What do leads and deals have in common? Well… same letters, different order? (Reminds me of a word jumble – remember that? It was in the newspaper alongside Sudoku and the crossword.) But despite the similarity in appearance, the two are distinct.

Unjumbling – A Lead is not a Deal

I was having a conversation with a client the other day, and realized something – as B2B marketers, many of us create our own word jumbles in our heads – we see or hear leads but rearrange the letters in our head and understand deals. But they are VERY different, aren’t they?

Yes, leads (or a portion of them) should turn into closed deals. But they aren’t there yet. They aren’t even close! A lead is just a lead. Expecting a lead to be a closed sale is a pipe dream; leads still need to be worked. And sometimes you need to work them hard to get them to move forward.

Leads still need to be nurtured, and sometimes leads will die. That’s the nature of the business. Perhaps it’s the optimist in us: we get someone that is a lead and we think they should be a customer. That’s great – that should always be our goal. But realistically, they won’t all be customers. So as marketers/sales professionals, we need to understand that a lead is not a deal. Those 10,000 tradeshow leads are not going to turn into sales. In fact, many (or most) of them only stopped by the booth to enter your raffle.

Cultivating – Leads Won’t Cultivate Themselves

As a young marketer at an enterprise software company in the late ’90s, I fell into this trap. I thought that all of the leads I generated with my campaigns were awesome and I would personally help the company shatter its revenue goals. But I realized pretty quickly that leads require time and tenacity to move through the sales process. I got pretty good at explaining to our sales team why they should keep calling and following up with leads, even after they had left them one message or sent one email. Those 50 webinar registrants aren’t going to turn themselves into sales. Sure they expressed some interest, and filled out a form with some qualification criteria, but they need to be convinced that they need to keep interacting with you.

They need to be cultivated. They need to be guided through the buying process.

So they didn’t return your call when you called them after the webinar? Keep trying! Tenacity! Your competitors are calling/emailing/interacting with them – if you sit back and wait for them to reply or respond, they will probably respond to someone else!

Collaborating – Bring Sales and Marketing Together

Companies like SiriusDecisions have spent years talking about sales and marketing alignment. They have built a powerful niche in the research industry around it. Their demand waterfall is quite powerful – it’s a shared view between sales and marketing of the health of an organization’s new business-related activities. It measures the progression of leads through a range of stages – from cold to closed.

The key here is that it is a progression, and to move leads through the waterfall, marketers and sales professionals need to use various tactics to help leads move through the stages and eventually become deals.

Forget the Pipe Dream – Remember Your Pipeline

Leads are leads. Deals are deals. Don’t mix them up.

Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat

The post Don’t Mix Up Your Leads and Deals appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

What is a high-quality Lead?

A good, high-quality lead is one that aligns well with your buyer persona and one that has a clear intent to make a purchase. This is where your marketing and sales team should come together and create a shared definition of what a high-quality lead looks like. This way, the marketing team can feed the sales team leads that align well with both departments to get the highest conversion of leads to sales opportunities.

How can you attract high-quality leads?

Are you putting out the right traps? Consult and revise your buyer persona and ensure you are attracting those who not only align well with it, but are in your target market, and most importantly, those who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Finally, once you start getting good leads, nurture them like a newborn baby! After all, Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group).

Here are some tips on getting higher quality leads:

Try Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Account based marketing takes a bit more effort but works well because you essentially go out and find those leads yourself. Let’s say someone from a company shows an interest in your product. You would use the valuable information from that lead to find and target decision makers in the company. By using this method, you can tailor specific messaging to those in that ‘account’ and increase the chances of turning over a sale. While it takes more time and effort it has a bigger payoff as you essentially get to choose who is a lead, and who isn’t.

Check out this post we wrote on the benefits of account-based marketing, and how it can help you earn better leads.

Gated Content

Offer free content for some information in return. By giving away something like a free e-book, whitepaper, or a webinar you can ask for information such as their title, email, company size, industry, etc. You can use this information to build up a profile and qualify them. Once you have their email address you are free to contact/harass them or even send them promotional materials in order to peak their interest and provide solutions.

Tap into Q&A and review websites and social media

This won’t provide any quick wins, but will help you achieve your overall goal of sending high quality leads to your website. Participate in Q&A’s and forums such as Quora, and social media discussions such as LinkedIn Groups. You will not only be providing people with valuable information and building your credibility, but you will be able to approach those who need help and offer your services. These people qualify as a high-quality lead because they have expressed interest, at this point its time to take this lead to the next step and nurture it.

Additionally, consider listing your product on a website such as Capterra. If people are actively seeking guidance on which products are best, and what customers say about those products, then they are clearly seeking a solution to a pain and that makes them a very qualified lead.

