The equipment financing and leasing industry is a great study in lead generation channels. Between banks, private lenders and brokers the industry is incredibly competitive and heavily saturated. This makes lead generation a priority, and just like other industries, there are a lot of options out there.
Having personally managed acquisition lead generation for a large financing company in my state I can assure you each lead gen channel has its pros and cons.
Below is some helpful information I learned over the years for you to benefit from. For comparison, I will go from my least favorite to most favorite to give you a sense of direction. Enjoy!
Cold Calling
Let’s just start here, since every sales person, small company and independent broker begins with the art of the cold call. Or, as I like to call it, brute force.
PROS: The great thing about cold calling is you only need some prospects to call and telephone and you are in business. It’s a low barrier to entry and very inexpensive in terms of equipment and technology. However, this is about where the pros end.
CONS: Cold calling may be a simple and affordable way to get started but there are many pitfalls. First, it can take up to 100 cold calls to find a prospect that will answer the phone, be willing to speak with you and be in-market for financing. Not to mention if they are even a fundable prospect.
Quality of the data is also a factor like most channels, but bad information can hurt in this channel especially. It’s great that it won’t cost you much in equipment and technology, but you will make up for that in your time trying to capture lightening in a bottle.
Radio & Television
PROS: Talk about a large potential reach! Radio and television reach millions of people every single day. A captured audience in their cars or homes where you can target them with your message means the message is delivered, even if only half attention is paid.
CONS: The cost of radio and television advertising is astronomical and tracking back to mid and bottom of your pipeline is almost impossible. Intent also isn’t there as this is mainly an awareness play for bigger companies with even bigger budgets.
Social Media
PROS: Social media can be the bane my existence, but there is no denying how many people are logging on and hanging out each day on the various social media platforms. This offers an opportunity for you to get in front of a large audience very quickly, and usually for a less money than some other lead generation channels. This channel also offers some tracking ability depending on where you send a prospect post click, and tractability is very important when it comes to tracking your marketing and lead generation performance.
CONS: Sure, there are a lot of people on social media. They are looking at peoples lunches, concert photos and baby pictures. Sounds like a great time to say hey! You need some financing for your business? In marketing we have a saying, the right message at the right time. I would include, in the right place, and I question if this is the place.
If you have budget to burn and want to see if you can generate leads from social media go for it. At least you can track it through your pipeline if done properly. Otherwise this is more of awareness play where eyeballs will suffice over pure lead generation and return on investment. It also lacks the in-market intent we look for in a lead generation channel.
Direct Mail
PROS: Direct mail may be dying, but it’s not dead just yet. As long as the postal service will deliver a piece of mail there is some opportunity. This channel must be married to quality and accurate lead data to be sure you are hitting the right mail boxes but bulk mail can offer some leverage in reaching out to prospects. It’s another demographic play and with good data and perhaps a post mailer landing page or phone tracking you layer some tracking on top of the program for insights. If you can leverage a trigger for more targeted mailings you may be able to get some intent involved as well.
CONS: This channel certainly qualifies as a shotgun approach and what you mail is as important as who you mail it too so effectiveness can be all over the map. Tracking is difficult even with some phone and digital mixed in here, never providing the complete performance picture. Cost is also an issue, as printing and postage can add up quickly.
SEO
PROS: Cracking the top rankings for a relevant search term with the proper intent can pay huge dividends in the long run, paying out like a annuity. You can match the content to the searchers need via your targeted keywords. Most businesses have a resident expert that can generate original content so it doesn’t always require outside help or a new employee.
CONS: Most mid to large sized financing companies have a department of employees that churn out content every week. Search engine results pages reward large web site conglomerates and directories, further clouding the results. It takes time for content to achieve ranking, and age of content matters. Google changes its algorithm on a regular basis, which can wipe out all your rankings over night. True optimization may also require changes to your web site in addition to your content and that can require a specialist.
