Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm - Part Four

To wrap up this series on Lead generation and lead nurturing, we’ll explore the ideal prospect, how to actually construct a lead nurturing system, and more.

This is the final installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read in initial installment by clicking here.

How Do You Envision the Ideal Prospect?

Whether a firm knows it or not, they have some sort of prospect nurturing system.  It is my opinion that if they cannot describe it in details, they don’t know enough to ever have a great closing rate.  Just about every prospect nurturing process commences with a deep familiarity with your prospect’s likes and dislikes; their “persona.” The demographic (who they are – social strata, economic level, low, middle or otherwise) and psychographic (how they shop, what do they buy, at what quality level). 

Here are a handful of crucial queries to enable you to manage this step in the objective:

• What number of consumers are involved with the procedure of shopping for your business' products and/or services? Exactly where are they in the pecking order?
• Are they the key decision maker for this type of purchase?
• Precisely what business or personal needs motivate their choices? What questions do they routinely have?
• What questions are they really going to raise before a purchasing decision is reached?
• What does your current buyer’s process resemble? How much time does the entire process typically take?
• How are consumers affected by your current marketing and advertising campaigns?
• Will their web-based habits (amount of time on your website, which pages, how long, how often do they return) indicate specific clues to how they consume your marketing subject matter (eBooks vs, blog articles, video or webinars, etc.)?

Once you assemble the data to resolve most of these concerns, you will be able to identify a group of suitable buyer user profiles that permits you to concentrate and target for your lead nurturing activities.

Forming the Lead Nurturing Process

Now that you have formed a group of prospective consumer user profiles, you should enjoin them to a particular lead nurturing concept.

This process looks something like the following:

• Selecting a variety of touch points for the nurturing process: How frequently do    you reach out to the potential client?
• Decide on your content offer strategy: You might want to begin with a simple blog, written multiple times a week.  You might write a specific white paper or special report on a product or service criteria. After that you might advance to a variety of previous customer case studies, and then invite the candidate to a webinar. The strategy is yours, but the information you have formulated should tip you off as to what scheme you should employ.
• Decide on your cadence, that is, when do you make contact with a potential client; weekly, bi-weekly, every other day? 
• Decide on your communication strategy. Is electronic mail the centerpiece of your          communications strategy? Do you make contact using telemarketing, direct mail,   trade shows or any other methods?

Easy to use lead nurturing processes may possibly include a selection of four to five electronic mail communications dispatched over duration of time. Does your process include different impressions (touch points), promotions, contacts, conversation channels on a regular schedule of frequency? Only you can determine what works and what does not.  You alone must capture the data necessary to formulate a ranking or rating system to know exactly where your lead sits in the funnel; what type of nurturing is appropriate at that particular time and touch point.

It’s recommended that you begin with an uncomplicated work-flow process or system, and subsequently permit your strategies to grow or alter as time passes.

Designate Accountabilities and Follow Up

Lead nurturing is often the marketing and advertising team’s duty, and it’s a rather straightforward case to delegate a group of staff members to take care of your company’s continuous nurturing activities. However, the technique of creating a lead nurturing program is a cross-organizational job and should call for marketing; you’ll need the appropriate individuals to research, quantify, accumulate information, develop consumer data, cultivate nurturing promotion strategies, and look for as well as produce engaging, informative content material that tells a story, and makes people’s lives better.

The two main other reasons to construct a “lead nurturing staff” that also includes staff of both marketing and advertising are:

1. Handling the plan should be to transition potential customers through the sales process, converting them from suspects into opportunities, and then hand him or her on to sales. Precisely what key elements specify a strong “opportunity?” When will the sales staff assume the responsibility and make contact with the prospect?
2. Develop an evaluation course of action so as to adjust the nurturing process for that particular type of buyer persona. Is the nurturing procedure providing effective outcomes?

When qualified prospects don’t convert, that is, there is a stop in the flow through the sales funnel, are sales representatives taught to send them back through the nurturing system, or will they merely jettison all of them?  Keep in mind, you are going to need a clear and concise, delineated communications system involving marketing, advertising and sales, or not having the signals clear could turn expectations to disappointments.

Lead Nurturing and Ongoing Adjustments

By characterization, lead nurturing includes potential clients that are presently in your marketing and advertising data bank. The lead funnel indicates your process is to provide the potential client with engaging content that actually improves your relationship with said prospect. How much is enough? How much is too much?  Imagine if the material you actually gathered has inconsistencies, or you chose to discover more about a potential customer to enable you to supply customized written content, only to find out you turned off the lead.

What then?

The point is that you will need to be on a constant learning voyage with each lead as they traverse the lead funnel, making adjustments along the way.  That way, you will grow in experience, and develop more closely appointed strategies for each rating or rank of lead.