Optimize your pages for lead generation

Offer visitors something that might be useful to them. The average person will spend 30 seconds on your webpage before deciding to stay or leave. If, after 30 seconds they decide they are interested and choose to stay, seize the opportunity to convert them into a lead. Make use of an automated service such as Instapage, Unbounce, LeadPages, Thrive Leads, etc. to offer them something free such as an e-book or whitepaper. With some services, you can also set this to pop up after a set amount of time so you can target only those who stick around. This will help filter the not-so-great-but-still-good leads from the high-quality leads. You can also do the opposite, target users when they decide to leave, maybe you can change their minds and convince them to stay.

Generate leads from existing customers

Chances are, existing customers have like-minded colleagues, peers, and friends who might be interested in what you have to offer. Consider setting up a referral program to encourage your existing customers to go out and get you more customers.

By providing some sort of incentive, customers will refer friends, family, and colleagues who are interested in order to get rewards. While this may involve a small investment, it pays off. Consider Dropbox. For each person you refer, you receive an extra 500MB of storage for free. While this is costing Dropbox 500MB of storage for each new person, the payoff is that they are getting new customers for a fraction of the price they would have spent on advertising. Mr. Referral is happy because he now has 16GB of cloud storage for free and Dropbox now has 32 new customers, some of which may have purchased a premium plan. Mr. Referral does all of the hard work for the price of 16GB, which costs Dropbox next to nothing. This will result in higher quality leads, as each new customer who signs up is essentially pre-qualified. Those who pass on the opportunity are obviously not the lead you are looking for.

Ask your customers what they want

Sometimes the best thing to do is to just ask your customers what they want from you. Ask existing customers to complete a quick survey and offer an e-book as an incentive to gain some insight on what it is your next potential leads might come looking for. You can use the data collected to better target your efforts and identify leads that have a higher chance of conversion.

Contact info and live chat

By providing a quick and easy way for potential leads to contact you, you can easily filter out the people who are genuinely interested from those who are “just browsing”. Provide very clear options on how to contact your company for more information. Include a contact form, a phone number for those who prefer to speak to a live person, and even an instant message box on your website for a quick response. Those who take the time to contact you and ask specific questions are likely very interested and most likely qualify as a high-quality lead.

Check out these 10 myths about lead quality.

Conclusion

While this may take some time, it is a worthwhile investment. By Revising your goals and changing up your strategy a little bit at a time, you can start to analyze each method and which ones work best for your company and attract the most high-quality leads. Once learning which methods work best, you can then focus your efforts on those strategies and perfect them to get the best possible results.

The post 7 Tips to Earn Higher Quality Leads. appeared first on Virtual Causeway.

Well….same letters, different order?

The image of a word jumble comes to mind – remember the word jumble? You would see it in the newspaper? I’m sure you can play it online somewhere….(Note to self – look for an online version of word jumble).

I was having a conversation with a client the other day, and realized something – many of us as B2B marketers create our own word jumbles in our heads – and we see or hear ‘leads’ but rearrange the letters in our head and understand ‘deals’. But they are VERY different, aren’t they?

Yes, leads (or a portion of them) should turn into closed deals,. bBut they aren’t there yet. They aren’t even close. A lead is a lead. Expecting a lead to be a closed sale is a pipe dream – leads still need to be worked. And sometimes you need to work them hard to get them to move forward.L Leeads still need to be nurtured,. Aand sometimes leads will die, …that’s the nature of the business. Perhaps it’s the optimist in us – we get someone that is a lead and we think they should be a customer.That’s great – that should always be our goal. But realistically – they will not all be customers. So as marketers/sales professionals/executives, we need to understand that a lead is not a deal. Those 10,000 tradeshow leads are not going to turn into sales. In fact, many of them only stopped by the booth to enter your raffle.

As a young marketer at an enterprise software company in the late 90s, I fell into this trap. I thought that all of the leads I generated with my campaigns were awesome and I would personally help the company shatter its revenue goals, but. But I realized pretty quickly that leads require time and tenacity to move through the sales process. I got pretty good at explaining to our sales team why they should keep calling and following up with leads, even after they had left them one message or sent one email.Those 50 webinar registrants aren’t going to turn into sales. Sure they expressed some interest, and filled out a form with some qualification criteria,. but they need to be convinced that they need to keep interacting with you. They need to be cultivated. They need to be guided through the buying process.

So they didn’t return your call when you called them after the webinar. Keep trying! Tenacity!Your competitors are calling/emailing/interacting with them – if you sit back and wait for them to reply or respond, they will probably respond to someone else! Companies like Sirius Decisions have spent years talking about sales and marketing alignment. Th. They have built a powerful niche in the research industry around it.

Check them out at www.siriusdecisions.com. Their demand waterfall is quite powerful – it’s a shared view between sales and marketing of the health of an organization’s new business related activities. It measures the progression of leads through a range of stages – from cold to closed. The key here is that it is a progression, and to move leads through the waterfall, marketers and sales professionals need to use various tactics to help leads move through the stages and eventually become deals.

Leads are leads. Deals are deals. Don’t mix them up.

The post A B2B Marketer’s Word Jumble….Leads vs Deals appeared first on Virtual Causeway.