Lead Aggregators
PROS: There are two types of models within this segment. The Buyerzone model, where you can buy leads for a low cost, and the Lendio model, where they provide leads to direct lenders for free and charge a commission on funded deals. Leads are generally inexpensive and in abundant supply, and you can put requirements the prospect must meet before you purchase the lead. You can also track these leads through your entire pipeline to track performance. Plus, they always have more, meaning you can attempt to scale by purchasing more leads.
CONS: In the Buyerzone model these companies sell the leads multiple times. If the prospect submitted their information at more than one of these sites, they can be sold upwards of ten or more times, creating a confusing and frustrating experience for the prospect, and a highly competitive selling situation. I’ve even experienced prospects that thought they sent us an application when in reality they sent it to someone else. In the Lendio model, Lendio ultimately decides which funding proposal the prospect sees based in part on which lender is offering them the biggest commission. If this isn’t you, your offer may never make it to the prospect, even if it is the better deal.
PROS: Email has become much less of the wild west in the last five years. Service providers better restrict who you can mail to and what makes it into an inbox versus junk or spam. This channel works best when you have a home grown list of interested users and triggers that allow you to email with a purpose. For example, emailing a user that visits your site and exists in your database that doesn’t call or submit a form but spent a good deal of time looking at multiple pages. Email is also very tractable, providing solid insight into what is happening throughout the funnel. If you can organically grow a large database you can generate some consistent lead flow as a result.
CONS: Although service providers have gotten better, they aren’t perfect. With so many financing companies and agents out there competition is fierce, spamming is an issue and over mailing can exhaust your list unless you can grow it faster than your attrition rate. The better uses of email that get away from just mass mailing take a level of technology, people and infrastructure that smaller companies probably can’t afford. Plus, people are tuning out email more and more after years of emails showing up in their inbox and intent isn’t there unless done properly.
Search Engines (A.K.A PPC, Pay Per Click, Paid Search Marketing & Search Engine Marketing)
PROS: Tractable, repeatable and ROI positive. These three attributes are the holy grail of marketing. You can target in-market-now prospects based on intent and in some cases what they are searching for, right at the moment they are indicating they need it. You can control your messaging yet change it quickly, get to market quickly and control your spend. This means financing companies of all sizes can compete. It’s tractable from every penny you spend to every penny you make. And it’s repeatable, providing a solid lever you can pull year after year to grow your business.
CONS: By far my favorite channel, but it’s not without a downside. You need a skilled professional that understands both the financing world and how to use the paid search marketing tools. There are up front costs to get everything set up and running. And you need a budget to fund the advertising spend.
*To be clear, we are talking about search marketing, not display or banner marketing.
So there it is. A first person experience with lead generation for equipment financing & leasing companies. If you’d like some help generating leads for your equipment financing company, by all means reach out using our contact form!
A Note About Triggers and Automation
Many channels can move more toward an intent based marketing and lead generation play if you can implement triggers and automation.
For example, UCC filings were used for call and direct mail campaigns. Web site visitors can be targeted based off behavior if their contact information is in your database. Email openers can be targeted for an immediate phone call for a live contact campaign.
Find the triggers that can help you identify when a user is easily contactable or in-market-now for a better chance at generating that lead.
Google really came out swinging at their 5th anniversary of the Google Marketing Live conference. The Marketing Innovations keynote presentation is always chock full of changes you can expect to see sooner than later. So if you did miss the event live, don’t fret, you can watch the keynote and other videos on Youtube.
Here are just some of the highlights from the keynote speech embedded below.
- User privacy controls
- Changes to Google product brands
- New YouTube ad conversion strategies under the Trueview banner
- Machine learning in almost every product including search
- Responsive search ads
- Google optimize (for landing page optimization)
- Landing page speed scoring
- Accelerated mobile pages (AMP)
- Cross device reporting and remarketing in Analytics
- Smart Campaigns for do it yourself business owners
- Auto-optimized landing pages
- Grow with Google (training for small business owners)
- Google My Business
- Automated feeds for shopping ads
- Local campaigns (for local small business)
- Hotel campaigns
- Google Marketing Platform
- Search Ads 360
- Display & Video 360
- Integration Center
- …and dare we say, a whole lot more.
