Wasting Marketing Dollars and MDF on Poorly Managed Follow-Up
How do we properly attribute leads, activity, and messaging to deal registrations for ROI Reporting? What is the best way to train new sales reps on special programs and right-size it and customize the marketing automation? How do we get partners and VARs to understand each other’s goals and speak a common language?
Alarming (And Solvable) Statistics
- Tradeshow Woes: 80% of trade show exhibitors don’t follow up with their show leads. (Bizzabo and SalesForceTraining.com)
- Unless You’re Segmented, Your Emails Are Trash: a 13% email open rate for tech industry as of April 2018 (and updated June 2018), according to Constant Contact’s data.
- You’re Paying for Social Touches LinkedIn, But Should Be: sponsored InMail minimum Open Rate 20%; Open Rate Range: 25-45%; CTR Range: 2-5%
- Outbound Phone Is Such a Grind, and Your Reps Feel It: for cold calling, InsideSales.com looked at over 1 million phone calls and determined 6.3% of the time the rep is able to have a conversation (aka not get hung up on)
We Must Provide Friction-less Process to Reps
Outbound, especially well-researched, targeted outbound is a grind. We must help them overcome the fatigue of the job, all while maintain accountability. It’s a balance (also from InsideSales.com):
- What Sales Reps THINK They’re Doing with Outbound: they’re making 15 touches per lead in a 20 day cadence
- But, Rep Psychology is Fascinating; What they’re actually doing: they’re actually making 4 total attempts in a 5 day duration
- And, Even Though Email Isn’t As Effective as Outbound Phone: YET 61% of reps choose this as their first touch in a cadence, and 32% of reps stop here at one touch.
What is the cause? Rep fear? Do you have a bad system in place? Does the rep not believe in his or her campaigns? Keep reading. I have a proposed solution…
The Future and Big Opportunity for 2019 and Beyond for IT Solution, Services, and Software Providers
Leading off with a stat: 25% of those who viewed an online video as part of their B2B event attendance research found that it affected consideration. (Google & Ipsos Media CT, 2014)
It was 2016 and 2017. I had been focused on events, traditional trade show booths, outbound phone and email cadences and sales pitch decks. A team of 7 and I spent 18 months outbound dialing in a hybrid Inside Sales/ Sales Development function.
All are important, especially a wicked sales pitch deck tailored to a major account with the account-based content creation strategy. And, having come from marketing to the public sector, events, tradeshows and outbound dialing is where the magic happens, even in 2018.
I led the charge on integrating lead scoring and grading, which we can go into. We started manually testing some nurture tracks and win-back campaigns on leads we had hit in the past. We build reports and created campaigns of old leads that we had marked as follow-ups.
And, guess what? The stuff (leads, data, context) that was already in Salesforce was a goldmine. Plus, the leads had been called on and researched, so with the extra context it made segmenting the leads so much easier.
But, I really knew this thing had legs when I lost my team of ADR/ SDR/ BDR. The headcount simply wasn’t sustainable. I knew I had to make changes to my approach to drive attendance to events, technical workshops, and micro-webinars.
Using LinkedIn advertising and email marketing alone, while collaboratively teaming with the sales reps if we had at least one key contact or win in an account, we were able to fill rooms of workshops.
I have a formula that works for your MDF dollars in order to help you sell licenses and services, especially if you’re newer to the game of integrating marketing and sales in a pipeline-focused way. Please, schedule some time with me.