Market qualification (MQ) representatives, sometimes also known as lead qualification or lead qual reps, are highly specialized agents whose role in inside sales transactions is to qualify an inbound lead. Compared to lead development specialists who engage a sourced outbound lead, MQ reps are the ones who research a client who proactively engaged the service to see if there is a possible sale that can be made.

Marketing qualification reps: The tasks

While market qualification is similar to lead development, MQ is much easier to carry out due to a much lower level of research needed to qualify the client. Additionally, since the initiative is with the customer, MQ reps generally need a shorter engagement time to qualify a lead.

The only potential issue is that it’s possible to acquire leads that are not really the target of a service. This can be detrimental as the MQ rep can lose time that could have been used to qualify other incoming leads. A silver lining is that it could still open up good opportunities due to the number of potential clients who are interested in the service.

Tools of the Pre-Trade

Market qualification reps definitely need CRM tools when they engage their leads, moreso than their outbound lead counterparts. This is mostly because MQ reps have less targeted groups of customers to address, whereas outbound lead development specialists are already aware of the specific consumer group they are targeting (i.e. sourced from lead generation, etc.). Specific  CRM functions like the ability to record information, track the customer life cycle, and remind the team to follow up on a lead at specific stages—even after handing off to sales—are very important in market qualification. Even the circumstances of a customer who do not continue with the sales process is a rich source of market intelligence data and can further help MQ reps in improving their qualification process.

In line with having a strong CRM foundation, another good tool is marketing automation software. Because some leads can be qualified immediately based on social media, transaction and payment histories, or even based on their credit rating (if involving financial information), market automation software can help an MQ rep identify and prioritize strong leads. This will increase the velocity of lead hand-overs to the sales team, which allows them to work down their leads immediately and get back quickly to leads that need more research and identification.

Source: Tenfold

It’s long been conventional wisdom that trying to reach a wide audience is usually beneficial in business, but far too many companies spend needless resources chasing leads that aren’t likely to pay off in the long run. As an alternative strategy, many B2B-focused companies have discovered that account-based marketing has the potential to revolutionize their sales.

By making the simple change of allowing marketing and sales professionals to focus their resources on a specific client, companies are learning that it’s possible to create additional value for their customers and reach the untapped potential of their accounts. A recent study found that 60% of organizations that had been using account-based marketing for one year experienced at least a 10% bump in revenue.

The origins of account-based marketing

So if account-based marketing has suddenly become de rigueur for so many innovative B2B organizations, how did we get to this point? Most experts believe that simple forms of account-based marketing emerged in the world of 1960’s advertising agencies, where the agencies would pull out all of the stops in order to keep big clients happy. Most agencies relied heavily on the support from these power-player accounts, who would not only make up a substantial portion of their billings, but would also lead to headline-grabbing press that would keep the names of the partners in the news.

Later, it became clear to many B2B sales and marketing leaders that the specificity that was inherent in an account-based marketing strategy could do wonders for their companies. Most B2B-focused organizations target very specific customers, and they discovered that if they created a strategy that took advantage of this in unique ways they could better service their clients and grow revenue from existing accounts. The challenge was to take the very informal practice that emerged from the advertising industry and incorporate the principles into a concrete plan of action that could be replicated, measured, and improved upon.

Deciding if account-based marketing is right for your business

There are many different kinds of companies who can benefit from implementing account-based marketing techniques, but there are a few characteristics that make some organizations particularly well-suited to the process. Your company may be a good candidate for account-based marketing if:

• You’ve noticed a disconnect between your marketing and sales functions

One of the key benefits of account-based marketing is that it helps to better integrate your sales and marketing strategies, creating a seamless handoff that results in more conversions.

• You specialize in targeting a smaller volume of high-value accounts

If your company is already in the business of serving a smaller number of customers that have a potential for significant revenue growth per account, then you will likely benefit greatly from account-based marketing.

• Your average revenue per account is currently underperforming

In most cases, acquiring new customers is demonstrably more expensive than growing existing accounts. You may be wasting resources by constantly pursuing new revenue when there may be areas where you can provide additional value to your existing customers.

How account-based marketing benefits your customers, employees, and organization

Account-based marketing doesn’t exist to wring additional revenue from your customers, it creates an opportunity for your sales and marketing professionals to provide a highly-specialized level of service and discover new ways to provide value for existing clients. It’s great for the customers, because research shows that approximately 75% of buyers desire more personalized offers.

Your sales and marketing team members will likely benefit from the strategy as well. Account-based marketing techniques give them the chance to perform targeted research about their clients and industries, gathering knowledge that can help them improve the customer experience and earn exceptional accolades for their services.

Account-based marketing strategies also help to reduce the drain on your resources. You’ll spend less time and resources courting leads and prospects that may never convert, and you may also be able to reduce your client churn percentage; a serious concern for most growing B2B organizations.

Guidelines for implementing an account-based marketing strategy

Once you’re ready to start reaping the rewards of an account-based marketing strategy, it’s important to understand how to optimize the execution and get the most value out of your effort. Initially, your primary focus should be on identifying which accounts and personnel are high-value and how you need to allocate your resources accordingly. Then you can get down to the business of developing overall messaging and creating content that is relevant, valuable, and personalized. This is the stage where robust data analysis truly shines as it allows you to dig deep into what your most valuable customers truly need from your organization. Finally, you can determine the best marketing and sales channels for your specific clients and put your strategy into play.

Source: Tenfold

At best, sales and marketing teams are acquaintances. At worst, they’re enemies. At least, that’s the situation at most organizations. While a healthy bit of sibling rivalry typically doesn’t hurt, the sales and marketing relationship often suffers from miscommunication—or a complete lack of communication—as well as occasional animosity. This is remarkable, especially considering that the two teams typically have the same goal: increasing business revenue.

There is a point in the history of sales and marketing in which it may have made sense for these teams to display more competition than camaraderie. John Wanamaker—a marketer active in the 1800s who is often called the pioneer of advertising—is quoted as saying: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

It is easy to understand why salespeople didn’t appreciate marketing efforts in that time. There was no accountability to business results, and salespeople could find themselves wondering whether the marketing team was contributing at all to their work, even while marketers took some of the credit for business success.

Those days are over, though. With the rise of digital marketing and the advent of marketing technology, marketing accountability is at an all-time high. Furthermore, these advances have allowed marketers to take more responsibility in not just catching the attention of ideal clients, but also in nurturing them down the sales funnel to ensure a perfect hand off to sales.

Explaining The Definition of Sales and Marketing: Strategic Sales and Marketing and International Marketing 

What is Sales?