The entire keynote runs about an hour and twenty minutes with some post keynote discussion. Our opinion, totally worth the time. There will be a lot of new marketing opportunities on the horizon and you don’t want to miss out.
*post image property of ppchubbub
“You Could Benefit from a Free Consultation with a Google Representative”
If you use Adwords you may have seen or heard something like this by now. Either an alert in your account advising how you can beat your competition by reviewing your account with a Google rep, or maybe you had one call you directly offering to help. Either way, what sounds like a fantastic opportunity to get some truth right from the source isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
That isn’t to say it won’t be helpful. Reviewing your account with someone trained in all the system’s capabilities may provide insights into using the various tools at your disposal. You might even learn a new way to use features already deployed in your campaigns. Which can certainly be considered a positive thing. At the end of the day, I’d recommend that you do it, but…
So What’s the Problem?
First let me set the stage by letting you know that since I manage multiple client accounts I’ve fielded many of the calls with Google representatives. And since they rotate out every six months I receive a minimum of 2 calls a year, multiplied by all the accounts I manage, every year.
Now, you can say Google’s efforts are well intentioned, or you can say that it is Google’s job to get you to spend more money and this is one way of doing it. Both views could be correct. But that isn’t the primary issue at hand.
“I’m from Google, and I’m Here to Help”
Words that are supposed to fill you with a sense of confidence should make you stop and think for a moment. Who, exactly, are you speaking with at Google? And what, precisely, is their experience in running profitable Adwords programs?
Are they a new employee just out of training? Have they served in an advisory capacity for years? I recommend asking these questions before you get into any serious discussion about your programs. Yes, these employees are trained in the various tools of the Adwords system. But that is where their experience usually ends. The sad truth is that I have yet to speak with a representative that has run a real world paid search marketing program profitably. Not one yet. Period. Full stop.
In addition to that, they have zero idea of why you might be deploying certain settings or tools in any given campaign. They have been told that using X setting/tool/method will make you more successful, because Google told them so. So it must be true!
They may not understand you’ve made a choice to forego call extensions because you prefer to have more tractability even if it might result in a slightly lower conversion rate. Or that you want to receive leads only during business hours because your live contact rate increase results in more sales. Or you are using manual bid strategies to muscle your ads into the top 3 to see how you perform against the top competition.
Context is incredibly important when discussing something as complex as Adwords. Combine that with the fact they rotate every six months so even if you did manage to educate one representative you find yourself starting all over again, twice per year.
In my experience these Google reps have zero real world experience running active campaigns with their job on the line if it isn’t profitable. They are trained in the tools of Adwords and their job is to call clients and get them to use tools that will increase the amount of money Google extracts from your wallet, without any idea of if they will truly work or how to best deploy them.
A great example of this is the enhanced CPC that focus on conversions. Things may have changed, and every client is different, but so far everywhere I’ve tested this setting it has resulted in higher cost per conversions and lower conversion rates. The exact opposite of what they tell you will happen. Interesting, no?
What Should I Do?
As mentioned above, I would schedule the call and review your account with the representative. However, do not change anything in real time. Take good notes, then have some deep internal discussions about the pros and cons of each recommendation to make sure anything you implement matches your ability, tracking and goals.
Then, should you decide to implement a recommendation, be sure to do it in a way that you can test and track to an outcome. If the outcome is positive, you now have a new tool in your tool box to deploy throughout your program. If the outcome is negative, you can quickly revert back to your previous state.
The golden rule of using Google Adwords is first, do no harm. Implementing too many changes that negatively effect your performance is a recipe for disaster. So be smart and skeptical in your interactions with Google. And always remember, they have Google’s best interest at heart, not yours.
