Is your CRM solution able to clearly break down funnel metrics? The numbers that drive your marketing and sales funnel? “Sales is a numbers game.” is true. Sales performance is ultimately measured in actual sales numbers but, the meaning of the cliche is different. Winning at sales is about understanding the other numbers that drive sales results and keeping your focus on performing there.
What are the actions that lead to sales? Sales processes differ and so will the key sales actions and funnel metrics. However, the two indisputably greatest sources of failure for salespeople are Prospecting and Follow up.
In a completely inbound sales process, there may be no need for either of these. However, it’s important for the salesperson to be aware of the importance of these factors in any case. Things change in business all the time for many reasons. A salesperson that is dependent on marketing to generation inbound leads, provide engaging content and other key assets on the website, etc. must know that any change to those elements could have a direct effect on their own results. Funnel metrics are the radar screen that provide early warnings of challenges and opportunities. If significant changes are made to the marketing mix or messaging and you detect a slowdown in inbound leads or a marked change in the “quality” of the leads, you should have a plan B. Of course, bringing the issue up to management, etc. is important too so you can quickly bounce back.
Paying close attention to funnel metrics provides an early warning system. The alternative is to manage only based upon actual sales results.
However, this can often lead to frustration. The business probably has a longer time horizon to see if the changes will really work than the salesperson can see. A salesperson is concerned about their commission check next month. The business may be expecting a slow down this quarter and gains to come further down the road. Will talk more about Plan B later.
Common Sales Problems
Why does this happen so often? On the one hand, prospecting – finding new people interested in your products and services – is the hardest part of the job and fraught with the most rejection. On the other hand, working with interested customers who you’ve established a strong relationship with, doing presentations, proposals and getting the order are what salespeople tend to love. So, the natural course of things is that salespeople stay focused on taking care of customers that are well into the process and getting closer and closer to buying and put prospecting off as it doesn’t have the same level of “urgency”.
But, prospecting is MORE important than closing. If the early phases of the process are managed well, the customer doesn’t really need “closing”. Ultimately, the customer is in charge of deciding to buy. No salesperson, no matter how good, can make a customer purchase. And things happen out of the salesperson’s control to cause even the hottest lead on the planet to stop or choose another alternative. The primary lever the salesperson has in the process that they have full control over is how much effort put into putting new leads into the process.
Measurable Steps in the Sales Process:
Outbound Calls to Potential New Leads (people we haven’t talked to before)
Conversations with these Potential New Leads
New Leads Qualified – meet some minimal criteria to indicate probable need
Budget and Authority Identified
Discovery Meetings, Presentations, Demonstrations, Site Visits, etc.
Proposals
Funnel Metrics – The CRM Solution’s Most Valuable Function
In every business, there are historical or average rates at which leads move from one of these steps to the next. The inability to measure and manage these rates is the undoing of thousands of businesses and millions of salespeople.
The only way to know with any confidence what you’ll sell at the end of the month, next month or next quarter is to know how many leads you called, qualified and so on this month, last month or last quarter. Keeping the beginning of the funnel full means the numbers will be there in the end.
The rates shown here are typical across all sorts of businesses. Each business will vary significantly. Use these rates to benchmark your prospecting performance. Did you call enough new leads to generate enough sales last month or this month? If you’re not measuring each of these steps, then start. If you don’t have CRM software or other automated way to track things, don’t wait for that. Just start keeping notes each day and spend an hour each week adding things up.
Play around with these rates and your process and you’ll begin to get a sense of how crucial focus on the beginning of the process, the “top of the funnel” is.
Once you’re able to pull this type of analysis from your CRM solution, you’ll be able to identify the source of problems or slowness in your sales. You’ll also have a proven model on which to base any predictions and forecasts when planning strategies for growth.
With the online CRM solutions available today, you can integrate your sales and marketing strategies to nurture your leads. In this podcast, SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein speaks with MarTech Podcast host Benjamin Shapiro about the reasons small-medium businesses could take advantage of an online CRM solution to service their customers and scale their business. Learn how to connect with your customers, take them through your sales funnel, nurture your leads, and optimize your digital marketing investments with a reliable online CRM solution.