Progressive user profiling resolves this difficulty, even while permitting you to accumulate more details about a potential customer gradually. An eBook, white paper or a webinar could possibly cause a lead to ask for one or two fresh bits of engaging company information.  If your system is automated, you will be surprised how much intelligence data you can collect to assist you in refining your lead nurturing and user profile construction.

Re-Addressing Fall-Out

Earlier in this article we discussed tanking another crack at failed opportunities.  Leads fall out of the process for any number of reasons, and it is best to dissect the entire process to see if there is a recurring problem in your nurturing campaign systems.

Some people become disillusioned with the process, become annoyed for a myriad of reasons, others simply change their mind.  Still others get a better offer from a competitor, or said competition got over on the prospect through some unforeseen reason.  Regardless of the fall-out, it is not a prudent move to analyze the failure, and adjust accordingly.

Secondly, and just as important, your team should attempt to re-position the prospect into the lead funnel for another attempt at closing the sale.

This has been a worthwhile trip through the lead generation and lead nurturing process, and hopefully it helped clear up some misconceptions and perhaps offered an insight into what you can do to make your marketing dollars produce a more fruitful return on investment.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm - Part Three

Part three of four

This is the third installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment which can be found here.

Here are a few areas to discover critical functionality indicators inside a lead nurturing marketing campaign:

• Engagement: Identify the email open and click-through rates. This data is a great starting point for your tracking efforts.
• Lead acceleration: Are leads moving according to expectation through the lead funnel?
• How does the time it takes to convert from lead to converting to a sell-ready state? Are leads attentive to your firm’s content strategy? Between nurturing campaign stages, how long does it take to move nurtured prospects into the sales cycle?
• Outcome metrics: What are the conversion rates? From initial contact (suspect) to lead, from lead to sales opportunity? How many leads begin the process? How many of them convert successfully through the entire process (closing rate)? What is your company average transaction amount (sales revenue average)? What is the entire length of the sales cycle in terms of time?

Once you establish a baseline with these and other key indicators, you can look for trouble
spots in your nurturing campaign, experiment with solutions and consider your next steps.

Going Forward From the Beginning

A fundamental lead nurturing strategy, utilizing a small amount of potential buyer user profiles, a restricted procedure flow, and some performance metrics, is an excellent place to begin. Like prospect scoring, on the other hand, direct nurturing is actually a stratagem that’s by no means concluded; there’s always room to fine-tune, improve and
expand your efforts.

In addition to incorporating improved and updated user profiles, fresh touch - points, content variety and communication avenues with your established activities, there are other tips on how to take advantage of lead nurturing, including:

• Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention: Utilize valid and current lead nurturing practices to produce more intense interactions with your current leads AND clients - including cross-sell and up sell possibilities influenced by engaging content.
• Relationship Building: Implement lead nurturing process to allow clients to get to know your firm better, provides you an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, and develop a bond so that you firm is “Top-Of-Mind,” and that your competitors become a distant memory. Assist and follow up with your customers concerning their newly purchased goods and services; supply them with help-desk support options, suggestions, provide consumer online groups for community information and facts, and various solutions.
• Remarketing: Re-evaluate each failed conversion to develop “come-back” strategies to take another pass for possible conversion. Sometimes, simple annoyances caused the prospect to fall out of the lead funnel.

 

This image displays another look at the sales funnel, and the lead nurturing process. The middle of the funnel is a critical area on which to focus, but as noted previously, doesn’t try to force your lead to a buying decision. There should be well focused energy in providing all of the information to a particular lead in this position, so that the buying decision formulates with you and the relationship you are building with them.

Lead Rating - How Lead Rating and Prospect Nurturing Interact

I would like you to understand the way in which prospect rating can help to increase your current marketing and sales campaigns. An essential prospect ranking principle - the warm lead - is additionally essential for any lead nurturing strategy.

“Warm qualified” prospects demonstrate an obvious affinity for your product or service and solutions, however, they typically do not score as significant as would the oh-so evident “sales-ready purchaser.” Identifying a warm lead using your own rating method is normally a question of time and experience. The efficacy of your system will be determined by various psychographic and demographic ranking considerations of your “ideal” prospect, coupled with your firm's practical experience going through a number of prospective buyers. Once you discover what your business’ lead scoring ceiling (the culmination of the factors compared to your ideal consumer), it’s not as difficult to be able to systemize the entire process of navigation directly to the sales staff. These folks, who are on the direct firing line of dealing with the prospective customer, must fully understand what makes the ideal time to work with the prospect. By the use of metrics (the rating system) and the prospect, they should know what stage of the buying process in which they find them. If sales intervenes too soon, there is a degree of probability that the prospect may back away, become frustrated, or seek further study with your competitors.

Timing is everything.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Accounting Firm - Part Three

Part three of four

This is the third installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment which can be found here.