I’m often asked for Google Adwords tips to improve lead generation and product sales via paid search marketing. The truth is, most Google Adwords users only utilize a small portion of the tools and strategies available in the platform. This often leads to struggling campaigns that fail to generate the return on investment your business needs.
In response, I’ve put together this eBook, 15 Google Adwords Tips to Improve Your Campaigns, free for you to download right now.
Here’s a Sample of What’s Inside
Tip #1: Google encourages you to set up related keyword sets into multiple ad groups within one campaign. But did you know that you can only apply budget at the campaign level? This means you may be funding under performing ad groups at the expense of those that perform well.
In most cases, it’s best to limit ad groups to one per campaign so you can isolate and fund them according to their individual performance.
14 More Adwords Tips Ahead
Looking for help improving your Google Adwords paid search campaigns or don’t quite know where to start a new program? I’d love to help. Just let me know you would like to schedule a free, no-hassle consultation and I will reach out to schedule a time to speak.There are 14 more great tips in our newest eBook, 15 Tips to Improve Your Google Adwords Campaigns, and it’s free to download. Just fill out our quick form, and it is instantly available in a convenient PDF format.
The holidays are here. So it’s time to wrap up this year’s efforts and look towards new ways to generate more leads and sales for your company in 2016.
With the drastic change in prospect behavior over the last few years, you may have noticed that outbound sales methods and traditional marketing is becoming less effective. So what do you do to get in-market-now prospects coming towards you instead?
Shifting to an inbound marketing model is the answer. And we’ve expanded our services offerings to help you with digital marketing, lead generation and sales enablement to be sure your business continues to thrive in the new year.
Cash in using Inbound marketing and sales programs including…
- Lead generation via Paid Search, eMail marketing and CRM mining to generate new opportunities
- Salesforce and CRM setup, administration and customization to reduce wasted time and leverage your data
- Lead nurturing and lead management to push more leads through your funnel
- Marketing automation and triggers in tools like Salesforce and Hubspot to save on time consuming tasks
- Streamlined sales processes and sales enablement tools to keep your sales people having meaningful conversations
- Performance monitoring and reporting to provide better intelligence
- Marketing & sales team integration to break down barriers and get your teams moving in one unified direction
Want to learn more about how these programs can help you reach your 2016 goals? Email me at info@newenglandwebstrategies.com today and we’ll get something on the schedule. Until then, a Happy New Year to you all!
The Controversy
I recently published a post titled, So You Want to Advertise in the NH Business Review?, that appears to have sparked a little controversy in our marketing community. The basic premise of this article being, if you can’t track marketing spend to ROI of an ad in a publication, but can in other channels, why would you choose the one isn’t providing clear, and actionable results that grow your bottom line?
Comments poured in from both sides of the aisle. From those that loved the article for espousing ROI based Inbound Marketing and those that felt otherwise. I appreciate and welcome the spirited debate among our community.
The most common theme of the less positive responses to my initial article talked about the critical nature of a ‘marketing mix’, ‘delivering your marketing messages across multiple platforms’ and creating ‘multiple touches’.
While there is something to be said for these concepts, they are just that, concepts. When the rubber meets the road, the mix is less important than the effectiveness of the mix’s components. Advertising in a particular channel just because a ‘marketing mix’ is a good practice conceptually, makes very little sense. Results are what keep companies afloat.
It’s inspired me to author this follow on article exploring the concept, If I Only Had $1,000 Dollars. Because let’s face it, most NH businesses are small, and their marketing budgets are not on par with a large corporation’s. Which means a lot less room for error. Performance based, ROI driven marketing is all about maximizing spend and getting the most trackable bang for your marketing buck. And if it were my company, my family, my employees on the line, and I only had $1,000 per month to invest in marketing or go belly up, what would I do?
