Marketing automation has evolved over the last decade from typically managing a single channel (direct mail or email) to facilitating multi-channel, multi-touch campaigns that are at the core of revenue performance. One valuable aspect of marketing automation tools is to nurture a lead until the prospect is ready to engage with sales. Coupled with the new reality that prospective customers do not contact the sales person until well into the decision process, marketing automation is now front and center to enabling sales to maximize the chance of winning new customers. While lead nurturing and scoring are well-documented uses of marketing automation, we focus here on a few tactical examples of further leveraging marketing automation tools by adding data and analytic capabilities to benefit the sales teams. You can use analytics in marketing automation to: 1. Estimate an early outcome: Early in the sales process, look at pivotal needs that leads and customers might be searching for, and what critical paths they might take within your organization. You can develop and use analytic models to predict what path the prospect is most likely to take. For example, you might be interested to predict that prospects would be likely to ”buy 50+ units” or want to talk about …Read More
Fun + Games = Sales Productivity?
People like fun n’ games. If yours is like most sales organizations, there is at least one program or motivational initiative with a fun theme to it, possibly involving sports or other games. A desire for recognition and winning brings out something extra in us, and what better place than sales to showcase that, where there’s motivation to scale new heights against the competition and to personally and professionally benefit. According to gamification.org – a terrific collection of resources – gamification is “the process of adding Game Mechanics and Rewards in non-game contexts to boost Engagement, Loyalty and Fun!” If that doesn’t seem intuitive, you’ll recognize it from first-hand experience because a popular application of gamification is frequent flyer programs. Gamification is simply a methodical approach to engage your audience, create a two-way give-and-take, and connect with people’s motivations and aspirations. In a business context, engagement through games can be targeted towards customers, sales reps, partners and even employees. Let’s break gamification strategy down to its core components: Game mechanics are the building blocks of the process. Gamification.org says these “are constructs of Rules and Feedback Loops intended to produce enjoyable Gameplay that can be applied and combined in any context.” According to …Read More
Spring Cleaning: Data hygiene tips that keep your sales data always ready for analysis
Predictive analytics needs a foundation of clean data. Here are top tips from our most recent lead gen implementation on Salesforce.com. You can use these immediately in any environment: Address standardization and change of address. Typically up to 30% of records lack complete address information. This affects both deliverability and duplicate search. If you have not done so in 3 years, run a Change of Address (NCOA) process to get your customer’s new addresses. Stay up to date on your customers because 10% of businesses move each year. When you receive a street address change, but it’s a PO Box in the same city, retain both — one for mailing and one for secondary validation. Dupes are the silent killer. Because a single comprehensive definition does not fit all, de-dupe the files using a variety of match logic. You can try a loose match logic (a few criteria, gives more duplicates) or tight match logic (more criteria, resulting in fewer duplicates). Take address elements into account, but use transactional information to determine which record to keep or drop. For example, between duplicates you might want to merge a record with multiple contacts into a record with the largest sales amount or the record with the longest …Read More