Craig Rosenberg, @thefunnelholic, in preparation for the Focus Virtual Summit on Mastering Lead Management, Tuesday, June 29th, asked Focus Expert speakers and sponsors to supply him with 4-6 tips on Lead Management for an article on his blog titled: Lead Management: 67 Tips From The Biggest Experts In The Field.
The list of experts included some of the most well respected people in the industry, (some I knew and others I didn’t), including David Raab, Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems, Howard Sewell, Spear Marketing, Maria Pergolino, Marketo, Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions, Carlos Hidalgo, Annuitas Group, Brian Solis, Future-works, Mac McIntosh, Sales Lead Experts, Mike Damphousse, Green Leads, Anthony Carraturo, Merit Direct, Adam Needles, Silverpop, Mark Feldman, Netprospex, Craig Stouffer, Pinpointe On-Demand, and Parker Trewin, Genius.
I thought I would join in the fun and continue his list of 67 lead management tips with six more.
Six Lead Management Tips
- Be extremely careful that your automated lead nurturing messages are for *someone* not *everyone* – (it’s not one size fits all – use your buyer personas and give your messages a personal tone).
- Just because you are saving time with marketing automation, doesn’t mean the human beings you are sending the messages to can’t tell the messages are automated. Make your content helpful and useful or risk the dreaded unsubscribe and or even worse – a failed relationship.
- Be sure your messages are timeless. Mistakes like this are dead giveaways that a machine emailed your content and not a person.
- Don’t believe that your lead management process and marketing automation system will accelerate / hasten your buyers to move faster through the buying process. Only your remarkable content is capable of that.
- Listen. Listen to your buyers, listen to your metrics, and listen to your sales team. Don’t forget the important role listening plays in improving processes, communications, and relationships.
- Today’s B2B buyers are busy. Your marketing and products are not the center of their universe. Keep your messages concise, meaningful, and addressed at their needs not yours.
I urge you to read the first 67 lead management tips as the experts provide really good food for thought on lead management, marketing automation, and building relationships with today’s B2B buyers.
To close I’ll quote Craig,
The main thing is that lead management is absolutely essential to ROI-conscious marketing departments. If you don’t have a lead management process, get one. If you do have a lead management process, you should always be optimizing.
Visit Craig’s blog, The Funnelholic, (and read it regularly) to stay informed on B2B demand generation, lead management, and online media. He is a B2Bblogger shaping the future of B2B marketing and one that you should be paying attention to, I am.
What are your tips for lead management? Can we get to 100 tips? As B2B marketers, we can use all the lead management tips we can get, no?