A Little Reality Based Exercise
Let’s pretend that you are a business owner in NH. The fate of your company, your family and your employees is all at stake, each and every day. Competition is fierce, and prospects are cutting you out of the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. You have only $1,000 budgeted to spend per month to generate new business this year, and if you fail to drive a positive ROI, you go out of business, failing everyone involved. You need to invest this money in the place that gives you the largest amount of quality marketable data & leads, trackable to ROI, and the ability to scale the program each month to stay alive and grow. What do you do?
Advertising in a Local Print Publication
You decide to invest your $1,000 per month budget on a small ad in a local print publication. We can safely assume that of the publication’s circulation, some percentage of recipients will open it and read or scan something, a percentage of those people will end up reading or scanning the specific page with your ad, and a percentage of those people will digest your advertisement.
Our verifiable result? We can assume that we got some amount of views, generated some awareness and maybe, a lead(s). We cannot calculate how much we just spent per view etc. because we don’t know the percentages that receive, open, read your page/ad. Without that we can’t assume much down the pipeline. More importantly, we don’t know where any of the audience is in the buyer’s journey or intent that allows us to customize our messaging for maximum effectiveness. We generated no marketable data, most likely no identifiable leads, and have no real ability to scale the effort. And to boot, any benefits end soon after the next issue is released. OK.
What’s Possible with Inbound Marketing
How about we try another path? We take your $1,000 per month budget and create an attractive content piece aimed at a specific prospect persona in a particular stage of the buyer’s journey. We put out digital hooks to that content piece via PR outlets, social media and a mix of other low or no cost channels. We also optimize a page at our web site to draw organic visitors, and email an advertisement to our database of prospects. We put that content piece behind a short form requiring a name and email address so we can generate more marketable data (to market to over time) as well as leads for our sales team to contact.
Then, we take another portion of that budget and invest in a paid search strategy, targeting keywords that infer the proper intent of prospects that are in-market-now and actively searching for your product or service. We connect our ads to a well crafted landing page with a form, so even leads that we can’t contact can be marketed to (and nurtured) over time.
Finally, we put a lead nurturing process in place using email marketing tied to actions/statuses in our CRM. Leads that progress through the process are helped along, and leads that are closed-lost for recoverable reasons are put into an automated email marketing chain in an attempt to reactivate them.
Our verifiable result? We can track visitors to our content page, and marketable contacts & leads generated from our lead capture form, from the various places where we placed our digital hooks, including opens, clicks and conversions from our email campaign. The content piece and web page will live online forever, getting indexed in the search engines and generating traffic from relevant prospects, paying us off like an annuity. As well as positioning us as a thought leader in our marketplace.
Our paid search program provides us with performance data like impressions, clicks, cost & conversions and ties them to the channel so we can follow progress all the way down the pipeline to a sale and ROI. Follow on improvements can be made based on the various performance data available from the search engine (in real time) so we can generate a better ROI each week/month. There is more traffic available, and more areas we can test our way into, to scale in the coming months.
Our lead nurturing program is pushing more prospects through the pipeline faster, while triggers are making it easier for sales to facilitate the process by automating some time consuming tasks. Leads lost to reasons like ‘no contact’ or ‘out of market’ are being automatically nurtured and reactivated into our sales funnel without further effort or spend required, and our overall conversion rates are improving.
Robust and real time channel data allows us to make quick, on the fly adjustments to programs to ensure we are achieving incremental weekly improvements. Granular line of site on performance means we can identify what is working best to maximize our investment each month.
Which would you choose? For me, there is simply no comparison between what is possible between the two programs, from targeting, to marketable data, to lead flow, to sales and ROI tracking. The ability to confidently (and quickly) pull marketing levers to put us in the best position to reach our sales goals is the absolute difference maker.
The ROI Based Marketing Mix
Let’s revisit the marketing mix concept real quick. Instead of thinking about it as ‘we need to advertise in X place because we need a mix’, or ‘more touch points’, (even if you do have larger amounts of marketing dollars to invest), I challenge you to think about it a different way.