The sales team is responsible for moving products or services to customers. They are also responsible for upselling current customers and clients. While sales teams may practice some form of outreach through cold calling, they typically deal with leads that are brought to them by the marketing team. Salespeople develop relationships with these individuals, determine what their needs are, and determine the proper products and services to fill those needs.

What is Marketing?

The marketing team is responsible for everything from increasing brand awareness to delivering high quality leads to the sales team. From a higher level, the marketing team identifies and defines ideal customers, communicates with them on relevant online and offline platforms, and primes them for a relationship with a salesperson.

Strategic Sales and Marketing and International Sales and Marketing

While these two teams often operate on their own, strategic sales and marketing is the ideal state.  Strategic sales and marketing requires two important elements:

1. Working together in a separate but equal capacity that relies on great communication.
2. Looking to the future by highlighting trends in consumer behavior and pipeline growth as well as keeping a foot in the present by addressing customer’s needs in the day-to-day.

When it comes to international sales and marketing efforts, these elements are doubly important, given the expanded range and larger customer database.

7 Steps for Strategic Sales and Marketing

1. Create Personas in a Joint Sales & Marketing Effort 

Personas are generally considered the responsibility of the marketing team, and they are sometimes ignored by the sales team. Considering that each of these teams is speaking to the same ideal customers, though, this is a huge missed opportunity and an effort that should be worked on together. In the end, this work will benefit both teams.

While the marketing team may still be tasked with the work of creating these influential strategy pieces, sales should be heavily involved in the effort. Getting the input of salespeople up front, interviewing them throughout, and seeking their approval at the end will help marketers create personas that serve both teams and result in vital buy-in from salespeople.

2. Make an Effort to Document the Buyers’ Journey for Each Persona 

The buyer’s journey should be the basis of all sales and marketing efforts. Unfortunately, this step is often skipped. Even more unfortunate is the fact that sales and marketing rarely collaborate on this vital piece of strategy, despite the fact that they each are responsible for significant parts of it.

Sales and marketing leaders should work through each persona in joint sales and marketing sessions, examining how each persona becomes aware of their company, how they become a lead, and how they eventually become a sale. As the teams work through these stages, leaders should keep a list of the various needs and questions each persona will have. This process will help with the next step, which should address what assets are already available to answer these questions and to move each persona through to the next step.

3. Audit Sales and Marketing Assets and Document Gaps Along the Buyer’s Journey 

Now that both sales and marketing know what each persona’s journey to purchase looks like, it’s time to examine whether or not they have assets to speak to audience needs along each step of the process.

In this stage, both sales and marketing need to spend some time collecting everything that both the sales and marketing teams have created, including whitepapers, infographics, interactive quizzes, e-books, case studies, assessments, email streams, and more.

Once this is compiled, marketers and salespeople should organize these content pieces along each step of the funnel identifying where they have appropriate assets, and where they are lacking.

4. Establish a Content Marketing Plan Across the Buyers’ Journey 

Content marketing is often regarded as a brand awareness tactic, and one with questionable impact on revenue. While some sing the praises of content marketing, those who are focused on quantifiable business results may not be sold on the concept.

What many don’t know, though, is that content marketing is an ideal method for connecting sales and marketing as well as building a strong strategy that will move interested buyers through the sales process.

When creating a sales and marketing content strategy, make sure to get both sales and marketing leaders in the room to discuss what audience needs they’d like to address, and how content assets can support throughout the different stages of the funnel.

5. Develop a Joint Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Strategy 

While a content marketing strategy may seem to favor the marketing team, an account-based marketing strategy will focus on the needs of the sales team. Still, these efforts should be worked on together. Marketing and sales leaders can choose to create an organic ABM strategy or to adopt a more expensive—but very effective—ABM technology solution that will allow for sales and marketing automation.

While the sales team may be more in tune with the accounts they want to target, the marketing team should be brought in at every level. This is especially true when it comes to content creation for the ABM ads or for dynamic, account-focused content on websites.

6. Implement Regular Sales and Marketing Communication Efforts

One of the simplest steps for ensuring a great sales and marketing strategy that creates and maintains alignment of the teams is creating a regular cadence for communication. This could be as simple as a weekly email or as complex as a quarterly offsite. It’s best practice, though, to ensure that both teams are completely on the same page in terms of regular sales and marketing efforts as well as long term business goals.

7. Repeat Steps 1-6 on a Quarterly or Annual Basis

Finally, the last step for a successful sales and marketing strategy is revisiting and refining the steps above. The work of creating successful sales and marketing strategy is never finished. Instead, sales and marketing leaders should make it a priority to track progress, evolve their tactics, and stay abreast of both industry changes as well as client and consumer behavior changes.

Whether marketers are looking to bolster their international sales and marketing or simply start taking steps towards more strategic sales and marketing efforts, the 7 useful tips above will help to create a sales and marketing strategy that drives organizational success.

What’s most important is that marketing teams and sales teams are aggressively working together with an understanding of shared goals and responsibilities. Ultimately, as the roles of sales teams and marketing teams grow closer and the lines of accountability continue to blur, it is in everyone’s best interest to start working together.

The best part is, the more sales and marketing connect on personas, buyers’ processes, strategies, and results, the more refined the efforts will become and the better business results will be. In other words—everyone wins.

Source: Tenfold

Lead generation, the art of attracting potential customers to your business and converting them into buyers, has seen a rapid development in the last decades. Although it is still common to a certain degree to generate leads through conventional channels like personal referrals or telemarketing, the internet has clearly established itself as the preferred lead generation channel. Even the modern field of online marketing is changing at unmeasurable velocities. One clear sign is that lead generation techniques are shifting from an outbound perspective, to an inbound marketing strategy.

It is estimated that only 17% of marketers last year considered outbound marketing practices to provide the highest quality leads.  Sure, traditional techniques such as social media to generate awareness and email marketing to nurture captured leads are still commonly used in the sales funnel, but for the actual lead generation process of converting visitors into prospects, inbound is king. Naturally, traffic plays a key role in this process, and HubSpot estimates that at least 80% of the companies not meeting their revenue goals have less than 10 000 visitors. Nonetheless, no inbound strategy is complete without proper lead generation techniques.

There are hundreds of diverse lead generation strategies being implemented, some more successful than others. Among all the noise in the market, there are some clear trends that apply for this year and keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies and tactics will ensure that your company doesn’t miss valuable conversions out of your inbound visitors. Here are the five most promising trends in online lead generation for 2017.