Here are a few areas to discover critical functionality indicators inside a lead nurturing marketing campaign:

• Engagement: Identify the email open and click-through rates. This data is a great starting point for your tracking efforts.
• Lead acceleration: Are leads moving according to expectation through the lead funnel?
• How does the time it takes to convert from lead to converting to a sell-ready state? Are leads attentive to your firm’s content strategy? Between nurturing campaign stages, how long does it take to move nurtured prospects into the sales cycle?
• Outcome metrics: What are the conversion rates? From initial contact (suspect) to lead, from lead to sales opportunity? How many leads begin the process? How many of them convert successfully through the entire process (closing rate)? What is your company average transaction amount (sales revenue average)? What is the entire length of the sales cycle in terms of time?

Once you establish a baseline with these and other key indicators, you can look for trouble
spots in your nurturing campaign, experiment with solutions and consider your next steps.

Going Forward From the Beginning

A fundamental lead nurturing strategy, utilizing a small amount of potential buyer user profiles, a restricted procedure flow, and some performance metrics, is an excellent place to begin. Like prospect scoring, on the other hand, direct nurturing is actually a stratagem that’s by no means concluded; there’s always room to fine-tune, improve and
expand your efforts.
In addition to incorporating improved and updated user profiles, fresh touch - points, content variety and communication avenues with your established activities, there are other tips on how to take advantage of lead nurturing, including:

• Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention: Utilize valid and current lead nurturing practices to produce more intense interactions with your current leads AND clients - including cross-sell and up sell possibilities influenced by engaging content.
• Relationship Building: Implement lead nurturing process to allow clients to get to know your firm better, provides you an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, and develop a bond so that you firm is “Top-Of-Mind,” and that your competitors become a distant memory. Assist and follow up with your customers concerning their newly purchased goods and services; supply them with help-desk support options, suggestions, provide consumer online groups for community information and facts, and various solutions.
• Remarketing: Re-evaluate each failed conversion to develop “come-back” strategies to take another pass for possible conversion. Sometimes, simple annoyances caused the prospect to fall out of the lead funnel.

 

This image displays another look at the sales funnel, and the lead nurturing process. The middle of the funnel is a critical area on which to focus, but as noted previously, doesn’t try to force your lead to a buying decision. There should be well focused energy in providing all of the information to a particular lead in this position, so that the buying decision formulates with you and the relationship you are building with them.

Lead Rating - How Lead Rating and Prospect Nurturing Interact

I would like you to understand the way in which prospect rating can help to increase your current marketing and sales campaigns. An essential prospect ranking principle - the warm lead - is additionally essential for any lead nurturing strategy.

“Warm qualified” prospects demonstrate an obvious affinity for your product or service and solutions, however, they typically do not score as significant as would the oh-so evident “sales-ready purchaser.” Identifying a warm lead using your own rating method is normally a question of time and experience. The efficacy of your system will be determined by various psychographic and demographic ranking considerations of your “ideal” prospect, coupled with your firm's practical experience going through a number of prospective buyers. Once you discover what your business’ lead scoring ceiling (the culmination of the factors compared to your ideal consumer), it’s not as difficult to be able to systemize the entire process of navigation directly to the sales staff. These folks, who are on the direct firing line of dealing with the prospective customer, must fully understand what makes the ideal time to work with the prospect. By the use of metrics (the rating system) and the prospect, they should know what stage of the buying process in which they find them. If sales intervenes too soon, there is a degree of probability that the prospect may back away, become frustrated, or seek further study with your competitors.

Timing is everything.

Inbound Marketing and the Holidays

Does your business distribute holiday greetings to its clients or customers? And, does your business distribute holiday greetings to prospective clients or customers? It’s amazing to me that there are companies who don’t have holiday greetings as a part of their marketing plan.

Why should your business send greeting cards or e-cards?

Why do you invest your precious time, talent, and treasure on any other marketing strategies – to build top of mind awareness! And this goal is equally important whether it’s an existing client or a prospective one.

The holiday season is now upon us.

Right now, it is time to prepare your list, craft your design (or hire a firm like Zen Marketing to custom design one for you), and send a polished, sophisticated e-card to those important to your business health.

If you are a DIY’er here are some best practices tips in creating a memorable e-card, one that your customers will really want to read, and proudly display in their offices.

Is Your Plan Ready?

Getting an early start is good, but even on December 1^st there is still time. Just don’t wait until the 15^th to begin your design selection process and hope to have it delivered in time. Determine the type of e-card you want to send today! Whether printed or electronic, holiday cards enhance relationships with your customers and prospects by showing them that you care enough to remember- a card that’s thrown together won’t provide this benefit.

Thank All Of Your Contacts.

People like to be appreciated and by highlighting this you encourage them to think about the wonderful service and products your company provides. One fun tactic to garbner attention is to build in a contest or promotion into your holiday card marketing.

If your e-card recipients know they’re automatically entered for a prize (or of you tell them how to enter) you will create excitement. But keep in mind that this a greeting card not a sales pitch. So, focus on the greetings of the season warm and less on the capturing of more sales.