Your marketing mix must be dictated by identifying what provides the most marketable data, leads and sales. Spend every penny of your marketing budget on what works best. Yes, even if that means you only have one channel for a while. And when, and only when, you’ve maxed out spend in that channel, do you introduce another (of course you’ve saved some budget for testing into new channels along the way). Work your way down the ROI chain to provide you with your ROI based marketing mix. It might look something like the following in terms of budget allocation. (Your business will need to create your own formula to account for various factors.) This generic list considers cost, trackability, propensity to convert and increased conversion as important metrics. (for purposes of discussion)
- CRM mining of current customers using email and call campaigns to cross sell into new products and services.
- Email marketing to prospects in your CRM that showed past interest in your product or service to generate inbound leads.
- Targeting and converting in-market-now prospects via paid search marketing.
- Tying email marketing of prospects into a live contact campaign for sales so they are making dials when prospects are at their computers or on their mobile devices (increasing contact rate).
- Creating high value digital content for data gathering and lead generation via the web.
- Customizing your CRM and Marketing Automation tools to improve lead nurturing, lead management and sales.
- Engaging in relevant direct mail pieces to targeted contacts that fit your buyer personas (preferably tied to some sort of identifier of position in the buyer’s journey or trigger event).
- Anything else that generates marketable data at a minimum, preferably identifiable leads, and trackable ROI.
- Once you have scaled and exhausted all other options, spend money marketing in channels that produce no marketable data, identifiable leads or clear ROI for incremental increases in awareness.
Are there exceptions to this performance based rule? Of course. Maybe you like and want to support a local publication. Perhaps you’ve invested all possible elsewhere and the general audience fits your basic mold, or it’s a hyper targeted niche publication and you’re OK it’s not highly trackable. Like I said, I enjoy flipping through the publications myself, and believe they do provide a public service.
But in the digital era, with so much opportunity and technology available, we can no longer be just marketers. We must be lead generators, filling the pipeline for sales, and accountable for our efforts impact on the bottom line. Utilizing every marketing dollar, no matter how large our budget, as if it is our last dollar. In short, we can, and we must, be able to demonstrate positive return on investment in everything we do.
Because if it was your company, your family, your employees on the line, and you only had $1,000…
Related Inbound Marketing Articles
- So You Want to Advertise in the NH Business Review?
- What Type of Digital Marketing Agency is Right for My Business?
- When it Comes to Your Brand, Are You All Talk?
How’s your ad in the Business NH Magazine working out? How many leads has it generated for you? How much revenue and profit did you generate for your business?
These are questions I ask many business owners in NH that advertise in the Business NH Magazine, just to see what I get for a response. Are you willing to guess the response I get the most? If you guessed “We don’t really know”, ding ding, you win!
It’s not that I don’t like the publication. I actually enjoy reading it myself. There are usually some good articles that keep me up to speed on the business environment in NH. You know what I don’t do? I don’t read through it looking for the vendor ads, ever. That’s just not how I, or most prospects solve business challenges these days. And therein lies the problem with this outdated method of advertising. You can’t target the prospects demonstrating the right intent.
A New Reality
Consider this, in the last decade a fundamental change has taken place in prospect behavior in the buyers journey. In the past, once a prospect identified a need, they would reach out to potential vendors and include them in the consideration stage of the buyers journey. With the adoption of the internet and the wealth of information available, prospects now conduct their own research, excluding you from that critical step in the process. Their behavior changed, your marketing has not.
Now how do you suppose a small ad in a publication is going to address the needs of your prospect in the buyers journey? Is it going to offer solutions or alternatives? Is it going to bring this prospect into your sales funnel? Is it going to provide you with marketable data so you can nurture this prospect into a customer? Are you even getting in front of the prospects based on their intent to solve a problem or purchase a product or service? No likely. It’s what I consider lazy man’s marketing. And it’s incredibly expensive to boot.