1. No single channel, no unique device

Diversity is the name of the game in 2017. The time where lead generation channels were limited to a few alternatives, like the telephone or email, are long gone. Today you not only have a great deal of channels which you can choose from, even within a channel you have hundreds of options. Think of social media: LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, the list goes on… Great opportunities exist within this huge diversity. The key lies in leveraging the most important ones for your desired target group and combining them with adequate strategies. Nonetheless, one thing is certain: just a few channels, let alone a single one, will not suffice for a successful lead generation strategy.

The same applies to devices: limit your online business to a single device and you are almost certainly doomed to fail. With the increased usage of mobile devices, an online marketing campaign can no longer be focused on desktop computers and laptops alone. Last year there were 2.6 billion smartphone users globally and it is estimated that this number will grow to 6.1 billion by 2020. In the USA, at least two thirds of the population use a smartphone to access the internet. Thus, mobile friendliness is vital for every single online business nowadays. From display to functionality, SEO to traffic measurement, online businesses need to provide not only a UX that is adapted to mobile needs, but they also need to focus on the adequate lead generation tactics and technologies.

2. Quality-driven content marketing = quality lead generation 

In the inbound community, it is popularly stated that content is king. Studies show that per dollar spent, content marketing generates at least 3 times more leads than conventional marketing techniques. It is a great strategy to attract traffic through SEO techniques and also guide a customer along the Buyer’s Journey with proper educational information. However, there is a popular belief that although this technique does help increase audience numbers, it does not ensure high-quality lead generation. This is something that is bound to change and has already been changing for a while.

The immense amount of content offer available at the web is increasing with every single day. This has resulted in large content offer which usually consists of a huge portion of mediocre content published towards SEO goals and a small portion of valuable content. The second one is extremely important from an inbound marketing perspective and will see an increase in the next years. Companies will start focusing in acquiring content professionals and aiming towards content quality instead of quantity and frequency. Moreover, content will be tailored towards specific audiences and customers along specific phases of the Buyer’s Journey, instead of looking to attract a more general public based on virality.

3. Customized lead generation tools 

Just as with high-quality content, lead generation tools are starting to be customized so that they better fit the lead’s requirements, provide a more engaging user experience and thus generate more contacts for your business. A study by Econsultancy and Adobe showed that B2B marketers considered customer experience and personalization to be the most promising marketing trends in the next years along big data. One fourth of them even mentioned customer experience as the single most important opportunity. Engaging content will ensure that the inbound traffic that a business experiences can more effectively be converted towards potential customers. Moreover, personalized experiences from the earliest interaction phases between your leads and your business will give potential buyers a further reason to hang around.

Boring contact forms on a separate page are starting to appear less attractive than customized, gated content in online presentations or videos. Other great examples are quizzes and calculators, which have a much more appealing effect than a regular contact form or newsletter subscription and thus provide a more interesting variant to convert visitors into leads. Even integrated microsites that allow you to track specific user engagement are gaining large popularity.

Which tools you implement depend on the public you address with your content and combining different strategies with diverse tools can help find the adequate approach. And if you’re dubious about the success of adapting your lead forms towards your customer experience, remember that Expedia generated an extra $12 million a year just by removing one field from their regular contact form. Image if they introduced interactive lead generation tools…

4. Data-driven lead generation 

In the age of information, data is essential. It is estimated that 42% of marketers consider that lack of quality data is their largest obstacle towards quality lead generation. Detailed information on the behavior of prospects provide valuable insights on his journey along the sales funnels and helps sales reps take more accurate decisions based on specific data analysis. From tools like Google Analytics, to lead scoring systems, tracking the behavior of leads and registering it in large databases that can be analyzed will be essential. This trend in data analysis is reflected in three main aspects:

• Big data professionals: The increased need for professionals in analyzing large amounts of data on lead and customer behavior.

• Data Analytics Tools: From Google Analytics to CRM solutions such as HubSpot or Salesforce, there is a clear increase in the usage of tools that provide a statistical analysis of customer and lead behavior.

• Machine Learning: Although still on its infancy, machine learning is bound to be large in the following years, with lead scoring systems and other smart data being managed by artificial intelligence.

5. Automated prospecting 

The term marketing automation is probably more popular in the business environment nowadays, than Napoleon Bonaparte was at the beginning of the 19th century in France. It is a trend that is changing the way marketing and sales are done online. Over 70% of businesses are currently using or implementing a marketing automation solution and it is estimated that at the overall investments of companies in marketing technologies has surpassed that of advertising and that a company’s CMO on average invests more in automation technologies than a CIO in IT.

There is no question that marketing automation is big. However, CRM tools and automated lead nurturing have been around for a while, so what is the actual innovative trend here? Two words: automated prospecting. Automated lead generation has been introduced by diverse tools that not only generate lead data and capture contact details from inbound traffic, they also automate or semi-automate activities such as lead scoring and even follow-ups. This on the other hand gives marketers and sales reps more time to concentrate in other key activities along the sales funnels, such as closing main deals. Prospecting is usually one of the most resource-intensive activities of a company, and thus the possibility of automating most of this steps with technologies is bound to have a brilliant future for both, sales and marketing.

AS the VP of marketing from Google Cloud Alison Wagonfeld brilliantly pointed out:

“Marketing still needs art to go with the science.”

No matter how effective the new marketing and sales technologies are and how significantly the are improving the way business is done, we should never lose track of the human side of business. A healthy balance between both will ensure great success for your business in the years to come.

Source: Tenfold

Increasing B2B sales isn’t simply a matter of putting out your shingle and hoping that more customers will come your way. Businesses who purchase from you want to believe they have the right vendor at the right time for the right price. Because there are more people involved and there are higher price points, it can sometimes take months to close a B2B sale.

As a business who markets to other businesses, how can you ‘tilt the playing field’ and make sure that when the customer is ready to buy, YOUR company is the only one that comes to mind?

1. Collect Honest Feedback

Feedback, whether received through surveys, in-person interactions, or email, is vital for both technical improvements to your site and funnels and your customer-facing work. Because in-depth and useful feedback from clients is hard to come by, it’s important that you take steps to automate the process and encourage your clients to provide you with more.

Talk with your clients. Find out what they liked and what they didn’t like. Talk about the number of steps that they took to get to the sale and the process that they went through. Ask them what about your company caught their attention.

Your customer’s needs are constantly evolving. By listening to what they are saying and keeping your ‘finger on the pulse’ you can stay ahead of the competition, making more sales for your company.

2. Try video

There are compelling reasons to have video on your site, but the biggest reason is that it’s one of the most effective means of selling your company’s product.  Customers and clients engage with video, often watching and engaging with the shorter ones for the entirety of the clip.

Here are some noteworthy statistics about video marketing.

• 43% of customers want to see more video from marketers
• 9% of marketers name video as the type of content with the highest ROI
• 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it
• Shoppers who view video are 1.81x more likely to purchase than non-video viewers
• 4 in 5 customers believe that demo videos are helpful

Depending on your products, your videos can have many purposes.