Ideally, your goal should be an e-card (or greeting card) that is memorable, exciting, or humorous. And remember to be creative and strive to get the right message.

Know your audience.

Depending on who you’re sending cards or e-cards to, you may want to divide your email or postal lists into segments, such as existing customers, prospective ones, perhaps even former customers, and especially referral sources. If you segment your email distribution list, consider changing the graphic and message design to be relevant to each group. If you try to send to everyone the message has to be bland and generic to relate to all groups and that is less effective.

Trying to Stay Within a Limited Budget?

E-cards are less expensive than printing and posting a greeting card, because… well, you save on printing and postage costs. An e-card lets you take advantage of moderate resolution graphics effectively or even embed video along with your message, and you can do so with a reasonable capital allotment.

You can send e-cards or greeting cards for holidays, to give thanks to customers, remember birthdays, or just let your contacts know you’re thinking of them. Instead of sending another boring email, try extending your marketing presence by sending e-card s and greeting cards.

Here are some other tips…

When you don’t have time to custom design a great greeting card, outsource it to a marketing company with a great design team. They can usually provide the mailing services as well, making it easy for your company to focus on the work at hand.

Another option is to use one of the many great graphic artists who offer e-cards via the internet. Our firm often relies on Jacquie Lawson. Jacquie is a well established English artist whose e-cards are engaging and offer terrific music with the visual beauty.

It is very inexpensive, although you cannot upload a list using this site (they abhor commercialism and don’t want to be perceived as a mass mailing house). But once you’ve established your list it is fun and easy to spot-send people cards for specific events or Holidays.

Using humor in business relationships can be tricky, but JibJab cards often have us laughing out loud.

They are renowned for their politically satirical cards but have a broad offering of birthday and holiday themes as well.

In conclusion, use special events like the Holidays to build on your marketing efforts and improve your company's top of mind awareness.

SMBs Still Favor Face-to-Face Marketing Tactics

This is a very informative and tellkoing article that I am sharing, courtesy of MarketingProfs. It mkakes a very compelling arguement about behavior but also abvout budget and behavior. Most of all it supports the paradighm shift in marketing and sales from the cold-call driven  process mentality to one created from content and driven through engagement and relationship.

Traditional, face-to-face tactics are still fundamental for SMB marketers: Personal relationships and networking (95%), tradeshows and industry events (89%), and in-person events (86%) rank as the most popular marketing tactics for finding new customers, according to a survey of small and midsized businesses conducted by Forrester Consulting for Act-On Software.

Among surveyed SMBs, content marketing (83%) is also a big part of the customer acquisition mix, followed by print advertising (77%), public relations (74%), and SEO (73%).

SMBs are using a variety of other digital tactics for customer acquisition efforts as well, such as email (72%), social media (69%), digital advertising (61%), webinars (58%), and PPC (50%).

Moreover, SMBs appear to be "doing it all" with small teams of marketing generalists.

Among those 14 different marketing tactics (in the chart above), 50% of SMBs say they use 13 of the tactics and 70% say they use 8 of them.

Below, additional findings from the study titled "Driving SMB Revenue in a Tough Economy."

Social Marketing Yielding Mixed Results

Though 69% of SMBs use social media as part of their customer acquisition marketing mix, results from those efforts across various social platforms are somewhat mixed:

• Facebook: 49% use the site and report positive results; 36% use Facebook but are unsure about results or say their efforts aren't paying off; and 14% don't use Facebook.
• Twitter: 47% use the site and report positive results; 31% use Twitter but are unsure about results or say their efforts aren't paying off; 22% don't use Twitter.
• Video marketing (e.g., YouTube): 51% use video marketing and report positive results; 16% use video marketing but are unsure about results or say their efforts aren't paying off; and 33% don't market with video content.
• LinkedIn: 49% use the professional networking site and report positive results; 29% use LinkedIn but are unsure about results or say their efforts aren't paying off; and 31% don’t' use LinkedIn.

 

Top Challenges: Converting, Closing Deals

Among SMBs, the top marketing challenge is converting more leads into opportunities (41%), followed by closing more deals from existing lead flows (39%), increasing sales from existing customers (33%), and differentiating themselves from the competition (33%).

Interestingly, marketing programs are not primary contributors to the sales pipeline: On average, only 35% of the sales pipeline is marketing sourced (attributed to a marketing program).

Also, SMBs aren't making use of marketing automation, Forrester found: Only 19% say they have implemented software that automates marketing and lead management processes.

By contrast, 56% of SMBs say they have implemented CRM technologies.

 

About the data: Findings are based on a survey of 208 marketing decision-makers in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), from multiple industries across the US, conducted from June to September 2012.

Source: MarketingProfs

http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2012/9618/smbs-still-favor-face-to-face-marketing-tactics#ixzz2DkMuuf7N

 

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Accounting Firm - Part Two

This is the second installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No accounting firm can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment by clicking here.

