qualifying leads.

Don’t forget that aside from this, MQLs will also identify what type of marketing content helps bring the right prospects for your business.

How Many Prospects Or Leads Do I Need To Find To Uncover an MQL?

There isn’t an exact figure to determine the number of prospects to lead you to an MQL. Setting your targets is pertinent to reaching a definite number of leads. 

For example, if the goal of a business is to reach X new customers each month, what needs to be done is to factor in specific variables of the sales process, and relate them with each other. The specific and accurate percentages can be calculated through historical data using CRM tools. In addition, using a lead calculator to get a specific number will give more direction to your lead’s buyer journey. 

The hard part’s always at the beginning. But with the right strategies and tools, investing in identifying and tracking MQLs to achieve highly qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, and more closed deals is well worth the investment.

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A cold call is a vital lead generation tactic in the tech and ICT industry.

While other lead acquisition channels and lead generation activities, such as email, content marketing, SEO, conferences, and webinars, have their benefits, you cannot underestimate the value of human conversation.

This is especially true when factoring in the time to impact – calling prospects to qualify is an accelerated lead acquisition channel.

Research shows that cold calling is a valuable sales tool, especially when target buyer personas are made up of senior business leaders. However, as with any other business engagement, cold calling needs a strategy.

A successful campaign needs to be tailored to the needs of your prospective customer.

What Is a Cold Call?

Technically a cold call is considered an unsolicited phone call to a prospect in an attempt to sell a product or service.

However, that definition is often misquoted and misunderstood. It’s not (or shouldn’t be) a random event with the caller blindly calling down lists of numbers.

Instead, it’s a particular sales outreach where the sales team contact leads from their organisation’s database.

The prospective names in a cold calling list could come from multiple marketing sources. For example, someone may have completed a form on a website or attended a company webinar. The names on a list could also come from an industry or association database, desktop research or a social media site like LinkedIn.

The actual definition of a cold call should factor this in.

“A cold call is an attempt to contact a prospect or to identify who the right prospective decision maker is of a target account that may require your product or services.”

It’s too time consuming and too expensive to call down poorly constructed lists or random numbers. For this very reason, it’s vital that you qualify your prospect list with relevant leads as part of your cold calling strategy.

After all, the sole purpose of cold calling is to identify and qualify prospects to move any qualified leads to the next step in the buying process.

The Typical Structure Of a Cold Call Script

A typical cold call script follows a familiar format. Since you’re having a one-on-one conversation with a prospect, it needs to have a natural flow. However, many cold callers fail to follow this fundamental progression.

 

Many cold callers do not get to the point of their call fast enough.

 

Technology leaders are busy people, and calls are often unwelcome interruptions. Therefore, building rapport and getting to the matter as quickly as possible is vital.

 

Not only does this let the prospect know the purpose of the call, but it also helps you move through your cold calling list, weeding out inferior leads so that you can focus on real opportunities. 

 

The typical structure of a cold call script has four core components.

1) The Introduction

It’s good etiquette to let the person answering the call know who they are speaking to as soon as possible.

 

During the introduction, the cold caller should state their name and the company. For example, “Hello John, this is Alex from Real Technology Solutions” is a far better opening than “Hello, how are you today?”.

 

Next, ask them if they are busy or have a moment to chat. Using this technique illustrates that you value their time and also gives you permission if you need to schedule a follow-up call. 

 

2) Establishing rapport

The next step is to establish a rapport with your prospect. Using some background information on the potential customer is vital during this phase.

 

For instance, if they are the IT Manager, use an opening like “I see you are an experienced manager, and you have been in your role for three years. What do you see as the challenges for your department in the next 12 months?”.

 

This approach is far more personalised than “I want to tell you about the benefits of cloud computing”. Your prospect likely already knows the benefits of the cloud and will want to get off the call as they see it as a waste of time.

 

3) Positioning your offering

Once you have established rapport, you can then start talking about your offering. For instance, using the previous question as an example, should the prospect say replacing hardware is a strategy for the next 12 months, you could open with “Have you considered the benefits of leveraging a cloud platform instead of purchasing new hardware?”.

 

Similarly, if they say that decreasing costs is a focus, you could probe further and ask, “Would that be capital expenditure or monthly operational expenses?”.

 

4) Determine next steps

 

Always conclude the call with offering next steps. The ideal outcome is to book an appointment between the prospect and a member of your Sales team. Ideally you have access to a shared calendar. It’s far more effective to book the appointment while the prospect is still on the phone with you.

If the prospect wants more information first, make sure you verify their email address if it’s already in the CRM, or ask for their email address. Confirm that you will be sending them the information shortly. This information might be a capability deck, a data sheet, a relevant case study or all of these.

You’ll be calling the prospect back in a few days to follow up on the email you sent, so ensure all the necessary information was included to introduce your company, as well as service and/or product offering.

How To Develop a Cold Call Script

When developing a cold call script, it is vital that you keep it fluid enough so that you can have an effective conversation with your prospect.

A long monologue of text that you intend to read out in full is prone to reader error and can come across as impersonal to the listener.

The ideal cold calling script is one where the potential customer does the most talking. Therefore, when developing the cold calling template, ensure you ask the relevant probing questions early on so that the conversation can flow naturally.

Think of a cold call script as a dialogue.

1) Tailor your script to your audience

Ideally, you should tailor your cold calling script to prospect personas.

For instance, target different market segments such as IT managers in a particular city or region. Another way to segment your cold calling verticals is by industry, such as finance, retail, or education. By tailoring your script to your audience, you can target needs that are specific to a particular set of customers.

2) Identify your potential prospects

Once you have your script template ready, the next step is to personalise it for the prospects you will be calling. As mentioned previously, the ideal cold calling script is one where the potential lead does the most talking. By doing some research into your target audience, you can identify talking points that resonate with them.

For instance, if a pending piece of legislation will affect them, ask them what they think about it. Another angle could be something social. For example, if a particular city is part of an upcoming sporting festival, work it into the conversation.

3) Research each prospect and refine your script

If you have followed the two previous steps, you should have a tailored script that talks to prospects in a specific target demographic. However, as the primary goal of the cold call is to build rapport and get the potential customer talking about their requirements, researching each one can help you ask questions that provide that personal touch.

For instance, if you review their LinkedIn profile and see they went to a particular school or university, you can work that into your script. Likewise, if they have been recently promoted or moved to a new city, asking them or congratulating them on their recent achievements is another excellent way to break the ice.

Using Script Variations and Key Messaging to Make Cold Calls More Organic

Although the primary objective of a cold calling campaign is to close more sales, it is not the purpose of making a cold call. Instead, you should leverage a cold call to gather information and build a relationship with your potential customer.

Taking this longer-term view will help you tailor your sales message to their particular needs. Although you have tailored your cold call script to your specific prospect, it is vital that you build in some flexibility to allow for a natural conversation to progress.

Using script variations and key messaging is an excellent way to introduce this approach.

For instance, when you are building rapport and asking them about their city, a new position, and what they see as their challenges are in the next 12 months, allow the conversation to flow naturally.

If your prospect wants to talk about how great their sports team is doing this year, let the conversation flow in that direction. As mentioned, the more the potential customer talks, the better the chances of your success. You can always lead the conversation back to your product or service once you have let the prospect speak.

Who knows, they may have given away some helpful information you could use to tailor your sales approach. For example, if they said they would have loved to see their old school play in the regional finals but had to work that weekend, you could use that nugget to illustrate how your product or service can help them increase efficiency.

The Benefit Of a Call Flow Diagram

A call flow diagram is an excellent tool that can help you increase the effectiveness of your cold calling program. Although your script will help you get the conversation started, there is no way to predict how the conversation will flow. A call flow diagram provides a visual structure to your cold call.

Instead of the words of a script, it offers a general idea of how your call should go. It allows you to let the natural conversation flow while enabling you to control it so that it gets back to its original purpose.

In addition to providing a visual structure that allows you to control the flow of a conversation, call flow diagrams also help you tailor the best possible experience for your sales team and the prospect. It allows you to visualise the caller’s experience providing a flow for various scenarios.

This technique is instrumental when you are training a new Inside Sales team member or are outsourcing your cold calling. It helps each caller ask questions and guide the conversation based on the answers, resulting in an effective and productive call experience.

How To Review and Measure the Effectiveness Of a Cold Call Script

As with any other sales and marketing activity, continuously measuring the effectiveness of a cold call script is crucial to the campaign’s overall success.

Ideally, you should measure statistics like calls answered, calls that progressed to the ‘sales’ portion of the conversation, and calls that achieved their objective such as setting up a meeting.

Ideally, you should set a target for these statistics at the start of the campaign. For instance, you may have a target of 30%, 10%, and 5% for each relevant measure.

After setting these goals, testing your script with a subset of your prospect pool is the next logical step. If you do not achieve your set targets, you can then tweak your approach accordingly.

This approach can also help you identify indirect factors that may influence the effectiveness of your cold calling campaign. For instance, you may find that calling on a Tuesday has a higher call answer rate than calling on a Friday afternoon.

Using these statistics, you can hone your cold calling strategy, ensuring you select the best possible script and the ideal time and day to approach your prospects.

11 Cold Call Script Templates For Tech Companies and IT Service Providers

Template 1 – Cold call for general cloud migration

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. Our customers are typically looking to migrate services to the cloud and move off legacy hardware. Does that sound like you?

<Prospect responds>

Tell me more about that.

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

Our product can help you and your organisation achieve the costing savings and agility you need. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

TEMPLATE 2 – Cold call for general MSP services

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. Our customers are typically looking to increase the efficiency of their operations while saving costs. Does that sound like you?

<Prospect responds>

Tell me more about that.