• How-to videos explaining a single part of your product.
• Explainer videos that outline what your company does and how it does it.
• Funny videos designed to get others to think about your product.
• Video testimonials from your clients to persuade others.

3. Upselling and cross-selling

Upselling and cross-selling have increased sales of B2B and B2C companies for ages. Upselling simply offers a higher version of the product itself. Cross-selling offers related products to your clients.

Upselling

Amazon has this tactic down cold. For instance, If you place an order for a laptop, you will inevitably be asked whether you want to upgrade the memory card or get a better one. While it might seem like a logical thing to do but shown to billions of people every day can really boost your sales. The intent behind this is showing the customers that he could get a better product by spending a little extra.

Cross-Selling

The McDonald’s sales force are also pros at this tactic.  Cross-selling offers your client something different but related to the first product. For instance, you’ll most likely be asked the famous question, ‘would you like fries with that?’ or the less leading, ‘will that complete your order?’ with every order. This gives McDonald’s customers to look at the menu for another few moments, pondering their next tasty treat.

Cross-selling and upselling tactics can be applied to nearly any business who wants to improve its bottom line and increase B2B sales. By offering multiple versions of the same service or related services, you can create a selling juggernaut with your already ‘warm’ clients.

4. Events

Local events can boost your bottom line like nothing else because they allow you to put a face to the name of the client. Savvy businesses regularly hold events to keep their brand at the top of mind for their customers.  Here are some statistics about event marketing for your reading pleasure. Certain has gathered over 75 statistics for a larger view of the event marketing picture. Here are a few:

• 84% of consumers repurchase the product promoted at the event, after their first purchase (EventTrack Study)
• 51% of marketers surveyed believe that events strengthen existing customer relationships (Marketing Charts)
• 60% of marketers use tradeshows and events for face-to-face customer meetings (Marketing Charts)
• 58% of marketers believe that events and conferences are important ways to improve customer experiences of their services or products (E-Strategy Trends)
• 31% of event marketers believe that trade shows, conferences, conventions, and channel events are essential to doing business in their target customer markets (Marketing Charts)
• 69% of B2B marketers consider in-person events effective (Sensible Marketing)
• The top 5 B2B content marketing tactics: Social Media Content (92%); eNewletters (83%); Articles on your Web Site (81%); Blogs (80%); In-Person Events (77%). (IMN Inc.)

The event that you hold doesn’t have to be something incredibly formal. You can set up something on Meetup for your clients to attend.  By offering your clients something different to get them in the door, you are getting your brand to stand out and receive more sales. 

5. Case studies

Whether Your business constantly generates data and whether you have hired a marketing agency or you are the one doing all the SEO, leveraging that data into the creation of case studies is crucial for your business. Case studies generate fuel for the fire to get more clients interested in your product or service because it’s measurable proof of what your company does.

73% of buyers used case studies in B2B purchasing decisions (2016 DemandGen Report).  Fortunately, developing a case study mostly involves the collation of materials rather than the creation of new materials. Look at your customer successes.  Are there ways that you can parlay that into viable case studies?

These 5 marketing tactics to increase B2B sales are by no means the only way to capture the attention from customers and get more money from each of them. Each of them has their pros and cons, but all of them have the chance to increase your bottom line. What can you do to increase your company’s bottom line?

Source: Tenfold

As digital engagement continues to grow, companies are turning to avenues like social selling, and the next “big thing” that will launch them into the monetary stratosphere. While it’s always proactive to be on the lookout for new technologies and strategies that can increase the productivity and success of your business, it’s equally important to stay committed to practices that are still working; namely, email marketing.

The practice began in 1978, “when Gary Thurek, a marketing manager for the now-defunct computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, sent out an unsolicited mass email promoting his firm’s computer products.” While Thurek was ultimately scolded for his unauthorized email outreach, it’s hard to argue against his efforts.

As a direct result of his mass email, DEC “sold $13 million or $14 million worth” of their products. Of course, what Thurek really did was create the first spam email; although it was certainly the beginning of what we now affectionately call email marketing.

Since that time, email marketing has become more advanced, and less intrusive. Rather than collect a random sampling of contact information and fire away, companies now target specific users who have already shown an interest in their product, been flagged due to their browsing patterns, or who at the very least have visited their website. Incidentally, this is where the email marketing journey begins; collecting the right data.

Getting access  

In today’s age, it’s impossible to conduct a successful email marketing campaign without a populated list of users. The best (and most moral) way to accomplish this is to build a permission-based list.

“Permission-based email marketing is used effectively everyday by hundreds of thousands of organizations to build their brands, increase sales, and strengthen relationships with their client and members. Permission-based email marketing is sending messages to people who have asked to receive them.”

Lists like this can be built by offering something to individuals. Exclusive access to sales, marketing, or technical advice; a download code to an eBook; or invitations to “members only” events. If your business offers a service, you can also offer free-demos in order to attract interested users.

There are other ways to acquire a populated email marketing list; namely through purchasing them. While you can go about email marketing this way, it’s important to note that it’s always a terrible idea to do so.

For starters, a number of “reputable email marketing vendors don’t let you send emails to lists you’ve bought.” A marketing software like Hubspot simply won’t allow it, as they require that you “use opt-in email lists.” Moreover, even if you choose to use a less reputable software vendor, it’s not guaranteed that the list will work. “One customer’s ill-gotten email address list can poison the deliverability of the other customers on that shared IP address.”

Put more simply, you don’t want to take shortcuts when it comes to building an email marketing list. Take the time and effort to building a permission-based list. Not only will you be targeting a better group of consumers, but there’s also no chance of your campaign being infected by a poisonous email address.

Selecting an email marketing provider 

Depending on how many users you want to reach, how you want to talk to them, and how much creative control you’d like to have for your email marketing campaigns, trying to find the perfect provider can be just as difficult as actually putting together your list.

Fortunately, Business News Daily has already done a significant amount of legwork and provided detailed reviews for a number of software systems. They’ve reviewed more than 50 platforms, which should undoubtedly be more than enough for you to start the process with.

It’s also important to ask yourself the right questions to ensure you land on the right email marketing solution.

The answers to these questions will ultimately direct you to the tailored solution. While this may be time-consuming, and potentially delay the start date for your email marketing campaigns, it’s vital that you put forth the time and care that these questions require. If you speed through them and wind up with the wrong platform, you’ll need to start back at square one.