Obviously, trade shows are not the only venue for Accountants to generate suspects. Anyone that visits your website, or picks up one of your flyers, or holds a spot in your mailing list database is merely a suspect. A person walking in the door makes them a suspect. It is the conversion of those suspects to prospects, or leads, that are crucial to the sales process.

Suspects don’t turn into prospects until some form of communication occurs with a suspect and a member of your company. This sharing of information will let both parties mutually determine if there is genuine interest in your particular services, and that there is credibility in your promise to deliver it. Only then will they graduate to the position of lead. They are now at the top end of the sales funnel (see Figure 1, below).

Understanding the Lead Nurturing Concept

Lead nurturing is the approach marketers use to develop and “care for” individual relationships with these immature prospects – even while they’re not yet ready to purchase - in order to earn their particular business should they eventually ready themselves to purchase.

I’m sure you will notice that the sales funnel in figure 1 is specifically illustrated for inbound marketing, but the concept holds true for all approaches involving relationship or content marketing. The top of the funnel is where the suspects first convert into leads, and these leads make their way toward the sales end through lead nurturing. The process is the same regardless of what type of marketing you perform.

You begin finding suspects to turn into leads, to convert to customers. The further down the funnel improves their “qualification” rating, or rank if you will. This is where you provide the level of nurturing they require, by returning for additional information. They may either contact you or you may contact them. The choices are numerous, and they are yours to make. What is certain today is that today’s customer or decision maker, be it business to business or business to consumer, is performing a lot of online search prior to making a buying decision.

Your responsibility as a business professional is to provide individual leads an easy path to the information they require to reach a purchasing decision, to keep your brand name top of mind during this time, and to be there when they are eventually in a position to make a commitment.

Within this article, I will attempt to explain the fundamental actions your business should take to establish an efficient and effective lead nurturing system.

For instance, these aspects are important to the overall success of your lead nurturing system:

1. Knowing and understanding the fundamental principles associated with prospect nurturing
2. Creating an uncomplicated prospect nurturing process
3. Understanding how to perfect and broaden your current process
4. Evaluate the success of your company lead nurturing program
5. Understanding how to employ prospect nurturing to produce a greater, more productive connection involving the marketing and advertising and sales teams

 Suspects & Prospects

 

 

 

Figure 1.

People, especially those looking to select the right accountant, often produce an extended buying cycle; they may take weeks or even months (up to eighteen months for one of our clients) to make major purchasing decisions. While this may not be true for all individuals, most people will still take their time on any major selection decision (and selecting someone to oversee their financials usually falls into this thinking), unless of course, the issue is one of an emergency nature. When the clothes washer goes out, they may not perform all the research they would have like to because the pile of clothes keeps rapidly growing. But selecting a firm for a long term relationship, and supporting their vision for their business, always requires a lot of research and evaluation.

Remember, lead nurturing is a lot like creating a pathway for prospective buyers, specifically where your company marketing and advertising group serves as the ever-attentive instructor.

You can learn more about what buyers are researching or looking to purchase, which is determined by their particular actions and patterns. If the prospect has visited (revisited?) your website; your analytics will tell you how much time they spent on a particular page, or what information they downloaded. If you use more traditional marketing strategies, by keeping a record of their inquiries, communications and/or visits, you can nurture them accordingly. In either process, you can produce engaging, well-timed information and facts, in relation to those needs and wants. It may be an eBook, white paper, brochure, flyer or product cut sheet.

Today’s accounting prospects also spend far more time performing online and offline research - a situation that often brings the prospective buyer to the attention of a firm's  sales and marketing teams, long before they are prepared to make a buying decision. A particular concern, naturally, is the ability to isolate these “warm” potential customers - the ones that aren’t prepared to purchase at this time - from your “hot” sales opportunities, which characterize instant sales and profits possibilities. This is precisely why prospect rating resources tend to be ever more popular these days.

Another challenge is knowing the way to interact with individuals that display a “maybe now-maybe later” attitude. Potential customers gradually make their way down the sales funnel, and you nurture them by providing with the information they require without disturbing or perhaps offending them. Performing a rush to judgment by pushing the lead toward a sale is not a good idea, despite the sales person’s need to make their quota. We will cover conversion chaos in another segment of the article.

Lead nurturing might be overwhelming, and it can become a complicated challenge. Getting started with lead nurturing, on the other hand, could be a straightforward process, provided an efficient strategy is developed, together with clearly defined objectives.

Quantify and qualify leads and lead data, merged with a marketing automation solution.

Automation presents your company with the opportunity to monitor and evaluate the process efficacy of your marketing endeavors.

NEXT - Part Three of this four part article will cover dissecting a lead nurturing program, and how it works.  See you next time.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm

This is the initial portion of a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle.

Regardless of the methodology of lead generation you employ, in all probability your architectural firm will spend considerable time, energy and financial resources on lead generation. Some firms utilize direct mail, telemarketing, referral or customer-based marketing, trade shows, networking and a host of other strategies to generate leads and revenues. Others use their own particular formula for marketing and advertising. Lead generation and lead nurturing are top-of-the-funnel aspects of marketing and sales in every business; yours is no different.

