Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

Part II. Working with Data and Leads

Chapter 7. Sending Leads to Sales

In This Chapter

 Involving sales in key decisions

 Turning on sales-enablement functions

 Running campaigns for sales

Marketing automation is not just a tool for marketers, it’s a tool for sales as well. Failing to realize this will cause you to run into many issues with salespeople misunderstanding what is being passed to them and misunderstanding how to use the new technology you’ve invested in. Without proper explanation, sales staff won’t understand how to use the information received from marketing correctly, and that leads to salespeople who won’t buy in to your new processes. Remember that it’s all about generating more revenue, and both sides of the team have the same goal.

You should include sales in all steps of investigation, implementation, and refinement of your marketing automation tool. Give salespeople a voice because you need them to believe in many of these ideas for you to be successful.

This chapter explains how to turn on sales-enablement functionality in your marketing automation system. I also tell you how to align your sales and marketing teams and run your first campaigns for your salespeople.

Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams

Sales and marketing can easily find themselves at odds with each other. Sales can say that the leads being passed aren’t any good, and marketing can say that sales isn’t closing the leads that marketing passes over. It’s a very common struggle within most organizations. Getting both teams aligned and on the same page can happen very easily with the proper technology.

In the next sections, I show you how to involve sales in your marketing automation decisions so that you can align your sales and marketing teams and reduce friction between the two departments.

Working with sales to define fields in your CRM system

The main objective of connecting your marketing automation tool to your CRM is to allow data to flow freely back and forth between sales and marketing. Identifying your key data points on each record before you begin implementation helps you to make sure that you are selecting the correct tool and properly integrating your two tools. Start by defining with sales which fields are required for a lead to be marketing qualified. Marketing-qualified leads are ones that have met all marketing criteria to be considered a lead and are then passed to sales. These fields will be the first fields you need to integrate. The fields you use for segmenting your list will be the second set of fields you need to list. Overlap is likely here, and that is okay. You don’t integrate fields twice. Continue this process with each CRM object you use.

Fields you don’t use for segmentation and that are not required by sales for a lead to be qualified don’t need to be integrated. Fields you don’t currently have but that will be required for advanced automations generally are automatically set up when you install your marketing automation tool into your CRM.

Some good examples are fields such as the following:

·        Prospect score

·        Campaign of origin

·        Marketing touch points affecting the lead

·        Last time on website

·        Last campaign engaged with

Agreeing on sales-ready lead definitions and time frames

If you have a problem with communication between marketing and sales, it’s usually a mismatch in definitions. For example, to sales, a lead may mean a person ready to buy. But to a marketer, a lead may mean someone who has an interest. Marketing automation gives you the ability to merge these definitions for a more cohesive team. The three main definitions you need to work on with your team are

·        Sales-ready score: This score is the minimum threshold that a lead has to meet to get passed to sales. Both sales and marketing have to agree on a score at which a lead gets passed on. Having a minimum threshold is easy to measure and implement with marketing automation, and it removes the frustration stemming from a host of reasons that a lead may have been passed to sales.

·        Service-level agreement: Sales and marketing teams sometimes disagree over how much time is given to a sales representative to allow him or her to respond to a new lead after it has been passed on sales. The two-way communication between your CRM and your marketing automation tool will provide you the ability to track and automate an agreed-upon time frame and align on the actions to take when this time frame has passed.

·        Sales-ready lead: A sales-ready lead is a lead that is ready to make a purchase decision or have a conversation with a sales representative. Many actions can be signs of a sales-ready lead, but without the context of other actions, they are not enough on their own to accurately qualify a lead as sales ready. Marketing automation gives you the ability to combine all sales-ready actions across all channels so that you have insight into the true sales readiness of a lead based on the entire context of your marketing program. Tools within your marketing automation solution such as lead scoring and lead tracking provide you with the data points to determine when a lead becomes sales ready. The automation part of your solution helps you to nurture the nonsales-ready leads up to that point and hand off the truly sales-ready leads to your sales team in real time.

Identifying the important data points of a lead, contact, account, and opportunity

Engaging sales to create common definitions for all aspects of the lead life cycle is key to a successful integration. Engaging with sales to have sales staff help create the following definitions will foster buy-in to the concept and help them understand what is being passed to them and why.

·        Lead: Define the information, activity, and score required for a person to become a lead.