Don’t rely solely on software to track your email marketing success

Once your email marketing campaign has been set up, it’s time to monitor the results. Unfortunately, this is where a number of people begin to lose a grasp on what’s really going on with their data. Too often do email marketing users rely only on email open rates, and take the results at face value; but it’s vital to dig deeper, as Chris Woodard explains.

“What most don’t know is that the mail open rates that your email automation reports is never 100% accurate. And whether you use Streak…SugarCRM, SalesLoft, MailChimp, or any other solution, this is still the case.

Why? Because every time you send an email, these software solutions place a code snippet that gets triggered when an email gets opened. No big deal, right? Not exactly”

Ultimately, this data can be misleading due to an issue with the code snippets that are embedded.“If someone has HTML email disabled in their email client, your email automation will not register it as an ‘opened’ email.”

Fortunately, thanks to echogravity, there’s a workaround that can be used in these situations.

This simple formula “takes into account bounced emails and also eliminates the margin of error that can occur when going solely off of the ‘open rate’ numbers from other automation platforms. “

While you may prefer to simply stick with the data being returned by your specific platform, it’s important to remember that the results may not be 100 percent accurate. Don’t take them as gospel, and make sure to continually ask yourself “do these results make sense.”

To compare your open and clickthrough rates with other businesses, Smart Insights has this link: a compilation of Email open and clickthrough rates from different sources.

With email marketing, it’s crucial that you don’t take any shortcuts. While that’s generally true for most things in life, it’s especially true for this business practice. Cutting corners and accepting data without fact-checking can lead to disastrous results. Before getting an email marketing campaign up and running, make sure that you’ve built a permission-based list to target, and that you’ve asked yourself the necessary questions to determine which platform to use.

Source: Tenfold

Have you ever wondered how Coke became so synonymous with cola, Hoover with vacuuming, or Google with searching the internet?

“Emotional connectivity,” says former Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts. “You want loyalty beyond reason and loyalty beyond recession.”

Emotional connectivity that becomes brand loyalty is what a true customer brand experience is all about. For every business seeking to thrive and create a lasting impact, emotional connectivity needs to be a mission-critical constant in their branding equation. Nowadays, customers no longer spend their money as a result of what they see and hear about brands; rather, they value brand and customer experience. Advertisers and brand managers are shifting their focus from creating simple brand messages towards building a lasting brand-customer relationship. Customers now equate brands with experiences, and they are willing to pay premium prices for excellent customer service and an outstanding retail experience. A single negative experience or unresolved issue is enough to make a client give up on a brand. Worse: a negative experience can easily become a negative review, and this can spread quicker than a wink online, thanks to social media and online review sites.

It’s vital for companies to connect with their customers on a deeper and more satisfying level – through positive customer experience. Here are five ways brands can create worthwhile and memorable customer experiences:

Make the brand stand out – in a good way

To customers, the uniqueness of a brand is what makes it stand out. The easiest way to do this is to create a memorable brand name. For instance, affixing the lowercase ‘i’ to its product offerings – like the iPhone, iMac, and iPad – has made each item a very recognizable Apple product.

Of course, Apple did not stop at brand recollection value; that alone would hardly make a customer use and keep using a new product or service. What makes the brand experience a meaningful one is when people use a product or service – and enjoy every minute of it.

In a fast-changing digital environment where each subsequent product tends to get more and more complicated, Apple went back to basics; the company decided to simplify everything. Apple built its brand by focusing not only on the features of each product but also on sleek and simple aesthetics – attributes that seemed like an afterthought to competitors. The strategy clearly worked; Apple has created a satisfactory customer experience that has morphed into a huge loyal brand following.

Adapt to the changing times

Staying current is a must for every brand that wants to endure over time. In the fast-paced Internet Age, doing so can be challenging, as evidenced by the many brands that have crashed and burned over the last few decades, like social media platform Friendster and mega-bookstore Borders. It seems like any brand that fails to stay relevant is signing its own death warrant.

Many businesses are finding ways to adapt to the changing times through social media, which has become an avenue for consistent, direct, and meaningful customer interaction. It provides tremendous insight into customer needs, wants, behavior, and engagement.

These days, having a website and a mobile app is pretty much non-negotiable, too. They provide information to consumers and help them not only to make informed purchasing decisions but also to resolve issues that could have a significant impact on how they perceive a brand.

Connect with customers on a personal level

A personal touch can go a long way in strengthening a business’s branding. Gone are the days when one size fits all; customers now favor brands that offer and provide them with tailored experiences. ‘Tailoring’ can be as easy as having the customer’s name in an email newsletter. A ‘Dear Joe’, as opposed to a ‘Dear valued customer’, can be interpreted as solid customer engagement. Personalized email messages, in fact, increase their click-through rates by an average of 14%, according to a 2015 report by the Aberdeen Group. Conversion rates also increase by 10%. Furthermore, research by Experian has revealed that personalized emails increase transaction rate by up to six times.

Brands’ efforts to personalize their connection with their customers clear demonstrate gratitude and appreciation for their clients’ continuing patronage – and the gratitude and appreciation are reciprocal.

Be transparent

Brand transparency has become a way of humanizing the business and showcasing a company’s positive corporate values. According to a study by Label Insight, brand transparency is the best way to build consumer trust, with more than half of the respondents saying that they would be loyal to a company if it showed itself to be fully transparent. An excellent example of such a marketing campaign is McDonald’s Canada’s ‘Our Food, Your Questions’ campaign. Trying to dispel misinformation and urban myths surrounding its food and ingredients, the fast food giant saw an opportunity to educate its consumers and still stand behind its products. The campaign has garnered over 42,000 questions since its launch in 2014. Even though it is widely known that McDonald’s is not the best choice when it comes to healthy eating, the campaign has satisfied its customers’ need to know everything about a product – no skeletons in the closet.

Consistency is key

Finally, the key to creating a brand that resonates with customers is consistency. This means keeping the brand in sync with its strategies so that every product and/or service always points back to the brand—distinctly and directly. Coca-Cola is considered to be one of the most widely recognized brands in the world. Although it continues to evolve, its classic script and font can be identified anywhere in the world, even when displayed in different languages. Consistent branding eliminates confusion and shapes how people perceive the business.

Consistency is also important when it comes to messaging; it should always be in keeping with a brand’s mission and values.

For instance, clothing company Patagonia has always been clear about its mission to inspire social change and protect the environment by advocating sustainability. It launched a Fair Trade campaign that led people to be more mindful of how their clothes were being manufactured, thereby leading to a stronger demand for products coming from Fair Trade Certified factories that pay higher wages to workers.

Ultimately, bridging the gap between brand and customers boils down to creating memorable customer experiences. Sure, the brand message is still important, but customers become more invested in a company when it walks its talk and prioritizes customer well-being and satisfaction above all else. An outstanding customer experience is by far the best way to encourage the type of brand loyalty that transcends both reason and recession.

Most people today know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to having a successful on-line business. What they may not know is exactly how to use it in their marketing plan. Incorporating strategically chosen keywords, with valuable content, can dramatically increase your world-wide-web presence, and ultimately, your bottom line. Even more important, knowing how your customers find you is invaluable information.

But this is just the first layer, of many, to creating a consistent revenue stream. Implementing a data driven marketing plan, to create repeat business, is necessary for growth and longevity. Once complete, you must re-evaluate your data and re-engineer your plan, to attract new customers and retain your existing business. With time, you can create a recycling funnel system that will continually produce revenues. This is known as data driven marketing.

First, what is SEO?

We know what SEO stands for, but what does it really mean in the marketing world? When building, or updating, the website for your business, using SEO and keywords is critical to being discovered organically online. You can certainly pay for placement, but this is an expensive option and must be on-going to maintain good ranking. It also does not guarantee top placement. Organic leads are what you want to strive for, as these people found you through a search engine or other free avenue.

When search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, crawl your site, they want to find words that are relevant to what people are searching for most. Big corporations know the importance of key word searches. Consider this: when you enter “the best laundry detergent for sensitive skin,” you will find all blogs on the first page, however when you use keywords such as “laundry detergent” and “detergent for sensitive skin” you start to see more name brand companies in the search results.

Quality content is a must

You want people to go to your website and stay there long enough to see what you do and offer. The average person spends only 15 seconds on a web page and less than one minute on a site before moving on. With quality content, you can engage your users and ultimately convert them from a customer into a client. Think about it like a retail store. Customers walk in and out all day long, but clients are those who purchase things and come back repeatedly.

Optimizing your content

There is no way to guarantee that you will rank number one on the major search engines with the number of services available to boost your placement, but your goal should be to land in the top 30. If you are searching for your own website on pages 10 or 15, you need to tweak your content and get it working better for you. Be sure you have a title and description that contains keywords for each page of your website. Also, add text to your images via alt text. Pictures on a website are great, but search engines cannot screen photos. Add your website name or a short blurb about what you do to your image files.

Pay attention to technology trends

In recent surveys, 64% of respondents felt that having a data driven marketing strategy was the key to on-line business success. Everyday technology improves and new services are available. Knowing what is out there and how it could benefit you can be critical to your on-line business. If you are not changing with technology, you will find yourself with less internet customers and a weak bottom line. Stay on top of how Google ranks sites and use their Analytics tools. This will guide you to a more successful website.

Test your Website

Many websites provide great tools that allow you to see how your website is performing. They track, for you, what words are being searched, where your traffic is coming from, how long people stay on a page, etc. Again, Google Analytics is a great tool to know how to use, as well.

Know What Your Competition is Doing

Competition is good for business. It forces you to be on your game and be more creative. But you don‘t have to do it blindly. Knowing what keywords are used to drive traffic to your competitors site can be invaluable marketing information for your business. Websites such as www.seositetools.com can be a great tool to use in your data driven marketing strategy.

Website Optimization and Marketing Strategies

There are a plethora of avenues for collecting data. How you use it will determine your business success. As stated by Kate Cooper, CEO of Bloom Worldwide, digital marketing has tracking capabilities that generates data, whereas traditional marketing mediums such as direct mail and print couldn’t be tracked accurately. The main challenge is choosing the most important data to analyze. You can easily get overwhelmed with all the information available.

As discussed above, researching your competition is a good place to start when creating a website that captures customers and keeps them engaged. By using the keywords that bring customers to your website you can determine what may or may not be beneficial to your marketing strategy. Also, make sure that you are optimizing all aspects of your site; add alt text to images; use at least two headers on each page or with each post, if you have a blog; and use external links. Don’t forget to keep on testing, as well. Strategies and plans need to have a fluid component. Business moves fast online, and so does the way search engines rank. When your competitors change the construction of their web presence, it will affect you. It’s important to avoid working with a reactive approach. Stay proactive and do your own research to determine the best way to stay at the top. Additionally, make sure that the rest of your company is in prime condition. As the saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. A balanced company is a successful one.

Alt Text

Using alt text is a simple way to increase your SEO ranking. Images do not get ranked, text does. Incorporate short, descriptive language and keywords into your alt text. If you are selling hand-woven baskets, then you should add this tag to your images. This will not only help your site ranking, but will also help when people are searching for images, as the alt text is what is picked up in searches, not the actual image itself.

Headers

Using headers is an easy and often neglected way to increased site rankings in search engines. Web crawlers first look for header 1 and header 2 on websites, and will go on to search lesser headers, 3, 4, and so on. Neglecting to add the initial headers will substantially hurt your SEO and ranks. Never leave off headers.

External links

You would think that linking to another site to yours would hurt your ranks. Why would you want to bring attention to another website? But having at least two external links boosts your SEO. Make sure that you link to meaningful articles, but not your competition, and that you link through keywords. If your company sells skylights in Maine and Vermont, link to a website that perhaps discusses the top five ways skylights benefit homes in the northeast. If you can google the topic to find the article, linking to the article through the keywords you used to search for it will help your website.

Test and Retest

Think of testing your marketing plan the way you would any other theories: with the scientific method. First, start with the data you have collected. Then ask a question about the information you have assembled. Determine your hypothesis or theory about this data and test it with an experiment. Next, analyze your results and formulate a conclusion. Finally, use this information in your fluid marketing plan. Take these steps often to ensure that your strategy keeps you at the forefront of the market.

Balance Within Your Company

Be sure that you have not only marketing goals, but company-wide goals. It’s one thing to have a solid marketing plan, but if the rest of your company is a disaster, you will ultimately fail anyways. Don’t spend money on marketing until you have all other sectors of your business in order, from your company finances to your POS systems.

Set SMART and RACE objectives

To win in business you need to run a SMART RACE. Yes, it’s true that success is a marathon, but not a sprint. You can’t take off fast and maintain success with a plan. Consider your marketing strategy more of a marathon; moving forward at a steady pace to gain success over time. Using the SMART RACE acronyms will help get you there.

SMART

The acronym SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Specific: Have a specific goal and audience in mind.

Measurable: Make sure that your strategy includes measurable data. Can you track where your audience is coming from? How you gained your customers? What your rate of conversions are and returning users?

Achievable: Making a billion dollars your first year is not an achievable goal for any business, nor is gaining a million new followers to your blog. Make sure that your plans are achievable ones and that your growth plan includes recruitment and retention. It’s great to get a client, but if you can’t keep them then what is the point?

Realistic: Can you accomplish your goals set forth in your marketing strategy? Are the time-lines you set to hit your goals even capable of being reach in the current economy? Make sure that your marketing strategy is a realistic one.

Timely: Timing is everything. You don’t want to miss the boat nor do you want to be ahead of your time in business. Make sure that your plans include data from the current economy. Do not use outdated research when planning for future growth. Yes, you can use old data to formulate new plans, but make sure you test your theories before putting them into action.

RACE

RACE stands for: Reach, Action, Convert, and Engage

Reach: There are many ways to reach your customers. The Seven Touches marketing principle suggestions that in order to gain a new customer you must get their attention, through various techniques, at least seven times. This may include: social media posts, emails, and even offline contact, such as print media and person-to-person. You can increase traffic to your website by creating multiple avenues, such as ads and social media. You can also utilize other websites to help promote your business, whether it be smaller blogs or larger discount pages.  Using different paid, owned and earned media can help you grow and thrive.

Action: Action comes in many forms. It can range from user interaction to a call to action. Either way, the idea is to interact with your prospective audience and give them the steps to becoming your customer. Phrases such as “limited time offer,” “this week only,” and “join our mailing list and get 25% of now” are great examples. They all tells prospective consumers that if they act now, they can get a great deal or that they can get something they may not be able to get once a certain amount of time passes. Utilizing various forms of media to convey this message will meet your seven touches strategy and direct them to do a specific task.

Convert: Reaching your prospective customers is one thing, but converting them to actually make a sale is entirely different. If you have 100,000 visitors to your site weekly, but are only selling 10 items, your conversation rate is horrible! Be sure to include realistic conversion goals into your marketing strategy and develop ways to increase them over time.

Engage: You reached your target audience, encouraged them to take timely action, and make the sale. Now you need to ensure that they keep coming back. Engaging your customers will ensure that you have a revenue stream for life. Provide “value-added” services, by letting them know about new products, and encouraging them to take advantage of future promotions. The best marketing strategies include maintaining your current clientele. It is easier to sell to a customer who already knows your product than to get someone onboard who you have never interacted with; remember the seven touches.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will a successful marketing strategy to grow your business. Do your research, create a website that will increase your SEO rankings, test what you implemented, and use the data collected to rejuvenate your marketing strategy, use SMART RACE techniques, and work all sectors of your company collectively to maximize your success.

The television series Mad Men portrays the bustling world of advertising in the 1960’s when it first rose to prominence as its own driving force. Over the last ten years, a similar seismic shift in marketing has taken place. For decades, many corporations had their own marketing departments, often relegated to the end of the supply chain and then responsible for moving products designed by engineers and executives who were often out of touch with the market.

Marketing Operations (MO) is a next-level concept engaged in the actual process of creating, manufacturing and promoting products. A marketing operations department is likely to be a wild blend of creative left-brain thinkers and buttoned up right-brain statistic ninjas, all working in harmony towards a common goal.

1.  Various Roles of Marketing Operations

As a department, Marketing Operations is involved with much more than just ‘marketing’. At Estée Lauder, for example, marketing operations start with creative teams conceptualizing new beauty products in anticipation of both demands and trends. From the initial concept, Estée Lauder’s MO team then oversees materials sourcing—such as finding fair trade ingredients or new non-allergenic materials—as well as product testing, brand naming, and design. The team also gauges demand by polling retailers and sets projected inventory and delivery dates. From there, each project is handed off to manufacturing, accounting, and various other departments until it arrives in warehouses for shipping. Meanwhile, the MO plans product launches and brand promotions.

At some companies, MO plays a bigger role at the end of the production process—but nearly every  department is involved at some stage of the company’s brand process. Other roles include strategic planning, lead management, process improvement, budget management, stakeholder analysis, quality testing, and data management. MO thus has a much broader sweep, taking care of the ‘business of marketing’ and not just the creative aspects.

2.  Factors Driving the Creation of Marketing Ops

The term ‘marketing operations’ was originally coined by analyst firm IDC in early 2005 but only entered the mainstream corporate lexicon around 2011. Several factors contributed to the rise of MO as an integrated unit in company culture. Savvy corporations began consulting the marketing department before introducing new ideas to get important insights on demographic trends, competitive pressures, and customer feedback.

What was once considered a revolutionary idea—including the marketing team from the beginning—created a loop that improves and informs company branding from concept to delivery. Now, with ever-increasing pressure on companies to provide transparency and guarantees, MO departments have also moved into designing company workflows, providing training, and establishing company standards.

At Thomson Reuters, the most widely used news distribution network in the world, the Marketing Ops team was intensely involved in crafting the company’s branding mission. The marketing team at Thomson Reuters is responsible for clarifying its values to clients and employees in the realms of journalism and intellectual property rights, as well as the finance and legal industries to which it provides proprietary software.

3.  The Real Purpose of Marketing Operations

The word ‘operations’ in the title is just as important as ‘marketing’. Marketing Operations evolved as a way to help companies be more transparent, efficient, competitive, profitable, and accountable. Early adopters of this over-arching role include Cisco Systems, Symantec, and Adobe. Today, hundreds of companies across multiple industries draw their employees and recruits from backgrounds in branding, finance, technology, accounting, and sales.

The defining purpose of Marketing Ops is to create alignment and order within a company. MO teams are often responsible for creating work systems and workflows through every business unit, as well as overseeing deadlines and cooperation. In essence, although the MO team is often involved in tactical analysis and deployment, its main mission is that of strategy. A strong Marketing Operations department becomes the hub of the company, where people, processes, metrics and goals are brought into alignment.

4.  Oversight of Long-Term Goals

One of the key roles of Marketing Operations is to help define the company’s long-term goals and then provide the oversight necessary to keep a company on course. This involves everything from making sure the company is following through on marketing strategy, to ensuring a strong return on investments. As with traditional marketing teams, this means a continual focus on key performance indicators(KPI’s). MO may also be in charge of those KPI’s related to budgets, distribution, data flow, and procurement. Another key role is ensuring that the company stays ‘on brand’ at all times.

The word ‘branding’ used to mean what colors represent the company’s product, and what values are included in a (frequently vague) mission statement. Today, branding is a complicated and powerful field that affects the very essence of a company’s identity. Some MO departments will review everything from the company’s mission statement to its year-end investor portfolios to ensure that a company’s overall brand remains intact.

5.  Planning for Market Penetration

Of course, despite its many responsibilities, Marketing Operations is still about marketing. While overseeing a multitude of tasks, MO will also have a flourishing creative department working on print collateral, media campaigns and event planning. The integrated nature of Marketing Operations allows it to assimilate information and feedback from multiple company modules that were once in their own silos. MO can see which products sell faster than others or have seasonal fluctuations, enabling the team to anticipate demand for inventory. Coordination with accounting helps MO analyze which products are most profitable, and why. Data from warehousing and distribution can identify bottlenecks. MO can then work backward from an anticipated launch date to include more time for possible delivery glitches.

6.  Responding to Changing Market Trends and Requirements

Marketing Operations is also the catcher for the company’s tech awareness team. MO keeps abreast of improvements and competition in CRM, data analysis, and marketing and then translates that knowledge into actionable improvements.

Agility is key when it comes to staying ahead of the competition in 21st-century marketing. Online commerce means most companies are selling globally 24/7, which requires highly responsive customer service teams, real-time traffic and revenue reporting, an understanding of advertising exchange algorithms, and the ability to spot fresh opportunities.

As an example, Estée Lauder’s trend-setting MO Department gave one of its more mature brands, Bobby Brown, a digital makeover in 2013 by launching a YouTube channel called ‘I Love Makeup’ targeted at millennials. As Forbes reported at the time: “As the first brand to take such a step, it will be watched closely by everyone.”

7.  Identifying New Markets

The marriage of data and strategic planning make it easier for a company to identify and evaluate a variety of new opportunities like exports, franchising, additional product lines, and mobile advertising. However, the growing impact of digital marketing also has complications: every country has different legal and political concerns regarding data privacy, and it’s MO’s job to sort that out.

8.  Optimizing Marketing Channels

MO allows a company to exercise both versatility and specificity in its choice of marketing channels. A department can put different people or teams in charge of direct selling, wholesaling, digital marketing, print media, mobile advertising and so on. This allows each team to drill down into what works (or doesn’t) in each channel, while still functioning as part of a cohesive department that collates and analyzes data from all channels.

9.  A Typical Month in Marketing Operations

While the scope of the department’s role can be quite involved, individual responsibilities are generally clearly defined. The ultimate responsibility is supporting other teams or individuals. A data analyst would likely lend support to the sales team and working the CRM, then move on to A/B testing and analysis of email campaigns and finally, refine data and feed it into current ROI reporting.

At least twice a week, data teams might meet with their creative counterparts to get their input and answer questions. Data teams can share which types of franchise leads respond most favorably, and ask creative teams for tailored messaging to those demographics — or Creative may ask Data to assess various mobile advertising exchanges and pick the best ones for geo-targeting and fill speed.

Twice a month, both teams might meet with a larger strategic planning group that reports directly to decision makers. These meetings may focus on preparing year-end reports, assessing new markets, or creating workflow templates and training materials across the company.

10. The Future of Marketing Operations

According to a 2009 Lenskold Group study, companies with a marketing operations department are twice as likely (11% vs. 5%) to enjoy more “effective and efficient” marketing and are more likely to outgrow their competitors. In a survey conducted by the CMO Council and software company Alterian, 60% of respondents said the transformation of marketing operations is an essential area of focus, regardless of company size. In the Lenskold study, 59% of respondents reported having a dedicated Marketing Operations person or team.

For those seeking a career in marketing, MO may be a very smart choice—new hires are likely to get intensive experience in the discipline of their choice, while still being exposed to, and working with, teammates in other disciplines.

For companies small and large, Marketing Operations provides the integration and insight necessary to compete in a world of rapidly accelerating data and intelligence.

There are several processes that make (or break) a business. Perhaps the most important of these is the process that goes into your marketing and sales pipeline. This is where your leads turn into customers, where your mainly revenue comes from.

Your marketing and sales pipeline refers to the stages that your sales rep goes through to convert a lead into a customer. It is separate from the sales funnel such that the pipeline sums up all the customer sales funnels. It is a visualization of where things really are, in terms of sales, and what’s being done at each stage.

It is typically made up of the following stages:

• Lead generation
• Lead nurturing
• Lead qualification as marketing-qualified or sales-qualified
• Deal closing
• Post-sale

In a way, your sales pipeline represents the health of your sales life cycles.
Are you dealing with a clogged system, wherein the average sales cycle takes too long?
Do you lose a lot of leads as they go through the pipeline?
At which stages of your pipeline do the process stall?

A thorough examination of your sales pipeline can reveal areas in your sales and marketing that need to improve. Thus, it is important to regularly draft pipeline reports that show deal quantity and value per stage. This is data that’s crucial if you want to better pipeline management.

Sales Pipeline VS. Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel captures your buyer’s journey. It represents the actions they take that move them from awareness to making a purchase.

The funnel has helped determine steps that you need to take to improve your content marketing, follow-ups and such, at its different stages. Knowing where your prospects are, you can provide them with the information and push they need to move them further down the funnel and eventually towards buying from you.

The sales pipeline, on the other hand, maps the actions taken by sales reps. It is the sales cycle from the rep’s point of view. To them, it is not about moving from awareness to conversion. To them, it is about getting the leads, qualifying them and eventually closing the deal.

The overlap lies in the leads. Are the actions at each stage of the pipeline effective enough to move majority of the leads down the sales funnel and through the pipeline?

Market research company Forrester found that 99% of leads never gets converted as customers. If you observe this in your sales pipeline, then it’s time to take a closer look and tweak where necessary.

Why Focus on Pipeline Marketing

Until recently, when the power of CRM and data put a lot of guesswork on the wayside, lead generation was the metric that determined your sales pipeline’s success. If you have a lot a leads, then you can potentially close a lot of deals.

We know that this is actually not true. There are several stages within your pipeline that need attention too as these might be the weak links that cause lead leakage. We should no longer focus on quantity – quality is more important.

Pipeline marketing connects sales and marketing to information. It considers all out-reach channels and marketing campaigns. Solid data becomes the basis of decisions and goals.

Pipeline marketing employs strategies that you may already be familiar with. Inbound marketing, content marketing, lead nurturing and growth hacking – all these factor into the individual sales funnels of your lead. In the same way, they are used at the different stages of the sales pipeline.

What Does a Healthy Sales Pipeline Look Like?

There are 4 key metrics that determine a healthy pipeline:

• Number of deals in the pipelines.
• Average size of deals.
• Average percentage of closed deals.
• Average time for closing deals.

Assess these metrics against your current production capacity, competitor metrics and goals. See if there are stages where movement’s stalled. Examine this against select sales funnels to see if there are common hindrances in moving clients down the funnel and through the pipeline. Are they information lacking – data, reports, guidelines and what-not that can help in the decision-making? Are you failing to follow-up at certain points of the funnel?

Your sales pipeline can work as a guide to improving your marketing and sales operations. It is a way to trim the fat and shape up. Take the time to draft your sales pipeline report and see where you can go from there.