BS: The first thing that sticks out to me is that online CRM solutions are big sales-driven organization tools. Although it’s not necessarily a marketing tool, it’s a way to build relationships on the sales side of the house.
CK: You just pointed out the main problem that most organizations (regardless of size) deal with: the line between marketing and sales. When we started SalesNexus, that was the first thing that hit me over the head. I come from a sales background, and one of the uses of online CRM solutions is to organize the sales effort. However, we quickly learned that digital marketing was going to be essential to filling our funnel.
Moreover, there’s this big disconnect of measuring what was happening in the digital marketing part of things. And then what happens to those leads once they get handed off to a salesperson. We couldn’t really bring together all the data so that we could really optimize the whole process. So that’s where we’ve focused in terms of delivering solutions to that problem for smaller businesses that don’t have the huge marketing and IT staff to figure all that out for them.
Areas for growth for SMBs
BS: I feel like technology has become more advanced, right? The ‘sales forcification’ of online CRM solutions and some marketing technologies. There’s been providers like yourself, HubSpot, Pipedrive – all are a bit of a different take on how you recognize who the actual people are.
CRM is customer relationship management. It’s about building one-to-one relationships with a person and a prospect. Talk to me about why an online CRM solution is essential specifically for SMBs – for small and medium-sized businesses.
CK: Well, to me, there are two things that SMBs really don’t do well. And have a huge ROI for them if they invest even a little bit in them.
Lead Response – Most SMBs, based on our experience over the last 15 years. When you talk about the response to digital marketing, sales leads that are coming through your website, or calls that are coming in based on digital advertising, they’re doing a terrible job of responding to those leads. They are waiting too long. They’re not handling them properly. They’re not following up enough.
Lead Nurturing – They’re not nurturing the leads. The people that come into the funnel initially, and then don’t buy right away. They get thrown over the salesman’s shoulder and into the waste bucket and they forget about them.
Taking your customer through the CRM funnels
BS: You’re saying that there’s a process for the merger between marketing and sales. And I think the line is a little gray here. When somebody gets through your website, fills out a form, gives you a phone call, or leaves a message. There’s the initial onboarding. How do you make sure you’re maximizing the purchase intent or the interest that they have at the time of them filling the form and keep the iron hot? And then if you’re not able to get to the close, how do you keep a relationship with somebody? Eventually, there’s a third part of getting them across the finish line. And that is very much traditional sales. What are the stages that you set up in a CRM or the “funnels” in marketing terminology?
CK: Well, of course, it really depends on the market that you’re in. When we’re talking about salespeople, we’re mostly talking about B2B with some exceptions. With B2B, the organization typically is very sales-driven. Marketing is there because it has to be. Especially in a medium-sized company, the salespeople are what the executives envision as their connection to the marketplace.
Transitioning customers into digital marketing
So that creates this divide between the two groups right out of the box. For example, we’re here in Houston with lots of energy-related companies. These are companies that have been hugely successful for 20 – 30 years. They’re very sales-driven. And then for whatever reason after decades of sending salespeople out to go knock on doors, the lights go on. Then they’ve decided, “You know what? We need to start investing in digital marketing.”
Now here they are trying to inject these new types of opportunities into an old-school sales team. So we find ourselves very often helping customers manage that transition. If you don’t come at it as a marketer with the perspective of a marketer. Knowing as you mentioned earlier, the mindset of a buyer when they engage with that form, and really thinking about that and building a process that’s based upon that journey that the buyer needs to go through. Then you’re really going to damage the ROI on the entire campaign. So it’s a cultural change, ultimately.
The overlap between Marketing and Sales
BS: Talk to me more about the overlap between marketing and sales. I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that online CRM solutions are traditionally a sales-driven tool. But now there is the notion of the blending of CRM, understanding the relationship marketing email, and even prospecting is building into CRM. Where does the marketing part start? Where does it overlap with sales? And when is it really just the sales team’s responsibility?