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

Our services can help you resolve those issues. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 3 – Cold call for specific MSP services

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. We have successfully implemented our (specific product or service) at several customers that have found (customer success). Would you be interested in hearing about (product or service features)

<Prospect responds>

(Provide product or service description). Do you or your team experience any of the following (list problems that product or service feature resolves)?

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

Our product can help you. We have seen many customers <discuss how the product resolved the pain point>. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 4 – Cold call for a new product or service

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. We have launched (specific product or service) that has resulted in (cost savings, efficiencies) in our pilot customer group. Would you be interested in hearing about (product or service features)

<Prospect responds>

(Provide product or service description). Do you or your team experience any of the following (list problems that product or service feature resolves)?

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

Good news! Our product is tailored to help you <discuss how the product resolved the pain point>. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 5 – Cold call for particular SaaS product

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. We have built our (product) to address (market need). Does that sound like you?

<Prospect responds>

Tell me more about that.

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

Good news! Our product is tailored to help you <discuss how the product resolved the pain point>. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 6 – Cold call for technical consulting

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. We have built a service that has helped many of our customers (consulting objective – cost-saving, efficiency etc.). Would you like to hear more?

<Prospect responds>

(Provide consulting service description). Do you or your team experience any of the following (list problems that consulting service resolves)?

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

Good news! Our consulting offering can help you <discuss how the product resolved the pain point>. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 7 – Cold call for resource augmentation

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. We have built a service that places highly skilled technical resources on-site to help organisations free up their leadership to drive IT innovation. Does that sound like something you might need?

<Prospect responds>

Tell me more about that.

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

From what you have told me, I believe we can help. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 8 – Cold call for business continuity and disaster recovery

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. We offer products and professional services that protect organisations from ransomware, outages, and data loss incidents. Would you like to hear more?

<Prospect responds>

<Discuss the benefits and features of the offering. Ask the prospect if they have experienced any issues related to your product or service.>

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

From what you have told me, I believe the next step would be for you to have a chat with one of our experts. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 9 – Cold call for cybersecurity services

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. We offer products and professional services that protect organisations from ransomware, data breaches, and system compromise. Would you like to hear more?

<Prospect responds>

Discuss the benefits and features of the offering. Ask the prospect if they have experienced any issues related to your product or service.

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

From what you have told me, I believe we can help. The next step would be for you to have a chat with one of our experts. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 10 – Cold call for application development

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>),

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. We offer a custom development offering where we work with your team to develop business applications. Would you like to hear more?

<Prospect responds>

Discuss the benefits and features of the custom development offering. Ask the prospect if they have any business requirements that off the shelf software cannot meet.

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

From what you have told me, I believe our application development service can help you. The next step would be for you to have a chat with one of our experts. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our solution architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

 

Sample 11 – Cold call for enterprise architecture

Introduction:

Hello, this is <YOUR NAME> from <YOUR COMPANY>.

<Pause>

Ask a question:

So, <PROSPECT NAME>,

  • I see you went to <SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY>. Did you enjoy it?
  • Wow, you’ve been at <COMPANY> for <X> years. How did you get started there?
  • Congrats on your recent promotion. How is the new role?

<Wait for prospect’s response, reply and have a natural conversation>

Positioning statement:

The reason for my call today is that we work with <COMPANY TYPE> in <INDUSTRY>. Our enterprise architects help organisations map out their system flows and develop roadmaps that align the needs of your business with the best technology solutions. Would that be of interest to you or someone in your organisation?

<Prospect responds>

Discuss the benefits and features of the enterprise architecture offering. Ask the prospect if they have any misaligned business requirements that their current technology stack cannot meet.

<Prospect talks about their pain points>

So, what I’m hearing is … <repeat customer pain points in your own words>.

From what you have told me, I believe our enterprise architects can help you. The next step would be for you to have a chat with one of our experts. Can I

  • Schedule a call with one of our architects?
  • Send you some more information?
  • Set up a meeting with our team to discuss our offering?

25 Practical Cold Calling Tips

1) Cold calling is about learning more, not immediate sales. 

Do not try and sell during a cold call. Instead, try and get as much information as possible and move the prospect to the next sales cycle phase.

2) Don’t waste anybody’s time, including your own.

If the prospect is busy, try to reschedule another call. If they are not interested in what you are saying, thank them and move on to the next prospect.

3) Use your sales script but do not depend on it.

Your sales script is a tool to help you break the ice and have a conversation with your prospect. Do not follow it verbatim. Instead, let the natural conversation flow and build the relationship.

4) Find the proper calling schedule.

Find the best days and best time to call your prospects. Find the right rhythm for follow up calls. Businesses work in cycles so take advantage of the ebbs and flows.

5) Always end with the next steps.

Before you end your cold call, make sure you set the next steps. Follow this up with an email or subsequent call to confirm.

6) Practice, practice, practice.

Practice your script with colleagues and other team members. Using this approach will help you think on your feet when a prospect comes with a question or comment that is not in your script.

7) Ask open-ended questions.

During the sales phase of the call, ask open-ended questions. Asking questions with a yes or no answer will not provide the information you need.

8) Listen to understand, not to answer.

Listen to your prospect’s answers to gain information. The solution phase should not form part of the cold calling process.

9) Leave a voicemail or send an email.

Technology leaders are busy. If you cannot get them on the phone, leave a voicemail. If they do not have voicemail activated, send them a personalised email saying that you tried to call and pitch your offering using that medium.

10) QA your cold callers.

Monitor and review the calls your reps are making. It can help you pick out any issues and refine your script or approach.

11) Pay attention

Try not to multitask during a cold call. Instead, give your prospect your undivided attention.

12) Keep track of which techniques work.

Over time you will start to get a feel of what approach works best during a cold call. Refine your strategy and share it with the rest of your team.

13) Set goals and try and achieve them.

At the start of your campaign, set achievable goals and try and achieve them every day. It is easy to let other issues distract you, so set time aside to work on your cold calling campaign.

14) Leverage triggers and events.

Keep an eye on your prospects. If they make the news with a new appointment or product launch, use a congratulatory call as a foot in the door.

15) Watch your tone of voice.

A cold call is a personal one-on-one interaction. However, the prospect cannot see non-verbal cues such as your body language, so your tone of voice is vital.

16) Stay on track.

Even though the ideal cold call is a natural conversation, remember your end goal and guide the conversation towards it.

17) Use a headset.

First impressions count, so you must deliver a cold call with quality acoustics. Invest in a headset with noise-cancelling features. Not only will it provide crystal clear sound, but it will give the prospect the perception that you have their undivided attention.

18) Learn how to handle objections.

Use the objective handling technique of listen, ask, solve, confirm, and move on.

19) Don’t give up.

Cold calling is a numbers game. Don’t let rejections or hang-ups derail your strategy.

20) Be respectful.

Always respect your peers and competitors. You never know if your prospect has relationships that are not listed on their LinkedIn profile.

21) Try and offer some value.

Cold calls are unsolicited and often interrupt busy technology leaders. Try to soften the blow by offering something of value, such as the latest piece of industry news or an interesting statistic.

22) Be prepared.

Make sure you have as much information as possible at your fingertips. If the prospect is interested and wants more information, have it ready.

23) Don’t be afraid to try different strategies.

People are unique. Remember to tailor your script to your individual prospect. Try different techniques to see which offers the best results.

24) Take notes and capture data.

Remember to document everything your prospects says in your CRM. Your current product or service may not meet their current requirements, but you could have something else that you can offer.

25) Use a local number.

Where possible, call from a local number. Prospects and their gatekeepers are wary of answering 0800 or sharecall numbers.

Want To Access Better Cold Calling Outcomes?

Developing and implementing an effective cold calling strategy can be challenging. Cold calling is a numbers game and can take up vast quantities of your time. Furthermore, developing an effective campaign requires some insight and experience.

 

Get in touch.

Knowing who your customer is and wrapping your whole brand and business around that customer’s needs and wants is incredibly powerful. We call this a buyer persona.

Buyer personas can transform your digital marketing by guiding how you do marketing and in what context. Buyer personas also have the power to shape decision making across your business as leaders and managers are guided by what the customer wants.

The following article outlines what buyer personas are, what they are not, and how they are used. Most importantly, this article shows how to build buyer personas for your business.

Armed with this information, you’ll be enable you to target the right lead acquisition channels, discover Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), nurture Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and convert customers to support your growth strategy with targeted lead generation into the future.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional, generalised representations of your ideal customers.

They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviours, and concerns of different groups. The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.).

“Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers and users in order to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions, and visual design of a website.” (Source)

What is a bad fit persona?

Where a buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer, a ‘bad fit’ persona is a representation of who you don’t want as a customer.

‘Bad fit’ personas could include, for example:

  • Students who are only engaging with your content for research/knowledge, or
  • Prospects who will be too expensive to acquire; or
  • Potential customers who will be too costly or time consuming to service effectively and efficiently.

How Should You Use a Buyer Persona?

At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalise or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas.

If you take the time to create ‘bad fit’ personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower Cost per Lead (CPL) and Cost per Sale (CPS) (and see higher sales productivity).

When combined with sales cycle stages, i.e. how far along someone is in your sales cycle, buyer personas also enable you to map out and create highly-targeted content.

Are buyer personas for marketing or for sales?

Your best leads are buyers that match your ideal buyer profile and are active in their buying journey. These prospects face similar challenges and have similar goals to your best customers, and are currently in the market for a solution. It’s far more efficient to reach out only to leads who fit your solution and want it.

That’s why inbound salespeople listen to the market to determine which prospects have recently visited the salesperson’s company website, filled out a form, or opened one of the salesperson’s emails. The ability to define the right business opportunities you’ll spend your time with is the difference between missing or exceeding your sales quota. It also helps you build a predictable, scalable sales funnel.

When you’re laser-focused on the right prospects, you stop wasting time with buyers who are simply poor fits or not yet ready to buy.