This article is not about the strategy, it is about the process. As an inbound marketing agency our company, Zen Marketing, is in the business of teaching businesses how to generate more leads from their websites using content, but this is not a sales pitch today. Forget inbound marketing for the time being; let’s focus on the best approach to nurture the leads that you have generated.

One of the oldest clichés in the business world is “sales is a numbers game”. The number of customer sales transactions is the direct result of the number of “touches” the suspect experiences to convert to a prospect, to a qualified lead, to a sale. A touch might be an ad in the newspaper, meeting at a trade show, phone call, direct mail piece, or article found on the website. Every business is different; every marketing campaign is different. The sales cycle is what it is for your business; you know best the period of which we are referring to.

Those attempting to generate qualified leads, or prospects, if you will, will quickly learn precisely how long and what number of those suspects and prospects result in completed transactions (aka closed sales). In measuring this, a hard truth is exposed: there is major difference concerning “qualified” as opposed to “ready to purchase.”

Here is another truth. There will always be a percentage of “qualified” leads in the lead nurturing process that simply fail to generate a sale, just as there are those that make it all the way through the sales funnel, having received all of the lead nurturing they could ever hope for, and yet fall completely out of the pool of “sales-ready” prospective purchasers.

Statistics reveal that any architectural firm can consider approximately eighty percent of qualified prospects will ultimately make a purchase; however, there is no guarantee the transaction will hit your revenue report.

Lead Generation

We won’t be spending a lot of time on lead generation, because there are so much varied approaches that there are hundreds of books on the subject available for download on Amazon. The trick is realizing the difference between a suspect from a prospect; between a “lead” and a “qualified lead.”

Successful business-to-business marketing tactics include a broad and diverse range of tactics. Some of the most widely utilized include:

• Relationship marketing
• Content or Inbound marketing
• Direct or outbound marketing
• Online marketing
• Events 
• Tradeshows
• Educational workshops

When it comes to lead generation each tactic yields some amount of leads; but at what cost? And how efficiently are the leads created? The graph below, courtesy of our partner Hubspot®, reflects the sliding scale of the costs per lead. I provide this for information only, and won’t be discussing the benefits of one over the other, as it is for your firm to decide what strategies will be effective.

That said, nearly every any business card collected at a trade show is nothing more than a link to a suspect. Chances are that the person providing the card had a fanciful notion to share it because he or she:

• Behaviorally averse to confrontation- it’s easier and safer for them to simply string you along
• Was too bashful to say that something about your product or service caught their eye and nothing more
• Something from their past was brought to mind as a result of seeing your booth
• They love collecting business cards (you wouldn’t believe the number of cards that are given out and then thrown away when the person gets home)
• They ask for more information, only to gather further information to compare with your competitors

IN OUR NEXT POST ..... we take a serious look at lead nurturing.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Accounting Firm

This is the initial portion of a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle.

Regardless of the methodology of lead generation you employ, in all probability your accounting firm will spend considerable time, energy and financial resources on lead generation. Some firms utilize direct mail, telemarketing, referral or customer-based marketing, trade shows, networking and a host of other strategies to generate leads and revenues. Others use their own particular formula for marketing and advertising. Lead generation and lead nurturing are top-of-the-funnel aspects of marketing and sales in every business; yours is no different.

This article is not about the strategy, it is about the process. As an inbound marketing agency our company, Zen Marketing, is in the business of teaching businesses how to generate more leads from their websites using content, but this is not a sales pitch today. Forget inbound marketing for the time being; let’s focus on the best approach to nurture the leads that you have generated.

One of the oldest clichés in the business world is “sales is a numbers game”. The number of customer sales transactions is the direct result of the number of “touches” the suspect experiences to convert to a prospect, to a qualified lead, to a sale. A touch might be an ad in the newspaper, meeting at a trade show, phone call, direct mail piece, or article found on the website. Every business is different; every marketing campaign is different. The sales cycle is what it is for your business; you know best the period of which we are referring to.

Those attempting to generate qualified leads, or prospects, if you will, will quickly learn precisely how long and what number of those suspects and prospects result in completed transactions (aka closed sales). In measuring this a hard truth is exposed: there is major difference concerning “qualified” as opposed to “ready to purchase.”

Here is another truth. There will always be a percentage of “qualified” leads in the lead nurturing process that simply fail to generate a sale, just as there are those that make it all the way through the sales funnel, having received all of the lead nurturing they could ever hope for, and yet fall completely out of the pool of “sales-ready” prospective purchasers.

Statistics reveal that any accounting firm can consider approximately eighty percent of qualified prospects will ultimately make a purchase; however, there is no guarantee the transaction will hit your revenue report.