CK: Ultimately they’re both overlapped completely. In a perfect world, that’s the way it would work. Because even when I’m closing a deal as a salesperson, there are messages that my customers are going to receive one way or the other. My retargeting ads or the email campaign they happen to be on, in a perfect world, those should all work well together.
In the end, that’s what we try to achieve. That’s kind of an ideal. And it’s not as if there’s no technology out there that does all of this. We’re different in that we’ve simplified it and combined it into one solution. That’s easy for a medium-size organization that doesn’t have the big back-office staff to manage, connect, and maintain it all.
How the sales process drives the marketing messages
The way we make things work for our customers is the sales process instantly drives the marketing messages. As soon as you come in as a conversion and engage with a salesperson, we begin to learn information about you. All that goes into the online CRM. Then that changes the messaging that you’re seeing. So even as you’re down at the closing end of the funnel, the CRM is using that information to change the messaging that you’re getting. Although that’s in a perfect world. Most companies developing all the content that would be needed to support all of the nuances in their sales process is probably a little bit beyond their scope.
BS: So what you’re saying is basically the marketing automation component of SalesNexus, the way that your platform works is as someone moves through one of the pipeline stages, it would change the language that’s being sent out to them using the marketing automation technology.
CK: That’s right. And you described it as stages. Typically what we see is at the top of the funnel is the need to focus on the customer’s pain. What is the problem that they have that drove them to fill out your form? Let’s stay focused on that at the top of the funnel.
Once you’ve uncovered an opportunity, then it’s really at that point more about establishing credibility. So that’s where things like case studies, testimonials, and things like that come into play. Just that one little change – being able to automatically switch somebody from a, “You have a problem, we have a solution” type of email campaign to a “Here’s how we’ve yielded success for our customers” type of campaign as they move through the funnel. Just that one little change can be huge.
Nurturing leads using marketing
CK: Certainly the marketing messages have to reflect the sales approach as well. We talked about earlier being able to nurture leads in this way. As when the salesperson just gives up. Once they go, “This deal’s not going to close. I’ve got to focus on the people that I am going to close this month, so I can hit my numbers.” We want to make sure that those people go on to some kind of drip campaign.
That’s where I see most companies just really are missing an opportunity because in B2B, for sure where it’s not so much of an impulse type. The reason people don’t buy is almost never because they’re saying “I don’t want to ever do business with you.” It’s almost always other things that are really out of the control of the brand. It’s things like, their budget, the unavailability of the decision-maker, or being in a contract with another vendor.
BS: I’ll use a dating metaphor: It’s the right person, right place, right time. And if one of those variables is out of whack, you’re either not getting a first date or you’re not selling your services.
CK: Therefore, you just got to be there. Six months from now, when something changes in their world, and all of a sudden it’s the right time. You want to be the last message they got.
Nurturing your leads
BS: Talk to me a little bit more about that nurture phase. When you’re going through the pipeline. You’re learning about them. You’re trying to build credibility or you’re actually getting to the point where you’re selling, and they’re just not ready at that time or there’s something that’s missing. How do you keep the relationship alive and how do you still preserve some momentum? So when they are ready, you are top of mind.
CK: It can be more nuanced than this, of course. At a really simple level, you want to go back to the pain. Additionally, just keep offering valuable content. That’s basically saying, “Hey, if you have this problem, then here are some tips. Here are some tricks. Here’s some interesting stuff that may be helpful to you.” So that’s how you’re going to keep that line of communication open as long as possible. If you keep going for the close in your email messages, eventually you’re going to annoy them and turn them off, and they unsubscribe.
Therefore, you want to go back to – “I can just be helpful here. Once your problem gets significant enough that you need more help than what I’m sending you, then call me. I’m here. We’ll talk about how it can help in other ways.”
Focusing on the customer’s pain
BS: That’s interesting. I would think that the nurture content changes depending on where someone is in the funnel, right? If somebody is in the “learn” phase, doing nurture content that talks about how to address the pain, makes sense. If somebody gets to that credibility portion, and they’re not ready to move forward, you’re not necessarily saying, “Hey, here’s more information about why we’re credible.” You’re going back and saying, “Is this still your pain point?” Is that because you’re simplifying the process here? Or is that really a best practice? No matter where someone is in the funnel, just keep reminding them that there is a way to address the pain that they’re feeling?