Doing the Math
Let’s estimate that it costs you $800 per month, with a 6 month minimum commitment to advertise in a publication like the Business NH Magazine. At the end of 6 months, you will pay $4,800 in total. And when I ask you the questions I started this article with, and you can’t answer them with specific performance figures that lead to a positive ROI, will you think this is money well spent?
What if instead you took that $4,800 and invested in some great digital content that addressed the pain points of your prospects in the buyer’s journey, that would help generate visitors and leads for years? What if you spent it on a lead generation program on paid search where you could get in front of in-market-now prospects searching for your product or service right now? What if you invested it in mining your CRM for new leads and putting triggers and automation in place to help move prospects through your sales funnel, or create efficiencies for your sales team so they can spend more time closing deals? And what if you could draw a straight line from that investment to your ROI?
That would feel pretty good wouldn’t it? And it would help guide your future marketing investment. In 2016, you would be looking directly at what produced a profit and know exactly what levers to pull to increase your leads and sales in the new year, every year. Over time, you’d build an Inbound Marketing juggernaut and be driving your business to new heights.
Looking to the Future
2015 is quickly coming to an end and you will no doubt be making choices about where to invest in the new year. Don’t make the same mistake so many others have made just to feel like you’re doing something. Start your transition to an Inbound Marketing model, invest your money in the foundational tools necessary to make it happen, and stuff your pipeline full of leads for your sales team.
Want to learn more ways to build your pipeline in the new year? I’ve written many articles about inbound marketing and lead generation, you can find them at our blog, Musings of an Inbound Marketer.
Interested in learning more as you plan for the new year? Let’s set up a time to chat over coffee. You can reach me anytime at daryl@newenglandwebstrategies.com to set something up, and the coffee is on me!
Daryl Eames
New England Web Strategies
*image sourced from scan of Business NH Magazine
Related Inbound Marketing Articles
- 5 Tips to Get More out of Salesforce
- What Type of Digital Agency is Right for My Business
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How’s your ad in the NH Business Review working out? How many leads has it generated for you? How much revenue and profit did you generate for your business?
These are questions I ask many business owners in NH that advertise in the NHBR, just to see what I get for a response. Are you willing to guess the response I get the most? If you guessed “We don’t really know”, ding ding, you win!
It’s not that I don’t like the publication. I actually enjoy reading it myself. There are usually some good articles that keep me up to speed on the business environment in NH. You know what I don’t do? I don’t read through it looking for the vendor ads, ever. That’s just not how I, or most prospects solve business challenges these days. And therein lies the problem with this outdated method of advertising. You can’t target the prospects demonstrating the right intent.
The Paradigm Shift
Consider this, in the last decade a fundamental change has taken place in prospect behavior in the buyers journey. In the past, once a prospect identified a need, they would reach out to potential vendors and include them in the consideration stage of the buyers journey. With the adoption of the internet and the wealth of information available, prospects now conduct their own research, excluding you from that critical step in the process. Their behavior changed, your marketing has not.
Now how do you suppose a small ad in a publication is going to address the needs of your prospect in the buyers journey? Is it going to offer solutions or alternatives? Is it going to bring this prospect into your sales funnel? Is it going to provide you with marketable data so you can nurture this prospect into a customer? Are you even getting in front of the prospects based on their intent to solve a problem or purchase a product or service? No likely. It’s what I consider lazy man’s marketing. And it’s incredibly expensive to boot.
A Quick Case Study
Let’s estimate that it costs you $800 per month, with a 6 month minimum commitment to advertise in a publication like the NHBR. At the end of 6 months, you will pay $4,800 in total. And when I ask you the questions I started this article with, and you can’t answer them with specific performance figures that lead to a positive ROI, will you think this is money well spent?