What’s the difference between an ideal account or ideal company and a buyer persona?

Ideal account or company buyer profiles define the different buying patterns of the companies and is particularly relevant when engaging in Account-Based Marketing and Sales. Buyer personas, on the other hand, are the fictional, generalised representations of the people in those companies you engage with.

For example, your ideal buyer profile may be health care companies with less than 10,000 employees. Within that ideal buyer profile, you probably engage with multiple buyer personas.

Various roles may be involved in the buying decision at those companies. Perhaps one buyer persona is a leader of the IT department and another is the head of operations. Differentiating between these buyer personas will help you formulate a message that resonates with the goals and challenges they are each uniquely facing.

How do you seamlessly integrate ideal accounts with buyer personas?

Here are six general questions you can ask yourself to identify your ideal buyer profile:

  1. Are there company sizes that are ideal or not ideal who would buy your product?
  2. Do you define size as employees, revenue, customers, or another metric?
  3. Are there industries or verticals that are ideal or not ideal?
  4. Are there geographic locations that are ideal or not ideal?
  5. Are B2B customers better than B2C?
  6. Are there other attributes of that make the buyer ideal or not ideal?

Should leadership teams be aware of a buyer persona?

While buyer personas help marketing shape content to add value to a specific type of customer, getting your leadership and management team involved can have tremendous benefits.

When buyer personas are clear and agreed upon across the management team, broader decision-making can be positively impacted. Business decisions which affect customers across multiple divisions or teams can be made with personas in mind, even if marketing is not immediately affected.

Asking how a persona would want a business outcome to be can provide tremendous guidance and clarity. Leaders can ask themselves how Persona 1 or Persona 2 may have different reactions to a particular customer service message.

Buyer personas can even be relevant at Board level, as broader awareness can strengthen an understanding of exactly whom a company exists for and sells to. Awareness at all levels ensures brand uniformity.

How Do You Build a Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside of your contact database who might align with your target audience.

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

  • Look through your contact database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
  • Ask the questions (We’ve included some prompts for you below) to formulate a detailed description of a realistic person when creating personas.
  • Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service.
  • Take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the leads they are interacting with most. What types of sales cycles does your sales team work with? What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?
  • Segment your CRM against any buyer personas. If your CRM has buyer persona tools built into the platform, ensure you structure your descriptions so that you can easily recognise any buyer persona prospects.
  • When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms. You could also gather information on what forms of social media your leads use by asking a question about social media accounts.
  • Create and organise persona data in a way that makes sense to non-marketers. This will unlock reporting capabilities.

What should I ask when building a buyer persona?

If the following questions are answered, a robust buyer persona will come to life.

What is the buyer persona’s role?

  • What is your job role? Your job title?
  • How is your job measured?
  • What is a typical day?
  • What skills are required?
  • What knowledge and tools do you use?
  • Who do you report to? Who reports to you?

What are their goals?

  • What are you responsible for?
  • What does it mean to be successful in your role?

What are their challenges?

  • What are your biggest challenges?
  • How do you overcome these challenges?

Where do they work?

  • What industry or industries does your company work in?
  • What is the size of your company (revenue, employees?)

How do they access information?

  • How do you learn about new information for your job?
  • What publications or blogs do you read?
  • What associations and social networks do you belong to?

What is their personal background?

  • Age
  • Family (single, married, children)
  • Education

What are their buying preferences?

  • How to you prefer to interact with vendors (email, phone, in person?)
  • Do you use the internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how do you search for information? What types of websites do you use?

What is your perception of our products and services?

 

Ready to get more targeted with your demand generation with a buyer persona?

If you’re ready to take a strategic approach with defined buyer personas which drive your strategic demand gen initiatives, then we need to talk.

When it comes to marketing, what does “measurable impact” mean?

Let’s dive in.

Whether success means growing shareholder value, financial efficiency, customer acquisition or retention, or diversifying revenue streams, knowing what success looks like is vital.

Without measurement, you cannot confirm that any deliberate strategic action achieved its stated objectives.

Measuring the impact of a particular marketing activity starts with setting realistic expectations to achieve intended outcomes. These are often referred to as SMART goals, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

How do you know if your insights and planned activities have had a measurable impact on your business? Put more practically, how do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing investment?

Defining Measurable

Every business engagement has a set of specific inputs that must produce the desired output. Typically, these inputs include time, money, and effort. When it comes to marketing, we expect these input factors to create or expand brand awareness, increase sales, and enhance customer engagement while protecting existing revenue. As organisations have limited resources, measuring their desired impact ultimately determines the success of a marketing plan or campaign’s effectiveness.

The vital ingredient needed to measure a particular initiative’s impact on your business is setting realistic, achievable goals, also known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Marketing’s role is to uncover prospects, generate demand, and qualify leads for a sales team to nurture and convert. Organisations can measure these metrics as they are quantifiable. However, other marketing metrics are intangible and difficult to calculate, such as improving or enhancing brand loyalty.

The critical factor to remember when measuring outcomes in marketing is time. Some activities produce results in shorter timeframes, while others take longer to manifest.

For example, a lead-generating campaign should produce measurable results for your sales teams in the short term. However, it also has an indirect impact on building brand awareness with potential prospects. Measuring this extended metric can only occur over some time.

Defining Impact

The impact of a marketing initiative is the desired outcome generated by an action. To put it another way, if there were no action, you would not see any difference in the measured result. That action may be a straightforward input, such as an email marketing campaign. That action can also be a more complex and collective set of inputs, such as taking an SEO-led approach to content marketing so that compelling messaging reaches target audiences while also optimised for search engines over the longer term.

Either way, an impact must make a noticeable difference to a pre-determined measure such as market share, brand awareness, or sales.

As stated, not all marketing activities create a noticeable direct impact in the short or even medium term. Organisations can measure some results, such as an increase in customer retention. However, in many instances, the effect is difficult to measure as the activities do not directly correlate with a stated outcome. Some marketing activities play a vital strategic role, but isolating their measurable impact for attribution is scientifically complex, and in some cases, near impossible.

Even so, organisations should be able to measure the macro effect of all their marketing activities over time.

Time to Impact – a Measurable Metric

One metric that provides a measurable marketing outcome is time to impact. This benchmark quantifies the length of time it takes for marketing activities to make a measurable impact on a business. Organisations can determine the number of leads, reach, engagement, and sales a particular initiative generated over a set period. Time to impact is an essential measure as it helps organisations understand how various activities deliver a measurable impact. It factors attribution, contribution, and investment in the context of a set timeline.

As mentioned, other outcomes may not be as transparent as the time to impact if one does not set a realistic measurement period. Some activities may only produce a measurable impact in the medium-to-long term, such as SEO. Optimising your digital content does not necessarily produce results right away. It can take longer periods as a result of compounding outcomes to have the desired effect.

This example illustrates why it is vital to set realistic expectations. Some activities may well have a direct, immediate impact, but others may only produce the expected results over time.

Determining a Measurable Impact

Measurable impact is the quantifiable outcome attributed to marketing and lead generation activities over a set period of time which contribute to achieving set strategic objectives.

Ideally, you should set quantifiable KPIs at the start of your marketing initiative and complement these with relevant time-based milestones. It can be challenging to quantify for some activities in isolation but setting realistic goals and a reasonable timeline can give you the metrics you need.

The type of marketing activity will also affect the timescales of your measurable impact. For example, you could measure your lead acceleration’s effectiveness in weeks, but others, such as SEO or brand marketing, will have a longer time to impact.

Want to Discuss How You Can Achieve a Measurable Impact fWith Your Marketing?

At Filament, we go beyond merely being an extension to your team – we are your team! Our whole focus is on your successful outcomes, which is why we place measurable impacts at the core of our marketing strategies.

Get in touch with us to discuss how we can make a measurable impact for your business and help you achieve quantifiable marketing success and business growth.

Before the global Covid-19 pandemic, the #1 priority for CEOs in 2020 was sustaining growth, according to Gartner research.

The Most Popular Solutions to Tackling Business Growth Challenges

The research showed that the most popular solutions for tackling growth challenges included:

  • To look in other geographic locations for growth opportunities, i.e. new market entries, and
  • To go-to-market with new products and revenue-producing services to diversify their offering.

Now that the landscape has fundamentally changed as a result of the pandemic, KPMG research shows a large majority of CEOs have accelerated their digital transformation both externally to customers as well as internally to operations, by multiple years in many cases. In light of this, there was only a slight reduction in confidence among both Australian and global CEOs in terms of the three-year growth outlook for their own company.

Business Leaders Continue Their Focus on Growth

When it comes to sparking that desired growth, it’s important to define the intentions and manage the scope and scale of the initiatives. From value proposition to go-to-market strategy, right through to the final execution, it’s critical to think about each move you make based on the extent of its reach and the time it takes to make a measurable impact for the business.

How Long Will It Take For Each Activity to Make an Impact?

As always, there are many variables involved in this. Different industries, economic cycles, contexts, activities to date, budget allocations, capacity and access to capability all play a role. The types of products and services you sell also affect how quickly you can make waves, as does existing turnover and brand recognition.

Time to Impact is about making sound growth decisions and setting realistic expectations to achieve intended outcomes.

What is Time to Impact?

Time to Impact is the length of time it takes for lead generation and marketing activities to make a measurable impact for a business.

If the role of marketing is to uncover prospects, generate demand and qualify leads for a Sales team to nurture and convert, then the Time to Impact is the length of time it takes for the specific initiative to deliver those qualified leads to the Sales Team.

Some activities deliver immediate results, others take longer.

Think of this measure as a way to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of a campaign in terms of actual time units. While measures such amounts of leads, reach, engagement, and ultimately sales define the end results, Time to Impact is about the relationship between effort expended and how long it takes to realise the value.