CK: As I said, it can be more nuanced. For instance, you may have a major competitor that when you close a deal, it’s almost always for them. Well, when you know, that’s what happened in a given deal, maybe you want a set of messages that really contrast you with that competitor.
I try to keep it pretty simple. Especially for a medium organization. Those who are just jumping into this for the first time. It doesn’t have to be very nuanced. What you’re wanting to do is just maintain brand awareness over a period of time. That’s 90% of the battle.
Reasons SMBs don’t have a CRM solution
BS: Craig, any last words for today about why SMBs need a CRM solution? What’s the biggest reason why they don’t have one?
CK: Well, the Achilles heel of the CRM world, of course, is that salespeople hate using them. So that’s the biggest reason why most companies don’t have them. The management just hasn’t figured out a way to twist anybody’s arm enough to get them to use it. So that’s another reason why doing this type of thing to me is a win-win for everybody involved. It’s a win for the business because what you’re doing is you’re giving the salespeople a reason to play the game with the CRM.
Advantages to having an online CRM solution
CK: The flip side of that is that there’s a huge win for the marketing group as well. In a small-medium-sized business, maybe they’re making that first big investment in say, Ad Words to drive traffic to the site. Well, the first thing they’re going to find out is they can drive conversions with all sorts of different techniques and tactics in Ad Words. But then they hand them off to the salespeople. However, they have absolutely no way to know whether the leads that come from that landing page or that ad campaign are the ones that the salespeople are closing. They just lose the tracking.
Then going into the board meeting at the end of the quarter and reporting on the results of your advertising. You can say “I spent a hundred thousand dollars in this quarter… I got X number of leads… I got this number of conversions.” Unfortunately, that’s all you can say because the sales guys are not going to give you credit. They’re not going to say, “We hit our numbers this quarter because of all those great leads from marketing.” Instead, they’re going to say, “It was our wonderful selling.” So you’ve got to be able to tie that together. And if you don’t have all this information in one system, you really can’t.
Optimizing your digital marketing investments
CK: That’s one thing that I’m really excited about. We just released a new capability that literally tracks the conversions coming in based on Ad words, Ad groups, and that kind of fine detail. As a result, you can do a pipeline report and a close report that says, “I might be getting a lot of conversions from this ad where I’m spending a lot of money advertising. But I’m not closing very many. But over here, I’ve got this ad campaign that I’m not really emphasizing or spending a lot of money on. Moreover, percentage-wise, I’m closing a bunch of those leads. So let’s redirect that advertising spending based on what’s happening in the sales process. That’s a huge game-changer in terms of optimizing your digital marketing investments.
BS: I think that’s a good point is that an online CRM solution allows you to capture the data. Not only from your marketing efforts but connect it to sales. So you’re able to see end-to-end from what campaign is driving impressions to web conversions and form fills, and then are those actually being closed and producing revenue.
And so that end-to-end reporting is something that’s really powerful to not just optimize, to drive people to and through your website, and make sure they’re actually creating business results.
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In 25 years of helping sales teams implement CRM solutions, I’ve learned there are two main reasons that CRM projects get stalled. And believe it or not, that is happening to a LOT of businesses!
As a CRM vendor, we’ve studied the reasons that deals don’t close and by an overwhelming majority, the primary reason is that the customer just never makes a decision. In other words, a business starts looking for sales automation and CRM solutions, talks to vendors, gets demos, have internal meetings about important requirements, etc. and then just never decides on a solution.
