How do 3rd party vendors help with Sales & Marketing integration?

In one of the earlier posts, my colleague, Abhijit touched upon the need for integration between the Sales & Marketing functions within Tech companies. While the post outlined the need for it and the mechanism to achieve that integration, I would like to touch upon how a 3rd party Inside Sales vendor can very easily speed up the process.

Having worked with multiple tech companies over the years, I have noticed that there is an almost cynical attitude sales has towards marketing leads. The attitude stems from the fact that given the constraints marketing faces, they end up passing a large number of leads (primarily from Email Marketing, Web Marketing and similar channels) that are a complete waste of time for Sales managers.

Over a period of time, this leads to genuine inquiries being thrown out by Sales managers just because there is no trust in the Lead Generation engine created by Marketing. Invariably, Sales managers end up depending on themselves to generate the leads they need and when they leave take all intelligence & contact data with them. So how does a third party vendor help with these issues.

In most of the successful campaigns we have executed for customers, I have noted that when our teams are used to qualify leads from all the components of the lead generation engine (Email Marketing, Events, Web Marketing, etc) and pass on only “Sales-ready” leads to the sales teams the effectiveness of the programs (number of opportunities identified to overall number of leads generated) is much higher than campaigns where we are used to only to book time-slots.

However, it is critical that the “Sales-readiness” be clearly defined by the Sales team before the start of the engagement. We recommend that customers use a BANT (Budget-Authority-Need-Timeframe) based scoring model to arrive at the “Sales-readiness” of a lead. Once this is done, the 3rd Party vendor acts like glue between the Sales & Marketing functions. Marketing gets visibility into the Sales process and Sales starts believing in Marketing leads and spends time following up only on genuine opportunities.

Milind Katti
COO, QEDbaton

How do you measure the success of your Web Marketing program?

In a survey we conducted recently, we asked participants how they measured the success of their Web Marketing program. As expected, most respondents measured the sales enquiries they were getting through the website, downloads people were making from their website or landing pages and the unique visitors their websites/ landing pages were attracting. Some respondents wanted to measure the unique visitors their blogs were attracting but did not do it regularly.

It was surprising to see that not a lot of people were measuring qualitative parameters such as number of comments on blogs, repeat respondents to discussions, etc. When we launched our web marketing program a couple of quarters back, we also started out with the same measures. However, we have rapidly found out that there are two elements to the web marketing program; i.e.,

• Quantitative (website visits, downloads, enquiries) typically measured to understand impact of program to Sales
• Qualitative (comments on blogs, repeat respondents to discussions, etc) measured to understand impact of program to Brand Visibility, Thought Leadership, etc

We are now including these qualitative parameters in the measurement of our Web Marketing program. Another key indicator of the relevance of your content to the market you are targeting is measures such as Exit Rate and Bounce Rate. Both of these can easily be measured from Google Analytics and give a good indication of how relevant the content on the website is.

What do you think are the right measures of a successful Web Marketing program?

Hari Raghunathan

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

How Social Media helps small businesses

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Your website is your medium of promoting your business on the Internet. Having said that it’s essential to keep your clients and prospects well informed about the developments that happen in your business. So, if you have a website you may as well update it with latest happenings. But the person who designed your website has disappeared and is not in touch with you because it was a one off project for your web designer. You also lack the funds to engage full time with a vendor to manage your website or employ someone to do it. What do you do in a situation like this?

A simple and logical solution is writing a blog.

Now, you may wonder how that can help you. Well, it’s really straightforward – A blog is your best bet simply because

1. It’s free – WordPress and blogger offer free blogs and they can be optimized

2. It’s easy – blogs are easy to sign up for and surprisingly easy to manage. WordPress in particular has a quick step sign up process and it has a brilliant dashboard with widgets and measurability aspect to monitor the blog.

3. It’s measurable – you get statistics if all sorts on a dashboard you know who is reading what and you know where the traffic is coming from. All this information can help you strategize your business accordingly.

