Welcome back to our latest LyntonWeb blog series - Master the Complex Sale. We began our series discussing the identification of buyer personas and offering recommendations on the mapping of content to your prospects' buying cycles.
Then, we focused on role of the future customer in the complex sale and on how a Chief Customer Officer must assure that an organization is built around the needs of customers rather than the whims of CEOs or leadership teams.
In our last installment of the series, we'll examine the role of marketing automation in a complex sale. Marketing automation can serve as a foundational engine of your sales process in the following ways:
- Lead Capture - marketing automation software, like HubSpot, offers efficient ways to capture and convert visitors from your website into leads that can then be vetted by your sales staff. In minutes, you can create a landing page that will capture specific data, like role in organization or size of company. It's data that will help your sales team decide how good a fit a prospect might be for your organization.
- Lead Nurturing - once a website visitor is converted to a lead, the lead can be entered in to a specific lead nurturing campaign. If your lead converts on a cloud computing white paper from your website, you can nurture them down a path highlighting your cloud based service offering. The next lead nurturing email in this path might include a link to a case study describing how your firm moved an enterprise from in-house data storage to cloud based storage followed by another email inviting your lead to subscribe to your blog. Lead nurturing emails can be spaced by days, weeks, or months. Nurturing emails can also be triggered by visiting specific website pages - this is particularly helpful in an e-commerce scenario. Potential buyers may visit specific products or even abandon products in shopping carts. A few well-timed and effective nurturing emails can help close that sale for you.
- Lead Grading - if you have an enterprise CRM in place, you can sync leads in your marketing automation system with your CRM. Within your CRM, you can identify lead metrics (number of conversions, pages viewed etc.) and assign leads to appropriate sales teams based on a variety of characteristics. Relative to lead actions, you may choose to call only leads that have converted on content offers three or more times. Or you may decide to segment your leads in your CRM and run additional email campaigns along those segments. Numerous possibilities exist.
Marketing automation should be part of the infrastructure of a complex sales process. It will augment your sales team's efforts and will allow them to focus and further qualify prospects truly exhibiting buying behavior.
Viewing the complex sales process through the lens of your buyer persona, coupled with an intense focus on existing and potential customers, and supporting your sales process through marketing automation will help your company close more deals and ultimately create more happy customers.
Photo Credit: neonbubble