By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman at Sonnhalter
To keep our sanity in trying to keep up with and engage potential customers, it makes sense to use some sort of marketing automation tools to help the process. And there are plenty of options out there: Marketo and Hubspot being two of the better known.
We all know nurturing improves lead quality and moves them through the famous sales funnel. The problem is most sales funnels aren’t simple straight lines.
Here’s the reality – the typical sales funnel isn’t as straight forward as we’d like to think especially in the B-to-B world. The Forrester graphic below is probably more accurate.
The challenge for me is determining messaging for each level to get them to the next step. We need to make them as personal and to the point as possible, but you can’t have 20 different e-mails.
Depending on what you’re selling (engineered product), the selling cycle is longer, and in many cases, there are multiple decision makers, all of which have different hot buttons. How do you handle them? Ideally you want to send leads to sales that are sales ready.
Here are some tips:
- Try to identify where they are in the sales funnel so you don’t lose them on messages that are already past.
- Give them something to download that will help them in their job (i.e. calculator, configurator, relevant case study).
- Make them aware that CAD files are available for downloading.
- Try to initiate a question that will want them to talk with one of your application engineers.
What are you doing to better qualify leads before sending them to sales?