Time to Impact is not about comparing the effectiveness of specific tactics or messages. It is not intended to replace ROI as a primary indicator of overall campaign success.

Instead, it’s the length of time it takes for these tactics or messages to become effective and deliver results. This measure is important because it helps to define contribution in relation to efficiency and effectiveness.

Why Does Time to Impact Matter?

It’s important to understand the effect of how different lead generation and marketing activities will impact a business. This measure matters because it factors attribution, contribution and investment in the context of a period of time.

According to an ancient Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is today.”

Using Time to Impact as a reference, marketing investment decisions can be made based on the tactical versus strategic business need. We can determine what activities can make an impact immediately or over coming periods, and plan more efficiently around what initiatives need to start now to make an impact over the medium or long-term.

What is Lead Response Time? Is This the Same Concept?

No, lead response times (LRT) is the average time it takes a Sales Development Representative (SDR) to follow up with a prospect once they are identified as being a sales qualified lead (SQL).  According to HubSpot, the quality of a lead negatively changes based on how much time has passed since an inquiry was received. Therefore, longer response times means lower SQL to Opportunity rates.

For our purposes, Time to Impact refers to the time it takes to attract and generate demand up to the point of a qualified lead reaching the Sales Team, either as a result of an inquiry or because they’re ready to be contacted and nurtured by the Sales Team.

Important to note here that weighing up lead generation activities is not a binary one-over-the-other decision. While the Time to Impact differs, each type of impact is different and has differing levels of wider benefits.

Faster lead acquisition activities produce immediate results, but are limited in reach and have a sharp drop off in engagement. Long-term lead acquisition activities take longer to ramp up, but can deliver outsized returns.

Impact Timelines

The time it takes for a marketing campaign to impact the market is liquid and highly variable. In order to maximise your return on investment, it’s important to streamline the message creation and delivery process based on the following timelines:

1) Accelerated time to impact (measured in days to weeks)

If you want to make an impact quickly, a direct approach is required. While long-term branding strategies demand the luxury of time, accelerated market impact demands speed and agility. Outreach tele-sales and appointment setting campaigns can be used to create immediate impact, especially if you have access to an existing customer base. For example, you can call a database directly or initiate a direct response email campaign to a targeted group. An integrated call to action (CTA) is an important component of every fast campaign.

Effective tactics:

  • Lead Acceleration

2) Short to medium-term time to impact (measured in weeks to months)

If the intention is to drive broader outcomes, such as taking a new product or service to market, short to medium-term campaigns can be highly effective. A number of standard marketing strategies fall into this category, including content marketing, sequenced email campaigns, and content offer campaigns. Organic marketing often takes time, however, which is why paid marketing strategies are often used to speed up the reach. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with Google and Facebook Ads offer a great way to reach out to a targeted buyer persona and drive specific actions. On-page and technical SEO can also be effective to optimise your website for search engines, especially where technical fixes can result in measurable gains in the short to medium term.

Effective tactics:

  • Content-led campaigns
  • Go-to-Market and New Market Entry campaigns
  • Paid Search (Google Ads)
  • Social advertising (Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads)
  • Local & On-page SEO

3) Medium to long-term time to impact (measured at 6-12+ months)

If you want to engage with your market on a long-term basis, it’s important to implement a strategic approach based around SEO. Ongoing organic SEO is an integral part of every medium to long-term strategy because it helps to cement your place in the industry and promote long-term branding and customer loyalty. Evergreen content, which remains relevant over time, is central to this approach. Evergreen content provides value to your customers and remains relevant to your business and industry sector. Inbound content and linking structures are also useful to create authority and context, and blog-style articles can be added to keep your website fresh in the eyes of the search engines.

Effective tactics:

  • Content-led campaigns
  • Go-to-Market and New Market Entry campaigns
  • Paid Search (Google Ads)
  • Social advertising (Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads)
  • Ongoing SEO

4) Long-term time to impact (measured at 2+ years)

Long-term marketing is a marathon and not a sprint, which means you need to think about the end-game. Long-term marketing strategies involve the promotion of your brand in addition to your products and services. While people engage with your business because you have something to offer, repeat business is often based on a sense of belonging and shared purpose. Branding is a promise you make to the market, and long-term campaigns provide consistent messaging and relevant value propositions. Risk mitigation strategies are also important on a long-term basis, including reputation management.

Effective tactics:

  • Value Proposition
  • Brand marketing

Ready to understand what Time to Impact can mean for your business?

In order to maximise the impact of your marketing, it’s important to create strong messaging and focus on efficient delivery.

Time to Impact is a great way to define and measure the temporal nature of the marketing process. Whether you want accelerated results or sustainable long-term gains, it’s important to think long and hard about the effort you expend and the time it takes to get results.

Get in touch with us to discuss your growth plans and to gain some clarity about the Time to Impact and what it means for your marketing activities.

Selling products and services in today’s world where relevant information is literally at everyone’s fingertips, requires a change in the way organisations approach the marketing and sales of their product offerings.

With so much information available and so many different organisational departments actively engaging in the procurement of services, understanding the pain points of each decision-making or influencing role, as well as the process they follow when making purchasing decisions, can help organisations hone their messaging and market their services more effectively.

Buyer Behaviour is Changing

One of the most significant impacts of technology transformation is the way we both produce and consume data. The access we have to information today has fundamentally altered the way both individuals and businesses procure goods and services.

This access to information means today’s buyer no longer relies solely on the traditional salesperson for relevant data regarding a product or service before making a purchasing decision. With everything they need at their fingertips, buyers now have the power and freedom they need to inform themselves of the alternatives available to meet their needs, and then act on a purchase decision immediately.

Organisations need to tailor their offerings and their marketing to adapt their sales strategy so that it aligns with the buyer’s journey.

The traditional approaches of engaging with potential prospects, generating leads, converting them into opportunities and eventually closing sales need to be adapted to consider the informed buyer. Instead of relying on conventional sales cycles, organisations need to adapt their inbound marketing and align it with the buyer’s persona and journey.

Understanding Buyer Personas

It stands to reason that organisations need to tailor their messaging so that it resonates with the needs of each unique buyer. The frenetic activity involved in operating a business means decision-makers are time poor and expect any time engaging with an organisation from which they may purchase to provide both education and value.

Constructing a buyer persona involves developing a fictional, generalised portrayal of an ideal customer. Buyer personas help you understand what drives your potential customer’s behaviour and make it easier to create content targeting their specific pain points and business objectives.

A Buyer’s Journey For Each Persona

Understanding the journey a buyer travels before they form a final purchasing decision is another essential element in building a successful inbound marketing campaign.

An organisation should tailor its marketing messaging paying particular attention to the multiple stages a buyer travels through before making a purchasing decision. This process must be accompanied with the necessary research taking each buyer persona into account.

A buyer generally moves through distinct stages on their journey from the moment they identify a requirement until they make the final decision to purchase a service to fulfil that need. It’s important for each organisation to understand what those stages are for their industry and their target buyers.

It’s critical for messaging and marketing efforts to take these stages into account. By taking a strategic approach, you can then create a particular plan of action which speaks to an identified buyer persona at a specific point in their buyer journey.

Ultimately it’s sales that benefit from this strategic approach to buyer journeys and buyer personas.

Ready to Get More Targeted With Buyer Personas?

Are you ready to take a strategic approach with defined buyer personas which drive your strategic demand gen initiatives?

Then we need to talk.

Your contact database is critical to your business as it’s an immensely valuable tool for your strategic marketing.

Having a curated and qualified database of prospects, leads and customers drives a series of benefits for your organisation, including shorter sales cycles, increased close rates, profitability and growth.

But managing and maintaining an effective database is not a simple undertaking.

Contact databases should emphasise quality over quantity and be designed to accommodate pertinent information regarding the target market to ensure the success of marketing campaigns. Good contact databases should be built with the end user of the information in mind, be simple to navigate and have the necessary structures and data in place to allow for data manipulation and extraction.

The Larger the Organisation the Greater the Challenge and Complexity

Experience has found that as companies grow and expand, the more unwieldy their contact database becomes over time.

Contact databases need constant maintenance to ensure information is constantly updated and contains the relevant data needed to execute effective marketing campaigns.

Unmanaged Databases Eventually Become a Giant List of Contacts

All these issues eventually lead to databases essentially becoming a giant list of contacts segmented by the usual meaningless demographics.

This makes the database impractical and ineffective as a strategic marketing tool due to the fact that a disproportionate amount of information is missing or incorrectly categorised.

Making Your Database More Effective

An effective contact marketing database should have contacts segmented by lead type and have some form of indication of where they are in a sales funnel or buyer’s journey. Being able to identify the source of how each prospect entered your database and tracking them throughout their buyer journey will unlock attribution reporting for future strategy decision making.

The database should also contain pertinent marketing information such as the contact’s intent to purchase, their current point in the sales cycle as well as their propensity to consider or adopt new methods if they are with a competitor.

Furthermore, contact database segmentation reduces friction between teams and empowers the sales function to prioritises pre-qualified leads for greater conversion success.

Consistency is Critical

Contact databases used by multiple teams for different purposes and in different ways leads to inconsistency in the way the data is recorded and utilised. This leads to a state where the integrity of the database becomes questionable as a result of the multiple teams not following a uniform or consolidated approach.

All marketing and sales activities should revolve around the same database to ensure alignment and provide visibility across the entire sales cycle for each prospect and customer.

Consistency will also enable an understanding of where leads came from. This will contribute to focusing on attracting the right Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) via the best lead acquisition channels for your business.

Where Do You Start With Optimising Your Contact Database?

It can be challenging to know where to start with taking control over an unwieldy database.

It’s important to ensure the segmentation is right for your business and that the right data will be captured going forward.

At the same time, it’s just as important is getting started with communicating to that database, and using the outcomes of that communication to identify the current status of each prospect in your database. where they are in a sales funnel or buyer’s journey, their intent to purchase etc.