·        Contact: Define when a lead is converted to a contact. This includes what processes need to happen and by whom, and whether the lead needs to be tied to an account or an opportunity at this stage.

·        Marketing Qualified Led (MQL): Define when a lead is passed to sales, which includes defining what information is required by marketing to be attached to the record.

·        Sales-Qualified Lead (SQL): Define the process of sales accepting marketing-qualified leads. This is usually called a Service-Level Agreement (SLA). The SLA should define how long sales has to respond to accept a marketing lead and the process for accepting and declining a lead. When the MQL lead is accepted, it becomes an SQL.

·        Opportunity: Define when a lead or account is created into an opportunity. This should be qualified by a buying timeline and marked on the record.

Collaborating with sales

You can run many types of sales support campaigns, but you should never run one without collaborating with sales in the following ways:

·        Define goals together. You need to sit down with the head of your sales team and define goals for your campaigns. Defining goals helps to get cooperation with each idea as well as a clear idea of what the campaigns are supposed to help with.

·        Obtain acceptance on ideas. Your ideas need to be bought into by the sales team. You might need to attend sales meetings to present your ideas, or do this via an email. I suggest meeting in person so that sales staff can ask you questions. I promise you that they will have lots of questions.

·        Create a test group. Set up a test group if you have a tough crowd. The test group is the first to use the campaign and then share their results. A test group can be a great asset if your team is reluctant to change.

·        Set a report date. You must have a defined end of your campaigns. Having an end allows you to obtain feedback. If sales doesn’t want your campaigns to stop, you don’t have to, but putting a defined date down on paper gives you a predetermined date for reevaluation. It also allows you to push off sales’ comments until that date.

Asking sales for content suggestions

Your salespeople may have a lot of good ideas. Remember that they are on the front lines; they get a lot of information and generally keep their ears pretty close to the action. They know what other companies are using, they see campaigns others are using, and they know what’s working and what isn’t. Asking them for content suggestions is a great idea; however, you need some structure around this process. Here are ways to create that structure:

·        Use a form. You have a marketing automation tool that can make forms. You can use your form tool within your marketing automation tool to create a place where sales can give you feedback. This is an outside-the-box use of your new form-building tool, located within your marketing automation tool. Your form should have only a few fields. You might use a drop-down list for campaign type, such as email, white paper, and so on, and you should have a free text field in which sales staff can type an idea. Your form can also send an auto responder back out to the sales rep saying “Thank You.”

·        Make it clear that not all ideas will fly. Have a dialogue with people about your idea-creation process. They need to know that not all ideas make it to a full campaign. If you are not clear on this, many reps will think you don’t like their ideas. This may well be the case, but you need them on your side to keep giving you ideas and to help push these campaigns. Playing a bit of politics helps keep the relationship between the two departments at its best.

·        Put a bounty out. Another great way to get feedback on content ideas is to put a bounty on other companies’ collateral. You can use any prize you want, but incentivize your salespeople to find other companies’ content and send it to you. This approach eliminates their subjective input and just gets you what’s happening out there in your marketplace.

·        Sit in on sales meetings. This is the other best way to get content ideas. Your salespeople can voice their issues with deals and describe where they are stuck. Creating content to help them get around these issues is a big win for you — and them. Just listening to their meetings can be a great source of information.

Copying your best salespeople

Because any email communication you will be sending in a sales support campaign will appear to come from a salesperson, you need to make sure that they look as though they came from a salesperson. Many marketers cringe when they think about the emails their salespeople send; their salespeople, however, usually know a thing or two about what they are writing. Learning to take tips from your best salespeople will greatly increase engagement with your emails.

·        Ask for their best email. Every sales rep has his or her “best email.” I was in sales for years and I can still remember my best ones. They are the ones I’d use the most often, and they were usually tailored to a specific point in the buying process and were easily changed. The latter two points give you two big wins. Sales will give you the best messaging for a particular point in the buying cycle, as well as give you a template, which works very well with dynamic text. Figure 7-1 gives a good example of a great sales email, which is set up to be able to just drop in names and other information.

Figure 7-1: Creating a dynamic email template can be very easy.

·        Find out their cadence. Cadence is something every sales rep has as well. Each rep has a process for when they call, how often they call, and when they do different types of touch points. Having a process is systematic and makes keeping up with a lot of leads much easier. Your best sales reps will have figured out a very effective cadence for your marketplace. They know how often is too often to reach out, and how soon is too soon to reach out.