Why is that? From my experience, the two most common reasons are:
Unable to Reach Consensus on CRM Requirements and Capabilities
Often, CRM projects start off as a tool the VP of Sales needs but, the requirements very quickly expand to include marketing and customer service functions and information exchanges. So, now there are multiple decision makers at the table each with their own list of priorities. Even within a typical sales organization, it’s difficult to find a CRM solution that has all the bells and whistles possibly needed for Lead Generation, Inside Sales, Outside Sales, Pipeline Management, Contract Management and all the other things that your sales team may want to do. If you take that list and add to it all the tools your marketing team might like to have and the same for customer service, the list becomes extremely long and you’ll find there are no “out of the box” CRM systems with all of these capabilities. So, either your project just got much more involved, with the need to integrate and customize several technologies, or everyone’s going to have to choose what they can live without.
This is where things stall. There may not be budget or patience for building an all encompassing system for the entire organization. And there may not be enough agreement among departments to reach agreement on compromises.
Lack of Executive Support/Leadership
Of course, when you’re marketing, sales and customer service departments can’t agree on priorities, that’s when executive leadership is supposed to make the decisions for you. But, technologies like sales and marketing automation are often a bottom up decision internally. Management closer to the sales and marketing departments recognize the need but, executive management can’t see how it directly impacts the bottom line.
So, the Sales VP and the Marketing Director pitch executive management on a project that is massive in scope, in order to accommodate all the constituencies. And that’s not likely to fly anywhere.
Or perhaps leadership is completely out of the loop, which as described above, leaves no referee to prioritize requirements and so, no vendor can be agreed on and everyone just loses patience and goes back to work with the tools they have at hand.
Believe it or not, a large portion of successful businesses in the US do not have a CRM solution implemented. And the reasons are above.
So, if you’re CRM dreams have stalled, the answer is to sell the concept to the C level first. Get them on board and get boundaries from the C suite and focus all requirements discussions and vendor demos within those boundaries.
If your CRM project has stalled for budgetary reasons, let a SalesNexus consultant tell you about our CRM Implementation packages that help document requirements and workflows and set things up quickly and affordably.
Are you searching for a simple lead generation process that fits your budget? Lead Generation starts with building your list. When it comes to purchasing a lead list, there are two general options:
Purchase lead generation lists from specific industry groups that are very focused on markets you target. These tend to be the best, most up to date and accurate lists but, these groups are also often not willing to provide email addresses and lack other information that may be critical to your marketing and sales process.
Purchase lead generation lists from general data vendors like InfoUSA, Zoominfo or others. These tend to be less targeted, more broad and the cost of including email addresses can be extreme.
As a result, often companies leave it up to sales people to identify companies and then research the proper contact info themselves, one company at a time. Of course, this is slow and not the best use of your sales team’s time.
Here’s an alternative approach to building Lead Generation lists affordably and “at scale”!
Find a List of Target Companies
Industry trade associations often publish lists of members on their website, without the contact info. Another source is partner pages on related vendor sites. Trade shows often publish lists of attendees, speakers and exhibitors. Any list that’s very targeted to your products and services that includes the company name and location is sufficient.
Search for Names
Typically, each business will know the title of the person they would like to speak to within a targeted company. A free account on LeadFerret.com allows searching by company to see a list of employees with titles and more. Or, search LinkedIn for the company and click the “See All Employees” link. This will list all employees at this company, even if you’re not connected to them. And of course, you can visit the company’s website and look at their About Us page for executive names.
Find their Email Addresses
Add the contact names to your SalesNexus CRM with company and website URL. Then click the GetEmail button in SalesNexus and their email address instantly appears!
See how here:
Add them to a Lead Generation Campaign
Now add your targeted leads to an on-going email and calling campaign in SalesNexus.
To see how to create effective Lead Generation email campaigns, watch our Starter Kit video here:
Of course, when we typically think about the ethics of our companies, we think of our values, mission statement, HR, accounting and even production. Shareholders, the board and management establish the values, HR communicates those values to the staff, marketing communicates them to customers and of course, customers experience our values and ethics directly in the quality of our products and services.
Sure, your sales people may be trained to talk about your company’s values and the quality of your services in discussions with customers but, most of us leave a HUGE loophole for ethical missteps by sales people and therefore your company.
That loophole is the gulf that can exist between customer expectations and the actual product/service you provide.
In every conversation with a customer, sales people hear questions that demand detailed explanation. But, for many reasons, that detailed explanation is not always forthcoming.
Don’t get me wrong… often in a presentation to a group of potential customers, the questions and answers are flying around faster than anyone can truly keep track of. And so, its inevitable that some customers will get unrealistic expectations about things both trivial and consequential.
Sales Ethics
Experienced sales people know the difference between the details and the important issues. Your sales team is truly representing the ethics of your company when they are trained and required to address those consequential issues thoroughly so there are no misunderstandings. If your sales team is free to keep on moving through their presentation when those issues come up, you’re guilty of unethical behavior, at least by omission, if not by commission.
Think of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. As the scandal unfolded, management first claimed the software modifications that allowed vehicles to falsely beat emissions tests where implemented by a few rogue software engineers without the knowledge of anyone in leadership. Of course, it later came out that upper management was well aware of what was being done.
VW management was pretending ignorance.
Now, you know how customers can get misled or misunderstand what to expect in a product like yours. It’s all very innocent. No salesperson is required to actually tell a lie. All they have to do is let the customer assume things that your customers often assume.
And that is your sales person and your company pretending ignorance.
Sorry to lay this burden at your feet but, it’s as clear as day once you consider the implications for your customers of making common assumptions about features, service response times, refund policies, etc.
Sales Ethics is the Road Less Traveled
The good news is that taking the high road is the road less traveled.
Train your sales team to listen for the comments and questions from customers that indicate they may be making a false assumption about what their experience of your products, services and your company will be.
Train the sales team to stop the conversation boldly when these issues come up and arm them with clarifying statements, slides, demonstrations, specs and articles.
Sales Ethics Example
“I’m sorry Mr. Jones, I need to stop us here. I heard someone on your team ask if the XJ9000 has this or that feature. I want to be sure I address that because frankly, it’s one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of our product. It’s my job to help you find a solution that fits you best and I want to be sure you’re as clear as possible about what to expect. Honestly, I’ve worked with a lot of companies like yours that have worked with our competitors and it’s pretty common that they’ve had a bad experience due to a misunderstanding about seemingly small details like this. I don’t want that to happen to you. So, let me explain how that really works…..”
Another good technique is to create a checklist in your CRM solution that’s easy for the salesperson to checkoff as they address each common misconception, etc. And, your marketing automation system can educate customers with easy to create content like “5 Common Surprises Your Product Buyers Don’t Like”.
Sales people are the ethical standard bearers of your company. Obviously, if they lie or are unprofessional, it reflects poorly on your company. Also, if they leave the opportunity for misconceptions, misunderstandings or false expectations to exist, they are leaving the door wide open to the same impression being created.
What will be the next big thing in CRM? If you’ve used CRM solutions for any time at all, you know that automation, lead scoring and a few other innovations have been the “big news” for a few years. So, what’s going to be the next breakthrough CRM tech?
There are a lot of theories!
Wearables in CRM
Clearly, if you’re wearing your iWatch, there a lot of things it could do to leverage CRM information and help to gather information. Cognizant recently posted an interesting investigation of these potential innovations. From smart glasses, wearable keyboards to smart watches, there are a lot of possibilities!
AI and Machine Learning in CRM
From an end user’s perspective, CRMs tend to become be vaults of information and the sheer volume of information can make it hard to find the needle in the hay stack. DestinationCRM.com published this article on how AI can revolutionize the CRM industry. Experts predict that the volume of data generated and archived by businesses about their customers will increase by 4300% by 2020! Salespeople are going to need help working their way through all that customer information!
Full Box the Next Big Thing in CRM?
Full Box CRM is the concept of CRM that comes pre-loaded with customer information. As experienced users know, each new lead tends to start off as just a name, phone and email in the CRM. The end user is responsible for entering most of the information about customers as they interact with them. Full Box CRM promises to provide sales and marketing hands with not only lists of names, phone numbers and emails but also demographic data, preference information, purchase history, etc. Business software recently published a good investigation of this exciting new concept. –
Do you have a lead nurturing plan? Are you leaving that up to your salespeople to manage?