This initial information can then be used for more targeted marketing which can then be personalised to match the prospect’s current position in the sales cycle.

There’s a high likelihood that simply getting started and building up a communication rhythm will uncover a great amount of qualified leads your sales team simply did not even know they had because the database was not segmented appropriately. Being able to uncover the difference between MQLs vs SQLs will make sales nurturing more targeted and effective, ideally even shortening sales cycles over time.

Ready to Qualify Your Contact Database?

We remove the hassle and help you transform your database into an effective marketing tool with digital marketing.

Contact us to discuss how you can take control over your database to shorten sales cycles and increase sales close rates.

Contact us today.

When it comes to growing a business by generating demand and increasing lead volumes, hope is not an effective strategy, nor a competitive advantage.

This is about decisions being made without evidence or insights, which has a degree of hope built in, whether it’s realised or not. This is particularly true if the ‘decision’ (not making a decision is considered a decision here) is to keep going about marketing, lead generation and sales the same way the business always has.

The fact is businesses need to change their approach. Markets have shifted rapidly as the needs of prospects have changed. Leaders need to ensure their business and teams can adapt to these changes to take advantage of the opportunities offered and defend against the threats created.

What’s the secret to accelerating business growth? A pragmatic and strategic approach of evidence gathering and targeting with specificity.

Get ready to measure impact with meaningful metrics

Practical insights can only be derived from data compiled by actively engaging in a target market and using content and marketing activities to test demand and engagement.

If this data doesn’t exist yet due to inactivity, or wasn’t captured from previous activity, then part of the objectives of any initial campaigns will be to start gathering data for future insights. This evidence-based and insights-fuelled approach will give you the information you need to get laser-targeted to spark growth.

What metrics are important?

Not having enough data available yet to formulate insights, while facing the opportunity of accessing endless amounts of data, is a real blocker.

Ultimately, the business metrics that matter most are Revenue, Profit and Cashflow.

For sales and marketers, it’s revenue and Return on Investment (ROI). From these we can reverse engineer what’s most important for lead gen.

Every business leader wants to know the actual impact of their marketing efforts. For this, the ultimate metric is ROI. While many business leaders theoretically understand that a solid marketing strategy ‘can’ have a direct impact to a company’s bottom line, it’s common for executives to believe that marketers aren’t focused enough on results which can be meaningfully shown to drive incremental customer demand.

When it comes to metrics that matter to your business growth, you should be aiming to understand marketing costs in the context of revenue, customer acquisition cost and client lifetime value. Reverse-engineering these metrics to know what data needs to be gathered is how you discover what is important.

Depending on where your business is at, this is often easier said than done. With so many variables and hurdles, even identifying the simplest of metrics can be enormously challenging.

So where do you start?

How to start getting laser-targeted

Start by defining your buyer personas. Buyer personas are a great way to start getting laser-targeted with your lead generation activities. Well-defined and realistic buyer personas enable you to segment your audiences and create stronger marketing campaigns by generating demand from the right prospects.

But, how do you start researching and creating these personas from scratch?

A buyer persona defined as “anyone who has a budget” will result in ambiguously vague messaging in your marketing content and will mean budgets deployed to reach new audiences will evaporate quickly as a result of trying to get the attention of too many different types of people. The proverbial net is cast too wide.

While there has been a gradual shift and uptake to cloud, recent periods have shown that demand and opportunities for cloud solutions sales are increasing.

Prior to the pandemic, 90% of enterprises surveyed had “adopted cloud technology in some form”, with an average of 20-40% of workloads in the cloud. (Source)

Before the impact of the pandemic was understood, an analysis predicted that the cloud migration services market would grow by US$24 billion globally, representing a an annual compound growth rate of 24%. (Source)

Now heading toward a post-pandemic world, the impact of COVID-19 and the transformation of the workplace has resulted in 87% of “global IT decision-makers” surveyed stating that their business is rapidly accelerating a cloud migration. (Source)

However, it can be a challenge for cloud solutions providers to engage prospective customers for a cloud migration journey.

The fact is change can represent risk for business leaders and when it comes to technology, risk aversion often means sticking with what is working now. The problem with this mindset is that they may soon find themselves losing market share in a cloud-first world. Or worse, running an obsolete or unsupported IT platform as vendors move their products and services to cloud-based subscription model.

A methodical, strategic approach is needed to get customers to the cloud. Business prudence dictates that when implementing organisational change, you take it one step at a time.

As you generate demand in targeted lead acquisition channels, identify Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), nurture Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and engage with your prospective customers, it is therefore critical to choose the correct cloud services which will allow them to take that crucial steps toward a cloud migration or cloud-first strategy.

Start With High-Value, Low-Impact Services

While organisations may be resistant to change, they do have regulatory and compliance obligations. Meanwhile, online threats such as ransomware attacks are increasing. (Source)

If we look at the scope of cloud services available today, there are a few which organisations can start using which will not impact their day-to-day operations.

Services such as data protection, backup, disaster recovery, and to some extent, cybersecurity represent an opportunity to fulfil immediate needs customers have without large-scale impact to their operations.

In a sales strategy, these services can represent entry points or “feeder services” to enable structured upsell or cross-sell tactics over time.

Convincing a customer to move their backup or DR to the cloud takes much less effort than trying to persuade them to start with something that is critical to their IT operations.

You can easily argue that moving these services can help them test the waters, e.g. when failing over and failing back during DR testing, without impacting their business. This would also illustrate the benefits the customer can gain, which could include reduced costs, increased efficiencies, and superior features.

You’re enabling your customer to “see” the opportunity cloud represents, while also experiencing the value of your offer and customer service excellence.

Don’t forget that data protection services which protect existing cloud data are also beneficial services to commence with, such backup of Microsoft 365 or Google Workplace data. This is often referred to as cloud-to-cloud backup.

Cybersecurity covers a sizeable functional area with solutions which range from anti-malware to penetration testing. Like backup and DR, some cybersecurity services live on the periphery, or migrating specific edge services to the cloud can occur without impacting business operations.

Again, you can use this to your advantage as you guide your customer on their cloud journey, as they can test the functionality and see the benefits without disrupting their operations.

Entrench yourself as the customer’s strategic cloud adviser

Using these strategies which start your customer on their cloud journey without impacting their operations, gives you the opportunity to begin the cloud conversation without facing the usual objections to change.

Furthermore, as these opportunities help you entrench yourself as the customer’s strategic cloud adviser, you can start working more closely with them and formulate a strategy to migrate all their services to the cloud. For example, you can help them sort out their DR planning, then Business Continuity, move on to networking, manage their licenses, administer their Microsoft 365 and then all of a sudden, they’re significantly advancing their cloud migration journey with you.

Ready To Accelerate Cloud Solutions Sales?

Contact us to discuss how digital marketing for technology companies can promote high-value, low-impact cloud services which accelerate demand for your cloud solutions sales.

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Country Managers responsible for the growth of regional or local operations of multinational enterprises and vendors face multiple challenges.

When it comes to digital marketing in local territories, Country Managers face a wide variety of unique hurdles they need to overcome. In this post we identify the top five lead generation challenges Country Managers face and outline practical solutions to overcome these challenges.

Challenge #1: Regional Teams are Stretched – the Strategy is There But the Bandwidth to Execute Isn’t

Regional teams are constantly being asked to launch, execute, grow and scale business in their region. Strategic region-specific marketing campaigns involve juggling many tasks, including locally-relevant content development, vendor and partner management amongst others.

Limited human resource capacity often results in team members needing to multi-task to ensure day-to-day operational activities are also completed. This often leads to marketing functions which are over-utilised and ineffective.

Taking on additional strategic marketing activities is a tall order

Asking these teams to take on added responsibility and run effective strategic projects and campaigns is a tall order which ultimately leads to vital strategic initiatives not receiving the attention they deserve. Or, if sufficient attention is allocated, it’s at the cost of operational activities.

Refocus scarce resources on value adding activities

Organisations can reprioritise team activities to achieve more. To accomplish this, organisations

need to adopt a strategic approach where key outputs are identified. Based on these identified deliverables, the organisation can then deduce which activities create the most value.

The team can then be repurposed to accomplish the identified activities which give the most value in the shortest space of time.

Increase resources by recruiting or partnering with a local strategic partner

In some circumstances, repurposing team activities may not be a feasible option. The obvious solution is to employ additional human resources.

However, identifying, approaching and recruiting an individual who possesses the strategy experience, marketing research capabilities and local market knowledge required is a challenge, especially if this needs to be achieved within a limited timeframe.

Partnering is an option for those organisations who have a limited timeframe, stretched capacity or do not want to increase their internal headcount.

A local strategic partner would have the local knowledge, skills and experience necessary to successfully execute a local campaign.

Challenge #2: A Prospect Database Has Become a Large List of Unqualified Contacts

Optimising an effective customer marketing database is not a simple undertaking. Managing and maintaining the database for strategic lead generation purposes is challenging.

If database management has not been a core focus, or if quantity of contacts took precedence, it can be common for a database to have become a large and inaccurate list of contacts over time.

The larger the organisation, the greater the challenge

The larger the organisation, the more unwieldy the customer marketing database can become. In addition, databases used by multiple teams across regions and for different purposes can lead to inconsistency in the way the data is recorded.

Databases eventually become large contact lists

These issues lead to databases essentially becoming a giant list of contacts, lacking relevant profiling data. This renders them ineffective as strategic marketing tools due to the disproportionate amount of lead nurturing information that may be missing or unknown.

Solutions which segment contacts by buyer persona and lead type are the answer

Organisations should investigate implementing solutions to enrich contacts through segmenting them by lead type. Categorising contacts into multiple lead types is vital in mounting and successfully executing a lead generating campaign.

This can be challenging to resolve when CRMs are deployed globally for all regional teams.

Without attempting to resolve for all regions, regional teams can aim to segment their qualified prospects. This can deliver a true competitive advantage locally as they can use this database to target qualified prospects effectively.

This ultimately leads to a better closure rate and, as a result, an increase in sales, improved ROI and enhanced customer satisfaction.

A great way to kickstart this process is to deploy campaigns which can qualify local prospects or register some form of interest or intent from prospects in order to provide leads for local Sales Team nurturing.

Challenge #3: Global Brand Campaigns Are Effective, But Are They Enough?

An organisation’s global marketing team will often deploy brand campaigns and provide assets that can be leveraged by local country teams.

While these campaigns can be great for building or expanding regional brand awareness and for large-scale promotional efforts, Regional Marketing teams need assets and templates relevant to local markets to generate actionable leads for their local Sales Team.

Global marketing teams are already stretched

Global marketing teams are incentivised to build the organisation’s global brand which is a full-time commitment. They’re already stretched, juggling multiple global marketing objectives.

Providing the necessary and detailed support for a specific regional team is usually not feasible. Particularly if a global marketing teams supports one regional team, then it will need to support all regional teams around the world in the same way. This usually isn’t feasible either.

Local content is needed but the development is time consuming

Developing and deploying campaign content that is meaningful for a local region presents challenges. The content needs to be adapted so that it’s locally relevant – a time-consuming process. In addition, the input of local specialist skills is often required.

Local relevance is essential

Regional teams need an effective solution which is able to bolster their global teams and support their local teams without adding to the operational priorities each team already carries.

Regional teams need access to region-specific insights in order to develop and deploy content which is locally relevant and contextual.

The solution is to actively engage local markets in a structured approach to obtain the local insights needed by the global teams to support their country teams. This solution should however take cognisance of the high workload these teams are already carrying and seek to alleviate it in some way.

Challenge #4: Knowing Where To Start and What To Prioritise

The objective of a marketing campaign is to achieve a specific marketing goal through a focused, tactical initiative. A successful campaign therefore needs have a tailored marketing message which is focussed on a specific target market to induce action.

That’s why relevant research and meaningful insights are so important to strategic decision making.

Insights are needed to ensure local campaigns have the right focus

Without local insights obtained through a structured, locally-relevant solution process, deciding on which markets, customers or channels to focus on would be challenging.

A regional team needs to ensure its regional marketing content takes local market insights and evidence into account to achieve the laser focus needed to ensure a successful engagement.

Engagement with the local market is key to deriving the needed insights

Teams need to follow a structured approach to engage and test demand in the local market with locally relevant content to obtain these practical data insights.

These insights can then be used to create focused and effective content, ensuring the delivery of locally-relevant marketing campaigns.

Challenge #5: Managing and Growing A Channel Programme Is Incredibly Complex

Channel programmes are effective because they allow your brand to develop scale and market coverage, using local expertise and knowledge. However, managing and empowering large numbers of Channel Partners and Resellers is a challenge.

Enterprises with local regional channel programmes generally have two struggles; attracting new Channel Partners while increasing sales to end users through existing Channel Partners.

Lack of information results in an ineffective partner channel

A lack of locally-relevant information inhibits making informed strategic decisions to strengthen a channel programme, as not enough is known about the Channel Partners.

In addition, without relevant empirical information and considered insight, organisations find it difficult to empower Channel Partners to market themselves, generate demand and sell more.

These factors make it difficult for an organisation to identify new prospective partners, or to know what support is needed to facilitate their current partners’ success.

Relevant information is needed to ensure partner success

A channel programme needs insight into the metrics of the organisation’s Partners to succeed.

A solution which provides locally-relevant metrics can help regional teams understand which Partners to pay attention to and identify any additional resources Partners require to successfully market and sell the organisation’s products and services.

The right strategic partner can support Channel Partner lead acquisition to ensure right fit for channel expansion programmes.

Country Managers Need To Be Able To Think Global and Act Local

As part of an international team, local Marketers are responsible for ensuring their efforts align to and reinforce the global brand they represent. Meanwhile, your Sales Teams need to hit local targets.

These efforts need to be balanced with the nuances of the local market to ensure they execute effective marketing campaigns.

Global messaging needs to be made local.

Solutions are needed to obtain local insight

To ensure success, country teams need compelling solutions which can assist them in gaining market insight, make evidence-based decisions and then execute these against the local and global organisational strategy.

Unique challenges require tailored solutions

When it comes to practical demand generation capability, country teams are often faced with limited resources, database challenges and the limited impact of global campaigns.

In addition, country teams also need to identify which potential customers or Partners, such Value- Added Resellers (VARs), Managed Service Providers (MSPs), or System Integrators they should focus on in order to actively develop an efficient and successful Channel Programme.

Resolving regional lead generation challenges has common underlying requirements

While the challenges are varied and have different degrees of impact on individual businesses, the solutions proposed here share underlying requirements.

A pragmatic approach is needed

Many of the challenges covered below should be tackled using a pragmatic strategic approach of evidence gathering and targeting with specificity.

The adage of “our ideal client or ideal Partner is anyone with a budget” won’t cut it. Understanding buyer personas prior to any lead generating campaigns is a far better option.

Insights-fuelled campaign planning and development at local level ensures seamless internal sign-off of global marketing budgets.

Measure impact with meaningful metrics

Practical data insights can only be derived by actively engaging in the target market and using content and marketing activities to test demand and engagement. If this data doesn’t exist yet due to inactivity, then part of the objectives of the initial campaigns will be to start gathering data for future insights.

This evidence-based and insights-fuelled approach will give you the information you need to get laser-focused with strategy, content and tools over time.

Engage strategic partners who can plug in

Engaging skilled and specialised demand gen and marketing solution providers is an ideal option to access the skills, expertise and track record you need. They can help you develop the right strategic plans, and then successfully execute demand gen campaigns with you to make a measurable impact.

Ready To Overcome the Demand Generation Challenges Country Managers Face?

You need a marketing solution that makes it easier for your regional team to access the necessary local strategic marketing skills, research and lead qualifying capabilities they need to achieve region-specific marketing objectives.

As a tech marketing agency partner that delivers a measurable impact to spark growth, Filament has worked with enterprises and multinationals in Australia, New Zealand, SE Asia, India and the US.

Talk to us about how to take your regional marketing efforts to new heights with global messaging made local?

Do you use Google Analytics to analyse your website traffic? If so, you should make sure you’re familiar with the different web traffic sources that bring visitors to your website.

The more you know about Google Analytics acquisition channels, the easier it will be to optimise your marketing for more web traffic. If you’re a business owner, you should look at the traffic sources in Google Analytics to find out how potential customers find your website.

You may be asking yourself, “Which sources are available in Google Analytics?” In the article below, you’ll find definitions for some of the most common sources available in Google Analytics. These channels include direct, paid search, organic search, referral and email.

Google Analytics tracks traffic from all these sources and shows metrics such as bounce rate, page views, and more. If you look at the acquisition metrics Google Analytics provides, you can produce reports that show how well your various marketing channels are working. Using Google Analytics is an important part of digital marketing for technology companies.

Read on to learn more about using Google Analytics to determine which marketing channels drive traffic to your website.

Definition of Google Analytics Direct Traffic

The first traffic source you should be aware of is direct traffic. What is direct traffic? Direct traffic comes from people who type your website’s URL into their web browser to access your site.

These visitors didn’t use Google to search for your website, and they didn’t come from a link found on another site. If you click into your Google Analytics acquisition report and see that a lot of your traffic is direct traffic, it means people know your website’s URL.

Getting a lot of referral traffic is usually a good sign, because it’s an indicator of brand recognition. The only issue with having a lot of direct traffic is that it’s not a marketing channel that you can build upon.

You should also be aware that Google sometimes assigns traffic as direct traffic if Google can’t determine the traffic source. This could signify that you need to fix some of your Google Analytics tracking information.

Definition of Google Analytics Paid Search Traffic

Do you run cost-per-click (CPC) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements? If so, you’ll likely see a fair amount of traffic coming from the Paid Search channel. One of the benefits of Google Analytics is that you can use it to track both paid and non-paid marketing channels.

The Google Analytics paid search definition is “traffic sources bringing visitors to your site that are attributed as CPC, PPC, or paid search.” If you dig into the data, you can also determine which campaigns and keywords delivered your website’s visitors.

It’s essential to pay close attention to paid search traffic, because this represents the return on your marketing investment.

Are you not getting a lot of paid search traffic despite spending a fair amount of money on paid search ads? That’s a sign that you may need to adjust your paid search strategy. If you don’t change your strategy, you risk wasting your marketing budget on ineffective ads.

Definition of Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic

Your website should come up in search results when people search for related keywords. Some people will come to your site after clicking on your link in organic search results.

Google Analytics categorises the visitor as coming from “organic search.” The search results page has paid and organic results, but website visitors who click on a paid advertisement link will be categorised as paid search traffic.

Websites that get a lot of traffic from organic search usually do excellent search engine optimisation. If you’re not seeing a lot of organic traffic, it likely means your website isn’t showing up on the first page for most keywords.

One way to get more organic search traffic is by creating new keyword-optimised content on your website. You may also want to look into the technical SEO components of your site to make sure everything is up to date.

Definition of Google Analytics Referral Traffic

As you’re looking at the list of web referral sources in Google Analytics, you’ll notice one category titled “referral.” This category refers to traffic that comes to your website from a different website.

For example, someone may be reading an article on a magazine’s website that links to a page on your website. If the person clicks on the link, that person will be directed to your website, and Google will categorise them as “referral traffic.”

You can expect to get a lot of referral traffic if your site has a lot of backlinks from other websites. Backlinks also help improve your website’s search ranking, which will drive more organic traffic.

If you don’t see much referral traffic, it may be time to start a link building campaign. You can do this by creating helpful content on your website. Next, reach out to other websites to see if they would be interested in linking to your website.

Definition of Google Analytics Email Traffic

Many businesses use email marketing to communicate with potential customers. If someone clicks on one of your business’s emails and the link takes them to a page on your website, these visitors fall into the “email traffic” category.

When you’re analysing your Google Analytics data, you’ll likely see spikes in email traffic on days that you send out emails. Email traffic usually isn’t as consistent from one day to the next as other traffic sources like organic or paid search.

Reviewing your Google Analytics Acquisition Channels

Now you’re familiar with the different Google Analytics channels. As a result, you’re ready to use this powerful tool to discover how people find your business online. Google can help you optimise your marketing to deliver more traffic, leads and customers.

Once you figure out which marketing channels drive the most traffic to your website, you can focus on those channels. This will help you attract even more website visitors.

Are you interested in learning more about digital marketing and driving traffic to your site?

Get in touch with the digital marketing experts at Filament.

For a comprehensive overview of how analytics functions as part of your content marketing, visit Digital Marketing for Technology Companies: An Introduction.

HubSpot is a powerful cloud-based marketing, sales, and customer service platform that companies use to accelerate their growth. But to get the most out of your investment in HubSpot, you need to ensure that you are leveraging this powerful tool fully.

That’s where a HubSpot portal audit comes in. An audit will help you structure your data and plan for the future.

What Is a HubSpot Audit?

A HubSpot audit thoroughly analyses your HubSpot account to ensure it was set up correctly, identify what is working efficiently and to uncover areas that can be improved.

The audit aims to help you better organise, fine-tune and streamline your digital marketing and sales activities, as well as customer success, with the intention of improving performance.

The scope of an audit will depend on which HubSpot products you need to optimise your investment in, which can include:

  • HubSpot CRM
  • HubSpot Marketing Hub
  • HubSpot Sales Hub
  • HubSpot Service Hub
  • HubSpot CMS Hub, and/or
  • HubSpot Operations Hub.

Why Is It Important To Audit Your HubSpot Regularly?

Every company is unique and is on its on trajectory. From organisational strategy, personel, and market landscape, everything is changing constantly.

It’s precisely because of this constant change why HubSpot audits on a regular basis are so critical. When you have an audit done, you can see what you’re doing well, what you can do better, and what resources you lack but could use in the future.

CRMs can become cluttered over time, collect incorrect data and, if left unmanaged, can turn into a large unstructured list of contacts. Perhaps accessing lead conversion data is challenging. HubSpot CRM audits are a smart option if you’re developing lists, workflows, and forms regularly.

For example, if contact records are lacking information, contact properties aren’t optimised to your unique business, or there are multiple duplicate contacts, they can cause unreliable automated workflows or less optimal lead nurture experiences since they are receiving irrelevant or incorrect emails.

In the next section we outline the top reasons why your business might need an audit of your HubSpot account.

a

Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Hubspot Audit

The decision to invest in HubSpot would have been a major organisational decision and not taken lightly by the leadership team and marketing pros involved in the process. There’s the marketing budget allocation aspect, as well as the commitment to onboard new marketing technology and IT infrastructure into the business.

It’s critical that every company that made this decision is leveraging maximum value from their investment and is continually optimising its use within operations.

Here are the top reasons why you need a HubSpot audit.

1. Hubspot is underutilised

Teams that start under-utilising HubSpot over time do so for many reasons, some of which can include:

  • Time constraints
  • Lack of expertise, and
  • Budget factors.

A common analogy is of “the Ferrari idling in the garage”. A decision was made to invest in the tool, but it’s simply just not getting used.

If not used to its full potential, it’s challenging to see a strong ROI, whether that’s money or time. Performing an audit can provide valuable insights into the inner workings of the company. Also, it reveals potential areas that need improvement.

Implementing audit recommendations has measurable effects on your marketing strategy and operations. As a result, your clients will have a better buying experience, and your team will be more productive.

2. It is challenging to quantify results

A HubSpot is a great tool to deploy marketing campaigns or manage sales activities. But if you’re unable to see the results and understand why they happened, it’s hard to know how to measure success. Performing a marketing audit is a great way to examine your current campaigns and identify any areas for improvement.

Take the time to audit your marketing portal to see how your campaigns are doing. The marketing team handles the first three lifecycle stages of the customer lifecycle:

Find out how well your team is doing and if the tools you’re using are facilitating you in reaching your goals. An audit can help you improve your marketing metrics. Use your data to identify marketing strategy gaps. Then develop a strategy to deal with all the issues and achieve results.

3. There has been turnover in the team

Your HubSpot portal can function well for now, but it may not be as simple if you have a personnel turnover and there are no HubSpot users in the company.

If managing HubSpot implementation was “owned” by a single marketing manager, HubSpot generally goes under-utilised if that team member departs.

Performing regular audits will verify that the systems put in place by previous employees are still relevant. So, new employees will not waste time figuring out how the tool works.

4. Unsure if HubSpot was set up correctly

If your company went through direct onboarding with the HubSpot team, that process would have been a facilitated process and your marketing team would have implemented the set up. Alternatively, a HubSpot Solutions Partner may have completed the onboarding for you.

Since every company is unique, you may be unsure if the tools were set up in a customised way that works best for your needs and goals. You may even have doubts about whether there were gaps in the technical set up or onboarding process.

A HubSpot audit will provide the necessary insight to understand whether it was set up correctly, and if gaps are found, what to do to resolve them.

5. Database is unsegmented

Your contact database is critical to the growth of your revenue as it’s an immensely valuable tool for your strategic marketing. Having a curated and qualified database of prospects, leads and customers drives a series of benefits for your organisation, including shorter sales cycles, increased close rates, profitability and growth.

But managing and maintaining an effective database is not a simple undertaking. If this was left unmanaged, the database may have become impractical and ineffective as a strategic marketing tool due to the fact that a disproportionate amount of information is missing or incorrectly categorised, i.e. has become bad data. Also, any duplicate contacts will need to be cleaned by merging contacts in CRM.

Clean data improves segmentation, which facilitates how you interact with your customers. A system clean of soft bounces, hard bounces or contact details that are no longer valid can provide better clarity of email metrics and performance as well.

Knowing where your leads are in the customer lifecycle is easier when your database is clean and reliable. As a result, you will craft targeted inbound marketing messages that speak directly to them.

6. Database is not engaged

Irregular or lack of communication with your HubSpot database reduces engagement over time. If your prospects or leads don’t hear from you, they go cold. Many leaders equate the strength of their database by its size. The reality is that a large database with unengaged contacts and companies likely is not as strong as previously believed.

Lack of contact engagement can also occur where contacts don’t have assigned owners.

You can measure the level of interaction of each of your contacts by looking at contact properties and attributes such as:

  • The latest email open date
  • The recent date of conversion
  • The recent reply to a sales email

A HubSpot audit will uncover how many contacts are unengaged. You can then can sort unengaged contacts by the date they were most recently engaged or simply remove outdated contacts.

7. Reporting is not tailored to management requirements

For HubSpot to truly be effective, the reporting needs to be customised to the needs of the company and make sense to leadership teams.

If the HubSpot dashboards and reporting are not tailored to the needs of management, an audit is needed to identify how it can be customised.

8. Buyer personas are not actively used

An effective inbound tool is the creation of buyer personas. Using these “persona” representations of your actual customers, you can use them to improve the way your marketing communicates with your contacts.

Buyer personas make it easy to develop persona and contact-specific messages and relevant content that resonate with your target audiences. These activities also improve conversion rate.

If you’re not using buyer personas in the HubSpot tool, an audit will help identify how they can be leveraged to help identify qualified leads in your CRM.

9. No email strategy in place

Emails are an important part of both marketing and sales campaigns. Checking your email’s health is critical. HubSpot gives you a lot of information about how well your emails perform with your contacts. You can track the success of your email campaigns by looking at the open and click-through rates.

Using industry standards as a guide, review your email performance. Besides metrics, look at other things like the design of your emails as part of the audit process.

Are your emails optimised to achieve the best results? Make sure you personalise marketing emails for the recipients. Use A/B testing on your emails to see which elements, such as the layout, CTA, subject line, and message, perform best.

If your marketing communications doesn’t include an email strategy, a HubSpot audit will make the case for why one is needed.

10. The time cost of repetitive admin tasks is too high

The time cost of too much administration can be high, especially when it comes to sales teams.

HubSpot enables you to cut down on admin with automated workflows and sequences, depending on which tools you are using. You can create workflows for various activities to take place based on lifecycle stage, deal status, close dates, or based on many other contact records to trigger activities.

You could create an active list for any contact who doesn’t have a persona assigned to them or to assign contacts to the right primary contact.

A HubSpot audit can help identify how workflows will help you keep your database up to date and reduce your time on periodical database cleanup. It also saves you time and money.

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12 Benefits Of a Hubspot Audit You Don’t Want To Miss

A well-functioning HubSpot platform eliminates friction as contacts progress through the buyer’s journey. Customers will keep coming back for more if you make the buying process easy and fun for them. As more leads progress through the funnel, an audit examines whether the tools create the best possible experience.

If you want to save your team time and headaches, a HubSpot CRM audit will look for ways to make their jobs easier.

1. Maximise your marketing investment

Many pillar pages, landing pages, blog posts, tutorials, videos and emails may already exist or have been deployed, but do you know which ones generate website traffic?

The fundamental reason to audit your HubSpot is to maximise your marketing investment. The intended outcome of the audit will be to align your content with your buyer personas, buyer journey and lifecycle stages, and the right keywords to build authority.

2. Identify marketing and sales funnel gaps

Your content is the key to attracting new customers and boosting your sales efforts. At each point of the buyer’s journey, your content and landing pages should prompt them to take some action. It should also improve the user’s overall experience.

A funnel gap analysis aims to understand if leads are being lost at any stage. That way you can create ways to improve the performance of your funnels and pipelines.

3. Engage with your CRM database

Preventing your CRM from becoming an unengaged HubSpot contact list is critical. The benefit of a HubSpot audit is to uncover how different approaches to engagement can improve lead flow and sales.

4. Improve segmentation and personalisation

Segmentation of contacts in your CRM is to target customer groups rather than the public to organise effective campaigns. By focusing their efforts on personalised campaigns, segmentation helps marketers save money, time, and other resources. A CRM

5. Improve Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Auditing your HubSpot and website will reveal any opportunities for improving call to actions (CTAs). Where CTAs are in place on a landing page with higher website traffic, a low CTR may be the result of uncompelling language or a content offer that doesn’t suit a particular buyer persona.

6. Increase lead conversion rates

A HubSpot audit lets you reassess your website’s effectiveness, such as lead generation and conversion. Uncovering missed opportunities or underperforming conversions on a web page or landing page enables you to A/B test ways to improve conversion rate.

7. Improve lead quality

Auditing and uncovering areas for improvement in your HubSpot portal will include assessing buyer personas, engagement and the type of content used to nurture prospects and leads. By focusing on attracting specific types of leads, and qualifying them with content, you can improve the overall quality of leads your sales team nurtures and converts.

8. Optimise lead scoring

An audit of the contacts and companies in your CRM will include assessing your lead scoring.

Lead scoring is a process of ascribing points to contacts based on a range of factors including demographics, lifecycle stage, and how they interact with your digital content assets which HubSpot can track. A HubSpot audit can help show how to better optimise your lead scoring.

9. Shorten lead cycles

It is possible to shorten lead cycles and positively affect the sales process by improving lead qualities. Your sales team will be engaged and nurturing more highly engaged contacts as a result of a better leveraged HubSpot platform. A HubSpot audit can point you in the right direction.

10. Identify automation opportunities

The automation potential of HubSpot is a major leverage point but it’s hard to know where to get started or how to improve. A HubSpot audit can identify workflow automation opportunities for you to leverage.

11. Consolidate reporting

When your data and reporting is spread out, it is difficult to understand how to monitor and adjust, let alone understand effectiveness. A HubSpot audit can show where you can consolidate reporting into efficient dashboards.

You can easily observe how your strategies in your Marketing Hub boost your pipeline for sales teams through comprehensive data.

12. Prioritise activities

It is much easier to prioritise activities once you have visibility of everything. A HubSpot audit can rank effectiveness of actions items and provide recommendations around where to place focus first.

Ready To Get The Most Out Of Your HubSpot Investment?

You can increase the quality of your traffic and the conversion rates of your marketing efforts by performing an audit.

Get the most out of your HubSpot investment with a Volt Lab HubSpot audit. We are HubSpot experts who can audit your account and advice, helping you to identify what’s working well and where you can improve your overall performance.

Contact us today for your HubSpot audit.

Business leaders are presented with a lot of metrics and understanding marketing ROI is a real challenge.
There is an endless amount of detail and data that can accessed, from website visits, conversion rates, generated leads per channel, engagement on social media platforms, blog post shares, email click-through rates and the list goes on and on. 
 
Every business leader wants to know the actual impact of your marketing efforts. In the end, the ultimate metric is ROI.
The purpose of this article isn’t to outline every metric that is important, but rather, to understand high level metrics that can help determine marketing ROI.

The Challenge Of Identifying Marketing ROI

While many business leaders theoretically understand that a solid marketing team can have a direct impact to their company’s bottom line, it can be just as common for executives to believe that marketers aren’t focused enough on meaningful or impactful results. They want marketing to able to show how a strategy or activities are driving or contributing to driving incremental increase in customer demand.
 
When it comes to metrics that identify marketing ROI, you should be looking to achieve reporting that includes data on the total cost of marketing, salaries, overhead, revenue, and customer acquisitions. Depending on where a business is at, this is often easier said than done.
With so many variables and hurdles, even identifying the simplest of metrics can be enormously challenging. The following six metrics to identify marketing ROI are a good place to start.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

What CAC is

The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a metric used to determine the total average cost your company spends to acquire a new customer.

How to calculate CAC

Take your total sales and marketing spend for a specific time period and divide by the number of new customers for that time period.
Sales and Marketing Cost = Program and advertising spend + salaries + commissions and bonuses + overhead in a month, quarter or year
New customers = Number of new customers in a month, quarter, or year
 
Formula:  sales and marketing cost ÷ new customers = CAC

What this means and why it matters

CAC illustrates how much your company is spending per new customer acquired. You want a low average CAC. An increase in CAC means that you are spending comparatively more for each new customer, which can imply there’s a problem with your sales or marketing efficiency.

Marketing Percentage of Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

What it is

The Marketing Percentage of Customer Acquisition Cost is the marketing portion of your total CAC, calculated as a percentage of the overall CAC.

How to calculate it

Take all of your marketing costs, and divide by the total sales and marketing costs you used to compute CAC.
 
Sales and Marketing Cost = Program and advertising spend + salaries + commissions and bonuses + overhead in a month, quarter or year
 
Marketing Costs = Expenses + salaries + commissions and bonuses + overhead for the marketing department only problem with your sales or marketing efficiency.
Let’s look at an example:
Marketing Cost = $150,000
Sales and Marketing Cost = $300,000
/ M / CAC = $150,000 ÷ $300,000 = 50%

What this means and why it matters

The M%-CAC can show you how your marketing team’s performance and spending impact your overall Customer Acquisition cost. An increase in M%-CAC can mean a number of things:
  1. Your sales team could have under-performed (and consequently received) lower commissions and/or bonuses.
  2. Your marketing team is spending too much or has too much overhead.
  3. You are in an investment phase, spending more on marketing to provide more high quality leads and improve your sales productivity.

Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC (CLV:CAC)

What CLV:CAC is

The Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost (CLV:CAC) is a way for companies to estimate the total value that your company derives from each customer compared with what you spend to acquire that new customer.

How to calculate it

To calculate the CLV:CAC you’ll need to compute the Lifetime Value, the CAC and find the ratio of the two.
 
CLV = (Revenue the customer pays in a period – gross margin) ÷ Estimated churn percentage for that customer
 
Formula   CLV:CAC

What this means and why it matters

The higher the CLV:CAC, the more ROI your sales and marketing team is delivering to your bottom line. However, you don’t want this ratio to be too high, as you should always be investing in reaching new customers. Spending more on sales and marketing will reduce your CLV:CAC ratio, but could help speed up your total company growth.

Time to Payback CAC

What it is

The Time to Payback CAC shows you the number of months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring new customers.

How to calculate it

You calculate the Time to Payback CAC by taking your CAC and dividing by your margin-adjusted revenue per month for your average new customer.
 
Margin-Adjusted Revenue = How much your customers pay on average per month
 
Formula   CAC ÷ Margin-Adjusted Revenue = Time to Payback CAC
Let’s look at an example:
Margin-Adjusted Revenue = $1,000 CAC = $10,000
Time to Payback CAC = $10,000 ÷ $1,000 = 10 Months

What this means and why it matters

In industries where your customers pay a monthly or annual fee, you normally want your Payback Time to be under 12 months. For industries where a single product or project service is sold, the Payback Time can look differently. The less time it takes to payback your CAC,  the sooner you can start making a profit off of your new customers.
Generally, most businesses aim to make each new customer profitable in less than a year.

Marketing Originated Customer Percentage

What it is

The Marketing Originated Customer Percentage is a ratio that shows what new business is driven by marketing, by determining which portion of your total customer acquisitions directly originated from marketing efforts.

How to calculate it

To calculate Marketing Originated Customer Percentage, take all of the new customers from a period, and tease out what percentage of them started with a lead generated by your marketing team.
 
Formula   New customers started as a marketing lead ÷ New customers in a month = Marketing Originated Customer %

What this means and why it matters

This marketing ROI metric illustrates the impact that your marketing team’s lead generation efforts have on acquiring new customers. This percentage is based on your sales and marketing relationship and structure, so your ideal ratio will vary depending on your business model. A company with an outside sales team and inside sales support may be looking at 20-40% Margin Originated Customer Percentage, whereas a company with an inside sales team and lead-focused marketing team might be at 40-80%.

Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage

What it is

The Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage takes into account all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads, anytime during the sales process.

How to calculate it

To determine overall influence, take all of the new customers your company accrued in a given period, and find out what percentage of them had any interaction with marketing while they were a lead.
 
Formula    Total new customers that interacted with marketing /  Total new customers = Marketing Influenced Customer %

What this means and why it matters

This marketing ROI metric takes into account the impact marketing has on a lead during their entire buying lifecycle. It can indicate how effective marketing is at generating new leads, nurturing existing ones, and helping sales close  the deal. It gives you as business leader a big-picture look into the   overall impact that marketing has on the entire sales process.

Using Metrics To Understand Marketing ROI and Inform Decision Making

Tracking different marketing data points to better understand what’s working and what’s not can sometimes result in losing sight of what’s most important.
 
Reporting on the high level impact of marketing ROI doesn’t mean you should no longer pay attention to site traffic, social shares, and conversion rates. It simply means that when looking at metrics for reporting, it’s crucial to understand performance that displays ROI to your company’s bottom line.
 
Rather than focusing on just the tactical metrics, use the metrics we detailed to understand at a higher level how your marketing program led to new customers, lower customer acquisition costs, or higher customer lifetime values.
 
When you can review metrics that provide visibility on actual marketing ROI, you’ll be in a much better position for making strategic and budget allocation decisions based on evidence and performance.

Want To Figure Out How To Identify Marketing ROI?

 Get in touch with us to discuss how we can put a foundation of marketing metrics in place for your marketing program.