Lead Generation

We won’t be spending a lot of time on lead generation, because there are so much varied approaches that there are hundreds of books on the subject available for download on Amazon. The trick is realizing the difference between a suspect from a prospect; between a “lead” and a “qualified lead.”

Successful business-to-business marketing tactics include a broad and diverse range of tactics. Some of the most widely utilized include:

• Relationship marketing
• Content or Inbound marketing
• Direct or outbound marketing
• Online marketing
• Events 
• Tradeshows
• Educational workshops

When it comes to lead generation each tactic yields some amount of leads; but at what cost? And how efficiently are the leads created? The graph below, courtesy of our partner Hubspot®, reflects the sliding scale of the costs per lead. I provide this for information only, and won’t be discussing the benefits of one over the other, as it is for your firm to decide what strategies will be effective.

That said, nearly every any business card collected at a trade show is nothing more than a link to a suspect. Chances are that the person providing the card had a fanciful notion to share it because he or she:

• Behaviorally averse to confrontation- it’s easier and safer for them to simply string you along
• Was too bashful to say that something about your product or service caught their eye and nothing more
• Something from their past was brought to mind as a result of seeing your booth
• They love collecting business cards (you wouldn’t believe the number of cards that are given out and then thrown away when the person gets home)
• They ask for more information, only to gather further information to compare with your competitors

IN OUR NEXT POST ..... we take a serious look at lead nurturing.

Sales Team Motivation and Inbound Marketing

We are approached by many companies who are looking to grow their revenue line, and in the process of understanding their approach to business development one question is universally asked - “How Do We Motivate Our Sales Team?”

First off- you cannot really motivate anyone. Motivation comes from within an individual. A person’s preference of behavior, both adapted and natural, really determines this. Having said that, we have enjoyed working with many good leaders, who have inspired a team of people to accomplish great things.

Second- a sales team is a group of individuals is not a collective or group mind set. Our workflow always involves the application of scientific online assessments to understand each sales person’s unique behavior and their motivators. When we understand a person’s preferences we can build a plan that aligns with that and truly engage their future drive to succeed… and drive greater results.

What drives motivation?

For some people it is purely money (and we screen for this especially where we are seeking people to fill commission based sales positions for a client).  There are several other motivators that can be measured using our assessment process. EG: You seldom see altruism as a motivator in business development profiles. So an understanding of a person’s unique behavioral and motivational preference can be a powerful dataset.

We also have an effective sales evaluation assessment, which measures a person’s understanding of the entire sales process. This valuable dataset lets us identify where a salesperson’s strengths lay, as well as where they might need additional coaching. It can be applied to an existing team or a potential new hire.

In other words, a plan that is broadly based is always going to be less effective than one that is built from the individual team member’s motivational perspective.

Give Them the Best Support to Really Drive Results

We then take this process one step further, by helping make the overall sales effort more efficient through the deployment of an inbound marketing process. If you want to see the batting averages of a sales organization skyrocket change the paradigm of cold calling into one where they are speaking to highly interested opportunities that, people that have the BANT necessary to insure success.

We use the term BANT a lot. This is an acronym for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline and all four of these conditions must exist for any salesperson to close a sale. Inexperienced sales people invest a lot of time in the sales process to learn one (or more) of these factors isn’t present and results in an investment of time and talent but no desired result. Experienced sales people know ways to navigate (or argue) their way around these factors but it can be very time consuming and not always fruitful.

Motivationally speaking, when a sales force knows the odds for success are higher with every phone call or email inquiry (because the inquiry has a high BANT probability) they approach the sales call more confidently. It is a lot of like athletics- players get into a cycle of success and that feeds more confidence and that usually leads to more success. Sales people also go through periods of ups and downs based on their close rates or the quality of the orders they are generating. A well orchestrated inbound marketing process can create this environment, one that drives better inquiries, improved lead conversion, and generates more success for the sales team... and the company.

Perhaps You Should Change Your Approach to Marketing?

With the proper application of a well defined plan along with a robust inbound marketing platform (we recommend Hubspot® and use it ourselves) you can consolidate almost all of your marketing endeavors into a single software-driven process. The advantages to this approach are:

• You will extend the reach of your company’s value proposition
• Your target audience will understand your company culture
• The value your company brings to your clients will be broadly and repetitively understood
• You will be able to quantify which tactics are most successful and where to shift your investment of time and talent

Perhaps best of all you will share that across a blog and different social media applications automatically and seamlessly. You will now have the ability to:

• Create and/or enhance the awareness in your brand that rivals the best public relations tactics
• Repetitively establish your credibility
• Provide opportunities for interested parties to become qualified prospects
• Maintain a high level of engagement over time
• Understand where in the sales process your investment in training and continuing education needs to be applied

Get the Facts

We have a comprehensive e-book that illustrates the inbound marketing process in great detail, and would love to share it with you. To obtain your copy, with no strings attached and no sales person phone calls, just complete the short form, above, right.