When I was selling, my cadence was 2-5-12-30. I called, left a voice message, and then waited two days. I then followed up via email and then waited five more days. I finally placed my last call, left my last voice message, and sent my last email after 12 days. After 30 days, I reached back out to the prospect if I had no sign of engagement during that time. I promise that your sales team does something very similar.

·        Speak their language. Despite any bad grammar, bad formatting, and careless mistakes your salespeople make on a daily basis, this is what makes them salespeople, not marketers. Speak in their vernacular, and write as they would — maybe not exactly as they would, but similar. Notice how they write an email and how they speak about topics. Pick up some of these tricks and it will make your emails more believable and increase your engagement.

Note that I’m not saying to have bad formatting, but rather to have none. Personal emails are what most salespeople send when they are communicating with a person, and these are short, with no formatting. Salespeople get into trouble when they try to format emails or make emails not look handwritten.

Turning on Sales Enablement Functionality

Turning on sales enablement is the last part of your implementation between your marketing automation tool and your CRM. The reason to save this part for last is that everything else has to be done first before you can leverage any of the features for sales. Getting your sales-enablement tools set up also is likely to require you to have very solid understanding of your tool because you are now the expert in your office, so be prepared.

Some salespeople like to try new tools but others will never use them, so make sure that you share the potential impact with your salespeople. The impact to the sales organization is often so large that salespeople who sell with marketing automation won’t sell without it again. They often become the champions for marketing automation when they move to a new company that is not using it.

You shouldn’t activate sales enablement without introducing these features to your salespeople. You should take the following three important steps just before or immediately after you turn everything on:

1.     Have a “town hall” meeting.

Get all your salespeople together and go over the changes they are about to see in the CRM application. Let them know that they do not have to change but that they can leverage these new tools to sell more. Show the CRM screen with the new features turned on, and explain what each feature is supposed to do.

2.     Demonstrate the process of the lead flow.

During your town hall meeting, show a prospect record. Create a dialogue based on a salesperson who got a lead, saw the lead go cold, reconnected after getting a lead activity notification from a drip campaign, and then generated the closed ROI. Make sure that your demonstration shows salespeople how they now have visibility into all actions of leads, automatic nurturing, and instant reporting.

3.     Conduct a training class.

Set up a short training class online or in person. Most companies use either video tutorials or live trainings in a classroom setting. Getting your team trained saves you countless questions and hours of frustration.

You don’t need to have sales enablement functionality turned on to get your own marketing value out of your tool after you integrate your CRM system with your marketing automation tool. However, enabling sales functionality doesn’t take any meaningful amount of time, and the value for sales is huge. So it really doesn’t make any sense to leave it turned off.

You also don’t have to turn on all sales enablement technologies right away. Many marketing automation tools have various levels of sales support. Most tools have three levels: sales notifications, daily emails, and campaigns. They all work independently of each other, so I suggest starting with one and moving toward another later on. Start with daily emails and then move to more frequent notifications, followed by sales campaigns.

Supporting Campaigns for Your Sales Team

Marketing automation can lend a huge hand when you’re crafting campaigns to support your sales team. If you can get sales support campaigns down, you can greatly shorten your sales cycle and increase your salespeople’s close rates very easily.

Building automated campaigns for cold sales leads

The first campaign you should build for sales after turning on sales enablement should be designed to catch and nurture the leads that sales can’t reach through the selling process. These leads usually fall through the cracks and are never heard from again. Many articles that cover sales effectiveness reference a statistic that says these unreachable leads will buy from someone over the next 24 months. If you aren’t communicating with these leads somehow, it’s unlikely they will buy from your salesperson.

Creating this campaign requires you to first identify a few key fields for segmenting your campaign. I suggest looking at two fields. One is a lead stage and the other is the lead’s last activity date:

·        Lead Stage: The lead stage is the prospect’s place in the sales process. For example, a lead could be in the assigned stage or the accepted stage depending on whether the lead is assigned to a sales rep or assigned and also accepted by the rep. If you don’t currently use a lead stage, you need to change that situation so that you can create a campaign to catch cold leads. The field is filled in by a sales rep manually, or you can use CRM automations to change it for you.

·        Last Activity Date: Last Activity Date is a custom field already in use by your CRM tool or a default field added by your marketing automation tool during integration. This field displays the last activity date of the lead in question, helping you gauge that lead’s last interactions with any of your marketing activities.