Every sales manager knows that sales people very commonly have a tough time managing to follow up consistently with active customers and leads. If you’re expecting them to also keep in touch with cold leads, you’re asking them to invest a lot of time in doing what they perceive as a “low return” job in a completely manual and inefficient way.
Marketing Sherpa says that companies that have Lead Nurturing programs in place achieve a 45% higher ROI on their marketing and advertising investments. That’s in addition to the fact that salespeople are relieved of the duty and can focus more energy on active prospects.
There are two main hurdles most businesses face when considering lead nurturing:
Choosing and Implementing the Technology
Creating the Content
Lead Nurturing Technology
If you’ve already got a CRM solution in place, then there is probably a lead nurturing add-on or partner that will integrate with the CRM. That’s probably a good place to start. Remember to keep it simple. The biggest mistake companies make when implementing sales and marketing automation technology is getting excited about cool capabilities without having a clear idea of how they’ll get used or add business value.
You can end up choosing technology that’s too complex and too expensive and then never really get the basic job done, nurturing your leads.
Creating Lead Nurturing Content
Again, the Keep It Simple principle applies. If you talk with a marketing firm, they’ll quickly have you believing that you need 3 different case studies based on exhaustive on-site interviews with customers, on-site photo shoots, video and a glossy brochure. If you’ve got the budget for that, it might make sense, but don’t assume it will be the rocket fuel for your lead nurturing campaign.
The fact is that until you send out your first email or first campaign, you have no way of knowing what is going to work. Little things like the subject line of your email can undermine an entire campaign.
Engage with more new prospects using Lead Nurturing
For leads at the top of the funnel, create campaigns that will attract new leads to your brand and engage the leads that are interacting with your website, events, etc. for the first time. Make them want to talk to a salesperson. One of Carroll’s suggestions is to repurpose existing content, both your own and content created by others.
Enable Sales by Nurturing Leads
For leads that have moved to the middle of the funnel, create campaigns that help salespeople do their job. Help them get connected with customers with automated emails that request an appointment and let the customer schedule a time themselves using tools like Calendly, etc. Create content that helps the salesperson educate the prospect and set your brand apart.
Lead Nurturing Helps Close More Opportunities
This is where many salespeople are adamant that they want to be in total control of what the customer is seeing. Salespeople don’t have the time to stay in touch with the 5 or 10 people that are involved in a decision for the customer. Make it easy for the salesperson to add all the influencers to campaigns while they focus their love on the primary decision maker.
SalesNexus will release a completely new design with enhanced features in June 2016.
The user interface has been updated and modernized to be easier for new users to learn and use quickly and to provide more full featured controls on tablets.
In addition, the release includes powerful new features:
Automated Campaign Triggering – clicks on emails in one campaign can trigger an entirely new campaign.
Email Notifications – users can be alerted of clicks on an email by recipients via email.
Enhanced search – simple and easy to use yet powerful and fast search of contacts, companies, campaigns, opportunities and notes.
Calendar synchronization – sync calendars between SalesNexus and Google Calendar and Outlook/Exchange.
Automated Profile Pictures and Social Links – profile pictures and social links are automatically added to your contacts when added to SalesNexus.
The new release will be available to new customers in early June 2016. Existing SalesNexus users will have the option to upgrade in late May to take advantage of the new, simpler design and new features, or choose to upgrade during the summer months in order to plan staff training.
contact info. Another source is partner pages on related vendor sites. Trade shows often publish lists of attendees, speakers and exhibitors. Any list that’s very targeted to your products and services that includes the company name and location is sufficient.
is responsible for entering most of the information about customers as they interact with them. Full Box CRM promises to provide sales and marketing hands with not only lists of names, phone numbers and emails but also demographic data, preference information, purchase history, etc. Business software recently published a 
believing that you need 3 different case studies based on exhaustive on-site interviews with customers, on-site photo shoots, video and a glossy brochure. If you’ve got the budget for that, it might make sense, but don’t assume it will be the rocket fuel for your