And if you would like to schedule an initial assessment of your current website and see an inbound marketing quotient just drop us an email and request a complimentary consultation.

Accounting Firms and Inbound Marketing- Sustainability in Marketing

Your business development or sales organization has been very busy. Think about all that time spent drafting emails, responding to voice mails, writing proposals with little or no real relevance, pitching to non-decision makers and not holding prospects accountable to commitments… in actuality that is a lot of time NOT spent selling, it is time spent chasing!

What percentage of the overall time of your sales efforts are actually spent actually selling with new prospects? And how does your brand and/or credibility suffer from these typical but common sales activities?

Time is Your Most Valuable Asset

Consider the impact on your top line revenue if you were able to reduce the time either you or your sales people spend chasing procrastinators.

Consider the impact on your growth if you were able to double your actual time spent selling (most sales people are only in front of new prospects (outside the scope of your existing core client base).

Here is a hint: an improvement of 5%-20% of the time equates to 2-8 appointments/hours per week.

What would this translate into with regards to gross sales?

There is a marketing process that can shorten the sales cycle and dramatically improve conversion and close rates. When properly deployed it can eradicate all those annoying time wasters many sales people get stuck with while providing your brand or product with a significant boost in credibility. The common term is content marketing or inbound marketing. More about that in a minute…

How Is Time Utilized in the Sales Process?

Just think about the amount of time that gets invested into:

• prospecting and networking
• engaging
• presenting
• writing proposals

This is usually followed by the big chase with the “prospect”… and then you come to discover that your sales people were on a big fishing expedition!

Sooner or later every business owner will realize the importance of addressing this situation.

Quite often traditional sales people sit back after all of the hours of prospecting, pitching, presenting, proposal writing and chasing and go over in their own minds why the prospect, who seemed so interested yesterday did not buy today. There are shelves of books dealing with this problem in book stores. The reasons that sales people typically provide are at the very least predictable.

Do any of these replies sound familiar?

• Your price is too high!
• We need to “think it over”!
• We have decided to postpone this for now!
• We have decided to stay with our current provider!
• We chose another company!

If you had a stock portfolio that was under-performing the overall market would you keep dumping time and money into those stocks? I seriously doubt it. What you would do is you assess what you have that is working, and then determine what to keep and what to eliminate… you would cut your losses with regard to what is really an under-performing asset. Why would you approach your marketing tactics any differently?

Place Your Focus on the Plan

For our clients opportunity is not a viable strategy to business development. Our clients believe in the creation of plans, plans that are both realistic and achievable; plans that establish measurable goals and provide personal accountability. Our clients wake up every morning knowing what action items have to be accomplished, and understand how these activities align with their overall long term mission.

Can you honesty argue that your marketing and sales goals are clearly defined, understood throughout your company, and are being achieved? If not perhaps it’s time for you to seriously consider a change in your company’s approach to marketing. Beginning with the overall vision and leading through the goals, strategies, and action items necessary to achieve a result that you will be proud of. And getting off of the unsustainable cycle of cold calling, frustration, and remorse and shifting your marketing spend into a more sustainable process.

It Must Be Measurable

Adopting new marketing tactics are always met with excitement until the revenue line doesn’t grow or the results are fuzzy and non-measurable. That has often been the case with traditional marketing tactics like direct mail, newspaper advertising, and road signs. And while good marketers have adapted internet marketing best practices like dedicated landing pages and QR codes to help strengthen these traditional practices provide and provide some analysis they really cannot compare to the quality and volume of data that can be generated from an inbound marketing approach.

Again, using the stock portfolio analogy, how long would you continue with an investment advisor if all you routinely saw were the fees s/he was charging you and not the performance of the portfolio? That is very similar to what many businesses are doing- paying the fees to pump out ad’s without being able to assess the impact that ad is having on their revenue growth.

Change Your Approach to Marketing

With the proper application of a well defined plan along with a robust inbound marketing platform (we recommend Hubspot® and use it ourselves) you can consolidate almost all of your marketing endeavors into a single software-driven process. The advantages to this approach are:

• You will project your company’s value proposition
• Your target audience will understand your company culture
• The value your company brings to your clients will be broadly and repetitively understood
• You will be able to quantify which tactics are most successful and where to shift your investment of time and talent

Perhaps best of all you will share that across a blog and different social media applications automatically and seamlessly. You will now have the ability to:

• Create and/or enhance the awareness in your brand that rivals the best public relations tactics
• Repetitively establish your credibility
• Provide opportunities for interested parties to become qualified prospects
• Maintain a high level of engagement over time
• Understand where in the sales process your investment in training and continuing education needs to be applied

Get the Facts

We have a comprehensive e-book that illustrates the inbound marketing process in great detail, and would love to share it with you. To obtain your copy, with no strings attached and no sales person phone calls, just complete the short form, above, right.

And if you would like to schedule an initial assessment of your current website and see an inbound marketing quotient just drop us an email and request a complimentary consultation.