After you have the aforementioned two fields set up, use them to create your campaign by assigning the campaign to a condition. For example, if the lead has not had activity within 10 days, and the lead is in the assigned lead stage, your lead has been assigned but the sales rep hasn’t accepted or started working the lead. To keep the lead warm, your marketing automation system can now add the cold lead to your cold lead nurturing campaign.

The other big win is the fact that any activity the lead shows will go directly to the sales rep because the lead has already been assigned. That way, marketing is helping sales to stay in front of leads, and sales is helping marketing get more value out of the leads they created.

Using lead assignments to drive leads to the sales team

Lead assignment rules allow you to pass sales-ready leads to sales in real time. You should be thinking about when to pass on a lead, and how to do so. Here are the most common scenarios and how to accomplish them:

·        One person owns the relationship and sells multiple products. When your sales team is relationship-based with a large book of products, you don’t need to do much work on lead assignment. Your leads are already assigned to your rep, and your rep gets updates on when his or her leads are engaging with the campaign.

Figure 7-2 shows a lead-notification tool that shows your reps in real time who is engaging with the campaign. Because you don’t need to reassign the lead, you need only to set up an automation to let your sales reps know when a certain level of sales readiness has been reached. Your CRM tool can accomplish this for you if you choose to have it do so. CRM tools have the capability to create custom list views. So if you have your lead score synced with your CRM tool, your sales team can have a list of leads with a score over “X.” This allows the team to just check this list for any new leads.

Figure 7-2: Use lead assignment rules to show campaign engagement to your reps.

·        Sales reps sell one product line. When you have a sales team on which each sales rep sells only a single product, and you have multiple products, driving leads to the correct salesperson on the team can be tricky. A lot of your lead assignment will depend on your CRM setup at this point. Whether you use duplicate lead records or a single lead record will also determine the complexity of your lead assignment at this point. Consult your vendor to get further information on how to accomplish this scenario because your tool will determine how it can be done.

 If your emails are being sent from a salesperson automatically, email replies will go back to that salesperson as well. Keep this fact in mind, because if you have an automated campaign sending emails out on a sales rep’s behalf and a person replies, the sales rep needs to know where that email reply came from. This situation should be covered in your training.

 Never give your salespeople access to execute marketing campaigns on their own. Many salespeople want to send email blasts to their leads. Again, don’t let them do this — it’s a bad idea for many reasons, with the biggest one being that you’re now moving into one-to-one marketing methods with your marketing automation tool. Mass email blasting damages the relationships you’re building and can greatly damage your company’s reputation as well. Your marketing automation tool is very powerful, and you run the risk of wasting all your efforts if you give control to sales. If salespeople do need to run campaigns, give them a place to submit the campaign they want, and you can run it for them.

Impacting sales with lead notifications

Salespeople love to have data on their prospects and they love to be notified when prospect data changes. The more data they have, the better decisions they can make when they engage. Any notification you plan to set up for your salespeople needs to be communicated after integrating your CRM system. One of the most common is the lead activity reports included in your CRM tool after integration, as shown in Figure 7-3.

Figure 7-3: Lead activity reports should be communicated to sales.

Logging your lead history into your CRM system allows sales to use one tool for all prospect data and notifications. Each tool has a different way of notifying salespeople. Some tools use notification tools within a CRM application; other tools use desktop notifications outside the CRM application, as shown in Figure 7-4.

Figure 7-4: You can use desktop notifications in place of CRM notifications.

No matter which type of notifications you use, make sure that the sales reps know that they will be getting notified when a lead shows activity. They can then log in to the lead record to read the full report. Your training should cover which notifications require action on the part of sales.

Instead of individual notifications, you could choose to set up a daily summary report sent to all salespeople each morning, as shown in Figure 7-5. A summary shows identified leads assigned to each rep and the leads’ activity that day. You can also choose to have all anonymous visitors listed and sent to sales.

 Don’t allow your salespeople to use notifications to become creepy. For example, if salespeople are notified when a prospect downloads a white paper, your salespeople shouldn’t think they can call the prospect and say, “I know you just downloaded my white paper.” That’s creepy to prospects. Anticreepy training is beyond the scope of this book, but if you want to learn more about the best sales practices related to prospect data and notifications, go to http://vimeo.com/64080251 and take the training session titled “Social Selling, How Not to be Creepy.”

Figure 7-5: Use daily reports to summarize data from multiple notifications.