Archive for the ‘Thought Leadership’ Category

Marketing Automation Is A Salesperson

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

Many of your customers are not ready to buy when they first meet you.  They are in the research and education phase of their buying process.  If you are a sales organization, your process typically revolves heavily around selling to ready customers.  The lens becomes narrowly focused on who is ready.  These are the minority.  The majority might be ready in 90 days and beyond.

Following Up Via Marketing Automation

It’s amazing that organizations will pay a person salary plus benefits often totaling $70K+ per year not including the management responsibilities.  The majority of this person’s time is spent following up.  And how does the typical salesperson follow up?  They call and interrupt people.  Buyers have become quite adept today at blocking out strangers, interruptions and things they are not ready for.  Caller ID, spam filtering, do not mail, etc. are in place because of sales processes that miss the mark.  They are selling rather than nurturing with value.  It creates mistrust and brand damage.

A New Sales Process With Less Cost

So what if you re-engineered your sales process recognizing the dramatic change in how people buy today?  Here’s how it could look:

Fewer Sales People That Focus On Closing

Have fewer sales people that focus only on the last leg of the sale – conversion.  This is what a good salesperson is about.  They know how to close.  Allow them to be set up for success by economizing their time rather than filling it with a pipeline of largely improbability.  Thus, they would be talking to those that are ready to move forward with your value proposition.  They would be brought in to do their job in the most relevant conversation of their job.

More Nurturing

Allow your marketing automation system to nurture and make ready those who are unready today.  Within the Loopfuse system, you can set up various campaigns, Lead Flows, metrics and action triggers to help a buyer become more ready.  This system has far less cost than a salesperson and is much more effective because it brings value, is consistent and creates transparency to a buyer’s readiness.

You can design your automation processes to work with specific buyer profiles you have identified and nurture them in a custom and intimate way.

If you fail to nurture, are inconsistent or create interruption, you will lose the larger potential from a continuous closing pipeline.

The world has changed.  Change with it by recognizing that nurturing is critical when you are not allowed to interrupt today.  Your value, messaging and timing better be focused in order to win a customer who has many options.

Loopfuse Success

How To Automate The High Fidelity Sale

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

In Kevin Maney’s book, Trade-Off, Why Some Things Catch On And Others Don’t, we learn about two categories of products and businesses – Fidelity and Convenience.  High fidelity businesses are inconvenient.  They typically have cachet and price points which make it more desirable for upper end buyers.

High convenience businesses are easy to get in terms of cost and access.  Maney’s message is that to succeed, you must position and commit to one or the other.  Otherwise, you are destined to fail.  Ted Leonsis, former president of AOL, sums it up, “A successful business is either loved or needed.”  The problem is when you try to be both. (more…)

3 Marketing Automation Strategies Using Loopfuse

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

The promise of marketing automation is to create a repeatable, predictable process for nurturing unready leads.  In so doing, you gain the advantage of creating an automated funnel.  Your leads become ready for your sales process and in turn, previously neglected leads become valuable for a continuous pipeline. (more…)

Inbound Marketing With Loopfuse

Friday, December 10th, 2010

Closed loop marketing involves seeing information within and through the sales funnel. Your different marketing channels constitute costs in terms of dollars and effort. Measuring this within Loopfuse can be done with the inbound marketing tool sets provided in Loopfuse in real-time.

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Sales & Marketing Best Practices: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

With the Loopfuse Exchange launched starting with Taking Your Website to the Next Level, we will now cover a very hot topic in marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  No doubt, SEO is on the mind of all marketers these days as they look for a cost-effective way to promote their website.  Search Engine Optimization: Best Practices covers topics such as:

  • Anatomy of a Well Optimized Site
  • Human readability versus Indexing Engine readability
  • You don’t have to optimize every page for the same term
  • Optimizing for different search engines – Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo, etc.
  • What Term(s) should You Optimize For?

Plus, we feature Oco, the only SaaS BI provider to deliver business analytics, multiple-source data integration, and data warehousing as a comprehensive, integrated solution and a Loopfuse customer, in this article with great examples on how to SEO your website.

Download Search Engine Optimization: Best Practices

Inbound Marketing Channels

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

A well-designed Loopfuse Lead Flow will funnel traffic from your inbound marketing channel.  Your presence in cyberspace and the content which drives engagement creates an avenue for a click.  That click starts the opportunity to connect in a relevant, personal and timely way with a stranger.  Turning that stranger into a friend is the art and science behind the powerful Loopfuse demand generation engine. (more…)

Choosing the right captain for your marketing automation ship

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Interview with Scott Olson (President, Mindlink Marketing)

For many marketing organizations, the implementation of a marketing automation tool and methodology is going to represent a major departure from the status quo.  With marketing automation there is a major focus shift to collecting and analyzing data.  Segregating prospects, understanding where they fall in the buying process, or through which channels they prefer to interact all require the ability to apply data to marketing problems.  Having the right mix of internal skill sets is critical to success with marketing automation.

In this episode we are joined by Scott Olson, the President of Mindlink marketing.  Scott and team focus on helping organizations better leverage data and understanding of the customer’s buying process to craft content and stories that drive conversion.
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Loopfuse Tracking

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

The opportunity to hone in on your prospective buyer in a one-to-one approach versus a one-to-many traditional marketing campaign requires attention to Lead Scoring and tracking. Setting up your system to follow the Loopfuse buyer from initial landing site contact to engagement with your sales and value propositions requires attention to each of the predetermined steps which qualify a buyer for the sales funnel. (more…)

Taking Your Website to the Next Level: Analyzing Web Performance

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

And finally,  it’s very important to measure the performance of your website.  Below is an excerpt from the article on “Analyzing Web Performance” from  Taking Your Website to the Next Level, ……

Lastly, you’ll want to be sure you measure how well your website investment is paying off. It’s actually very easy to learn how many people are visiting your website, where they’re from, whether they registered, how they found your website, etc. This information is very helpful—it shows you how well your awareness generation programs are working (e.g. advertising, PR, etc.) so you can figure out which ones to keep investing in, or drop.

Setting web analytics is easy. Sign up for Google Analytics or LoopFuse FreeView (or both!) and follow the instructions they provide for adding their analytics to your site; it’s very easy to do, and here are some samples of what Google and LoopFuse can tell you about your website visitors:

Download a copy of Taking Your Website to the Next Level

The right marketing automation partner can help you avoid the avoidable mistakes

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

On the surface, implementing a marketing automation tool appears fairly simple.  The problem though, is in not knowing what you don’t know.  Implementing a tool isn’t that hard, but getting it setup in a way, with the processes to match, to produce business value is another matter.  This is not an effort you want to go alone.  Like a tile floor, if it’s done wrong you have to rip and replace.

Someone that knows a thing or two about marketing automation, having installed and trained some of the earliest implementation of said tools is Don Dalrymple, President of AscendWorks.  Beyond his deep knowledge of the inner workings of many marketing automation tools, Don is also extremely well versed in training marketing organizations to focus on the customer rather than the process.

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