Besides all the above you can have new content on your website (because the blog can be linked into your website) which means crawlers will read your info and improve/ retain your rankings in organic search.

Apart from writing a blog you can also participate in the social media space is the form of

Videos: Helps you create a rapport with new prospects & Educates prospects about your services

Every business has a website and every competitor of yours has a website and you all have the same products or services! So why not do something different. Upload videos that speak about your business, talk about everything that your prospect needs to know about you.

Integrating a video about your products services, testimonials or even a video tour of your premises into your website can help building a level of comfort and trust for your prospect. After all if someone watches your video they are getting to know you and you are already doing a bit of initial consultation- basically creating a rapport with your customers using online streaming websites

Social Media Networks: Let’s your prospect know more about you

Social networking has changed the landscape of searching for people and getting to know them. You can list yourself on LinkedIn, Xing or creating a specialized community or simply participating within existing communities. You can also join Facebook and create a community there if you want. Get a Twitter account and send tweets, follow people in your profession. Engaging in conversations with prospects can help you win new business on a long term basis.

Most importantly you can stay in touch with your community and your business will reap its benefits in terms of long term business, rapport building and increased sales.

Nilesh Deshmukh

Social Media Consultant

Working Web 2.0 channels

Continuing from my last post that focused on the impact of Web 2.0 on Technology Sales & Marketing, I feel that Online Reputation Management is gaining importance in this new marketing world order. Customers are posting complaints & compliments which can easily be accessed by search. Users are writing reviews of the new products you are launching and prospective buyers trust and access these reviews to make their decision. What emerged from our last post and the subsequent discussions was that the best way to shape your brand online is to actively listen and participate in conversations that are centered either on your company or your industry.

We advice our customers to follow these guidelines when working Web 2.0 channels

Understand your Social Media channels
Not all Social Media channels will make sense to your organization. Understand where your prospective & existing customers and employees are active and start tuning into those channels.
Join the conversation
Once you have identified the channels that make most sense to you, start participating in discussions that are going on. Instead of waiting for people to come to your website or blog, join conversations wherever they are
Promote Good Content
Do not promote only content you are creating. If you come across interesting discussions, don’t shy away from sharing it within your network.
Use Videos
With more than 100 million video downloads per day, YouTube is too big a marketing opportunity to overlook. Create short videos and post them to YouTube and other video-sharing sites.
Monitor, Measure & Tweak your Program
Evaluating your social media marketing program is not only about counting your website visitor stats. You should measure how well your organization is at engaging your prospective & existing customer base via different social media channels.

Some examples of what you need to monitor are

• How many blog readers do you have?
• How many comments are posted on your blog and by how many different visitors?
• How many people mention your company on their blogs, and how often?
• Is your content bookmarked in social bookmarking sites?
• How many friends and contacts do you have on your profile in social networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc)?

Hari Raghunathan
Head Marketing, QEDbaton

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

How is Web 2.0 changing Technology Sales & Marketing?

Traditionally marketing has been an extremely controlled process. Messages have been developed, crafted, and delivered by a small group of people within an organization. However, with the advent of Web 2.0, this is undergoing a dramatic shift and online PtoP (Peer to Peer) communication is taking over. Every employee has now become a spokesperson and information from peers is highly trusted.

Web 2.0 is changing the way messages about products and brands are delivered and received. The rise of social media is a dramatic change for marketing. In Web 1.0, Internet marketing was looked at just like other marketing channels. We designed our marketing plan, audience, and choose channels to get our message out: Advertisements- TV & Print, Brochures, Newsletters, etc. Internet ads & Search engine ads were only seen as additional channels.

However, Web 2.0 is making us rethink the entire nature of our Marketing programs. Technology companies are now Blogging, podcasting, video casting, photo sharing, social bookmarking, creating profiles in MySpace and Facebook, and appearing in virtual worlds like Second Life. With Web 2.0, organizations don’t control the message anymore. Everyone contributes to shaping the message.

So what should a marketer do in an era where customers freely discuss your products and services?

Hari Raghunathan
Head Marketing, QEDbaton

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan