Posts Tagged ‘Lead management’

Build Lead Personas For Better Lead Nurturing

June 17th, 2011 Merlin Francis No Comments

If you are ready to spend some time on putting together your lead nurturing campaigns there is a great marketing tactic, which can really improve the quality and success rate of your campaigns.

The B2C industry has always relied on building buyer personas, which then become the core of all their marketing programs. This method of breaking down you prospects into different groups based on their demographics, interests, motivations etc. can go a long way in customizing your messaging to their needs and ensuring they in turn identify with the messaging and respond to it.

When applied to B2B, building lead/corporate personas based on the size of the company, industry type, their search query, expressed intent etc. can help marketing teams customize their messaging in a way that is in line with the needs of their leads. You can also add your product use case scenarios if possible for the personas you create, this will help you pre-empt a need and offer a more relevant solution than a generic one.


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Posted in B2B marketing, Drip Marketing Campaigns, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Automation | Tags: , , , , ,

Once Upon A Time….Converted Leads Into Customers By Telling a Story

April 14th, 2011 Merlin Francis No Comments

Storytelling is a very popular concept in the B2C world. Advertisers and marketers have used storytelling effectively in their campaigns to build brand awareness and customer loyalty. In a B2C scenario it works because you have to relate to someone at an individual level, if your story appealed to this person, he will in all probability buy your product.

But can the same be replicated in a B2B scenario, where it is usually a group of individuals who decide on wether to buy that packaging machine or software subscription? Longer sales cycles also make story telling difficult, it is no mean task to grab someone’s interest and then keep entertaining them for months together.

So can this effective marketing technique be used within the B2B marketing limitations? Well the answer is yes, as long as you keep one thing in mind…


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Posted in B2B marketing, Drip Marketing Campaigns, Lead Nurturing | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Best Practices in Marketing Validation

January 7th, 2011 Guest Blogger 1 Comment

Regardless of how talented the sales team may be and how aggressive the approach, a poorly conceived product offering will inevitably lead to disappointing results, if not outright failure. In today’s highly competitive product and business markets, failure is simply not an option.


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Posted in B2B Sales, B2B marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Lifecycle Management, Marketing Automation | Tags: , , , ,

Improving Data Quality in CRM

December 10th, 2010 Guest Blogger No Comments

Bad data sucks. It kills CRM adoption, it reduces campaign performance and it confuses people. Up to date, accurate data is the blood that keeps the sales organization moving. Without good data, it is hard to find prospects then turn those prospects into customers.

To improve data quality, we recommend a five step process.


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Posted in B2B Sales, CRM, Lead Lifecycle Management | Tags: , , , , , , ,

A Model for Aligning Sales and Marketing Processes

December 8th, 2010 Guest Blogger No Comments

Sales and Marketing alignment is a complex issue involving culture, processes, politics and egos. All of this may seem daunting to an eager sales or marketing manager who simply wants to drive improved revenue results in their company by getting Sales and Marketing to collaborate more effectively.

Regardless of the complexity and obstacles, there is one relatively simple (but not entirely easy) step that companies should take immediately. This is to identify the stages of the buyer’s journey and align their sales and marketing processes to it.


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Posted in B2B Sales, B2B marketing, Sales – Marketing Alignment | Tags: , , , , , ,

Segmenting IT buyers in Your Marketing Automation Campaigns

November 22nd, 2010 Guest Blogger No Comments

For many new users of marketing automation tools, one of the biggest challenges is segmenting the CRM database in a way that drives results. We’ve assembled some simple best practices that you can use to build better campaigns.


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Posted in Inside Sales, Lead Qualification, Marketing Automation | Tags: , , , , ,

Inside Sales Team – Unsung Heroes?

October 11th, 2010 Shreesha 1 Comment

Inside Sales teams are often just associated with ‘cold calling’ and doing the dirty work for the Sales team – passing ‘Sales Ready Leads’ on set criteria to the Sales Team to close them. Often their job is supposed to be getting ‘meetings’.

While the Sales team takes all the credit for bringing in deals…are the Inside Sales teams the unsung heroes?


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Posted in Inside Sales, Marketing Automation, Sales Enablement, Sales – Marketing Alignment | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ending the Sales & Marketing Blame Game

October 6th, 2010 Merlin Francis No Comments

Every company which has marketing and sales departments has at some point, witnessed the famous – sales and marketing fight and blame game – more commonly known as the sales and marketing mis-alignment. In a B2B set up these differences are more glaring as compared to a B2C company.In most B2B companies, the primary objective of marketing is to generate quality business Leads and of sales to convert these into closed deals. Both these departments are also measured based on the number of Leads generated and the number of sales closed, respectively.

In reality the role of marketing in a B2B company is relationship building and that of sales to use this relationship and help the prospect make a rational buying decision based on business value offered by the company’s solutions.

Irrespective of how companies want to position their marketing and sales objectives the truth is marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin.


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Posted in B2B marketing, Lead Qualification, Sales – Marketing Alignment | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Decode Your Online Leads

August 7th, 2010 Merlin Francis 1 Comment

Consciously or unconsciously, every visitor on your website leaves behind a set of clues, which if decoded, can easily convey a lot of information on the Lead and his intentions. This post tries to decode some of these clues, which provide greater insight on a visiting Lead.


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Posted in Lead analytics | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Salesforce’s ‘LEAD’ing intentions!

April 22nd, 2010 Shreesha No Comments

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced its definitive decision to buy Jigsaw, the business data provider for $142 Million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase-price. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011. The announcement caught a lot of people by surprise because [...]


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Posted in Future trends, Leadership Views | Tags: , ,
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