Sales Funnel | B2Bbloggers.com

There’s a methodology that needs to be adapted in order for Marketing Automation software to be completely effective. By design, it’s a software program to help better align marketing and sales to improve efficiency by automating repetitive tasks based on specific criteria about leads, opportunities and prospects.

But it doesn’t stop there, marketing automation software offers a number of benefits to help funnel better leads.

1. Demand Generation

Marketing automation facilitates demand generation through targeted marketing programs that drive awareness for a product or service. With a marketing automation platform, you can develop integrated marketing programs including, but not limited to email marketing. This will extend your reach, giving you more opportunities to engage and connect with customers and prospects. Some systems have additional features that allow you to leverage social media as a demand generation tool by providing trackable links that add to the prospect data and can affect the lead score–giving a more clear representation of the prospect’s interests and engagement with your brand.

2. Sales & Marketing Alignment

Marketing automation also enables better communication and collaboration between Sales and Marketing. One of the biggest challenges for Sales and Marketing is making sure that Marketing is really handing off good leads. With a marketing automation platform, sales and marketing can agree on a universal lead definition, then the system will enable both Marketing and Sales to track the status of leads, so that when leads are qualified correctly (based on behavior and specific activities), Marketing can hand them over to Sales (and Sales will be happy).

3. Lead Nurturing

One of the most noteworthy features of marketing automation is lead nurturing. Many times leads are ignored, or not given the right information at the right time resulting in you losing them to a competitor. Lead nurturing is a content-focused process that allows you to always be relevant and constantly provide value. Lead nurturing through a marketing automation platform can be done pretty effectively, since it becomes an automated process. These systems will help you organize workflows that send prospects information based on their profiles and behavior. This information can be in the form of an email, newsletter or even an event invite, but it’s important to know where prospects are in the buying cycle, so you are sending them the right message. Marketing automation helps you set up content paths for segments of people and these paths can vary depending on the prospect behavior, meaning they can be automatically moved to different paths. This is where marketing automation and lead scoring become extremely important.

4. Lead Scoring

I talked about this is greater detail in an earlier post, but lead scoring with a marketing automation system just makes perfect sense. A lead score is the number that tells you where prospects are in their buying cycle. It’s a number that is based on profile information and behavioral information. It’s always changing and evolving either through action or inaction. It can be done manually, but for any company that has a good list of prospects, and a relatively large sales force, there simply wouldn’t be enough time or resources for this kind of manual labor. This is why the software is really important, not only will it automate the updating process, it will do it real-time and with very little effort giving both Sales and Marketing the opportunity to know how far along in the cycle in one prospect is at any time.

5. Analytics

Most good marketing automation systems have a pretty robust set of analytic tools that can be used to determine how interested prospects and clients are, or how they respond to different messages. It’s usually web analytics that show you where traffic is coming from, or built-in analytics about specific campaigns and where people click-through etc. This helps drive better leads because it helps you to better understand who you are dealing with, how they behave, and what they are really looking for. If you are trying to engage people, and you don’t have data about how they behave or respond to things you send them, it’s almost impossible to continuously add value. This is why analytics through marketing automation can help you drive better leads, because you’ll know for sure what you are passing to Sales are qualified and you’ll have the data to back it up.

There are many other ways marketing automation can drive better leads, so these are just a few. Things like consumer research, and defining your personas are just as critical to the success of your marketing automation campaigns as they are to any other inbound or outbound campaigns.

Marketing automation is about improving efficiency and productivity, it’s not going to be effective if you don’t know your customers, but it will help you get to know them much better, and once you do, it will help you stay engaged and relevant to them.she learns.

The Sales Funnel is a classic motif in the B2B world. It’s often written about; seldom used in real life. Most folks haven’t thought through what it takes, step-by-step, to convert a stranger into a customer. THAT, however, is a post for another day.

IF you did have a sales funnel, and if you’ve been tracking progress over time, you’ve probably noticed that prospects are

engaging with real live sales people toward the transaction end of the funnel (the bottom, as it were), and
turning to online sources as a first step in the buying cycle.

It’s going to get worse, not better. As social media moves beyond the early adopters, pioneers, and tinkerers, it will morph into an efficient and pervasive peer-to-peer intelligence gathering, archiving, and sharing platform. That means prospects will increasingly engage with sales people only after they’ve already made all their decisions and when they’re ready to place the order.

The good news is, it’s incredibly simple to meet the evolving B2B buyer where he or she is and will be. Here are five steps you can take to be in position to move prospects through your *sales funnel:

Produce solid educational content to help prospects move through each phrase of the process.
Make the content freely available in every format and every platform possible. For instance, when you produce a white paper, record an audio version of it, too. Make them both available freely on your digital real estate. Freely means: place no barriers to access whatsoever. If a prospect clicks on the resource, it downloads or starts playing right then. The old school (antiquated, obsolete, etc.) trick of requiring something from your readers before you’ll give them a white paper hurts you. You already HAVE something from the prospects: their attention right then. Make it count. Don’t irritate them and shoot yourself in the head by requiring them to complete “required information.”
Read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. (Yep, it was published a long time ago, even before any of us thought of MySpace or Facebook.) Then, make it easy for prospects to give you permission to help them. When you offer that white paper (as a PDF and MP3) by way of a button or link that says, “download now” or “listen now,” include a second button offering to send them a note when you publish another white paper, or conduct a webinar, or enlist beta users. Make it obvious the educational piece is freely available with no strings attached. Also make it obvious that you’re letting them determine the next step and making it easy for them to get the information or attention they seek.
Follow up according to the permission you’ve been given.
Have real-live people readily available to talk whenever your prospect wants to talk. Maybe the third button is a “chat now” option and the fourth is “talk to someone now” option.

These five steps enable you to meet your buyer wherever he or she is and help them navigate through the sales funnel. By making your content and yourself available to your prospects when they want you, you’re giving them the content and access they need to travel through YOUR sales funnel, and not your competitors.

*The concept of a sales funnel is helpful, but it’s probably outdated. Given the multiple access points to a sales cycle, multiple influencers, peer-to-peer platforms, a non-linear model would more fully comport with the evolving reality of the marketplace.

About The B2Bblogger: Trey Pennington (@treypennington) uses technology, marketing, and stories to connect businesses with the people they seek to serve. With an educational background in marketing, including an undergraduate degree in marketing management and an MBA, combined with a masters in education, Trey understands the need for businesses to discover and develop their core story and to engage their marketplace in making the story their own.

His book, Spitball Marketing: Using What You’ve Got to Get More of What You Want is due out in early 2010. You can read more from Trey now at his blog www.treypennington.com.