SMB Marketing Blog

This is a true story from my days as a sales rep for a Hospital Information Systems vendor.  As we were driving on the way to a sales call, my colleague gestured at a street sign and laughed, “See, our customers are so easy to find there are even signs pointing the way there!”  As healthcare industry vendors who focused on the multi-million dollar operations known as hospitals, HMOs and clinics, our situation was the opposite of most B2B companies whose main challenge is generating new prospects.

Which begs the question, if all prospects are known, why bother with a marketing automation solution if you are a healthcare industry vendor?  The main reason is probably timing.  A Sales 2.0 solution will identify which of those institutions are sales-ready at the exact moment in the sales cycle.  As a sales rep it is very advantageous for me to be notified when a hospital had downloaded a particular white paper, watched a video, or visited a certain page on our corporate website.  And more importantly, have that information delivered directly to my Salesforce.com account and with email at the moment it happens.  It goes without saying, that this would give me a huge competitive advantage due to knowing their TIMING. Hospitals and their constituent departments each have their own budgeting cycle so it helps to be alerted when funding might be kicking in.

Another reason is INTELLIGENCE.  Even if a hospital isn’t ready to purchase your healthcare product or service, an advanced  marketing automation solution will tell which ones are researching your offering.  And if you have multiple products, it will identify which of your products have attracted their attention.  Better products will even give you contact names, size of institution, location etc. This helps to qualify opportunities. You can even to put them on a ‘watch list’ so that you can tell when they re-visit and alert the right sales rep.

Today, leading healthcare industry vendors use Sales 2.o tools like this to be more competitive, more productive and more timely. They’re the guys who seem to ‘know’ where there are deals, and when they’re sales-ready.

This is the fourth of ActiveConversion’s very popular “How To” guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to score the behavior of website visitors, and those who click through on emails, so that they can be automatically sorted for prioritization.  From the summary:

Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness

Not all leads are created equally. A lead scoring system acknowledges this by assigning values to leads based on objective criteria. The lead score determines the appropriate action for that lead.

In establishing your system you should;

• Identify online behaviors that indicate interest or sales-readiness
• Assign point values to each of those behaviors
• Establish a score that defines “Sales-Ready”

With a contemporary marketing automation solution like ActiveConversion, today’s B2B marketers can reduce costs and increase revenue through prioritization with lead scoring.

To download this eHow To Guide on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead scoring plan for your business, click on the image!

The principal sponsors of this blog, Active Conversion, are offering an limited time 60 day free trial if you sign up as a result of reading this post, so here’s a quick look at what to expect:

After you’ve taken a few minutes to activate your trial account and install the Active Conversion code, you’ll begin seeing results immediately and within days patterns will begin to emerge.  To start with, visitors to your site will be identified by company name.  Some of these visitors may surprise you and as a B2B marketer or sales professional you’ll gain valuable information about which companies are interested in you.

After a while some visitors will start to jump out at you, repeatedly returning to your website to visit more and more pages.  Intuitively you may have pegged them as higher value and more qualified but now you have quantified data to back that hunch up.

For the trial, most marketers or sales professionals simply used the default lead scoring.  By looking at the online behavior of your visitors you’ll begin to correlate that to the lead score that each visitor accumulates.  Eventually you’ll be able to develop your own lead scoring criteria based on the behavior of visitors to your own site but for now you can see that higher lead scores mean higher quality leads.

If your site has pages with form fills using the same default conventions as Active Conversion, your visitors that have previously been identified by company now become people with names, email addresses and/or phone numbers.  In other words, leads.

You’ll also want to take an email nurture campaign for a spin during your trial.  Load up some content into a nurture campaign, pick say 3 emails over six weeks, and anytime any of the respondents clicks through on a link, they are identified as though they had form filled on your website.

Eventually when these leads are presented to your sales team the lead information will include a summary of their activity.  This will give your reps some background for that all-important first call.

This has been a quick look but you can see that even on the trial, things happens automatically, like it’s on cruise control.  We haven’t even talked about, lead nurturing, lead management, email marketing campaigns to your existing in-house lists, or social media ROI tracking.

Feel free to pass this offer along to your network, as long as you or they use this sign up page they’ll have access to a 60 day trial.

Wellesley, Mass. - January 25, 2010. THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market, announced today that ActiveConversion has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 by THINKstrategies as an initiative aimed at bringing greater attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

ActiveConversion recently released another in their popular series of eHow To Guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to leverage B2B Blogging.  From the summary:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With B2B Blogging marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, click on the image!