What if instead you took that $4,800 and invested in some great digital content that addressed the pain points of your prospects in the buyer’s journey, that would help generate visitors and leads for years? What if you spent it on a lead generation program on paid search where you could get in front of in-market-now prospects searching for your product or service right now? What if you invested it in mining your CRM for new leads and putting triggers and automation in place to help move prospects through your sales funnel, or create efficiencies for your sales team so they can spend more time closing deals? And what if you could draw a straight line from that investment to your ROI?
That would feel pretty good wouldn’t it? And it would help guide your future marketing investment. In 2016, you would be looking directly at what produced a profit and know exactly what levers to pull to increase your leads and sales in the new year, every year. Over time, you’d build an Inbound Marketing juggernaut and be driving your business to new heights.
Looking Forward
2015 is quickly coming to an end and you will no doubt be making choices about where to invest in the new year. Don’t make the same mistake so many others have made just to feel like you’re doing something. Start your transition to an Inbound Marketing model, invest your money in the foundational tools necessary to make it happen, and stuff your pipeline full of leads for your sales team.
Want to learn more ways to build your pipeline in the new year? I’ve written many articles about inbound marketing and lead generation, you can find them at our blog, Musings of an Inbound Marketer.
Interested in learning more as you plan for the new year? Let’s set up a time to chat over coffee. You can reach me anytime at daryl@newenglandwebstrategies.com to set something up, and the coffee is on me!
Daryl Eames
New England Web Strategies
*image sourced from scan of NHBR
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Salesforce is an incredibly powerful customer relationship management platform, not only for managing your contact database but for employing full prospect and customer life cycle activities, lead generation, nurturing & management and a whole host of related business and marketing activities. This also means it can be an incredibly large and complex system to manage and run. That’s why Salesforce users get together throughout the year to share and learn tips & tricks from fellow professional Salesforce users.
A major focus of our Inbound Marketing Agency is helping you mine and manage your Salesforce CRM system to generate leads. This month we were eager to see what nuggets of Salesforce wisdom our community would teach the group. There was a lot of great information, and here we highlight five takeaways to help you with your own Salesforce programs.
1) Reporting a Negative
Ever had to prove a negative or quantify something that isn’t there? This example came in the form of finding out what accounts in your CRM have never had an opportunity. A great segment to study and target with different approaches in order to generate more leads.
The solution is to use Cross Filters. Located in reports>accounts>filters this solution allows you to add rules around the qualifier “without”. You can also expand this to include various types of information including opportunities closed lost, opportunities closed won etc. to further segment the data for targeting.
2) Where Your Opportunities Come From
Most of us are tracking where our opportunities originate from. It’s a critical part of Inbound marketing and for guiding budget allocation. It can also be a messy report to look at if you have a large amount of channels to track.
This tip will make it easier for you to get a fast look at where the action is happening. In your leads header drop down there is an option to “show grid”. Think of it as a summary. You can add and format charts in a way that groups the data and presents it in an easily digestible format. Bonus tip, add the charts to various dashboards so internal stakeholders get the information they need to guide their efforts.
3) Grouping Data for Easier Analysis
Let’s face it. Although Salesforce is a great tool, some base reports can be downright ugly to view in their standard format. Try grouping data to save the day.
In this example we were looking at a report that provided deal close dates. From this report you can select a drop down to summarize data for easier viewing and consumption. Take it one step further by clicking on the matrix view icon to provide yourself a feature akin to Excel pivot tables.
4) Using Formulas in Reports
As marketers and salespeople we are always looking at our sales pipeline and how prospects are moving through the buying cycle. But sometimes we need to be tracking ratios and not individual figures. For example, what is my close ratio?
To help answer this question you can go to Opportunities>Group by Owner. Summarize the amount field. Then do a Lookup>Closed Deals and filter by your chosen time frames. When you group data this way to can easily create formulas to display in your reports.
5) Cut Through the Clutter by Using Dynamic Dashboards
Internal company stakeholders need access to different information that matches their responsibilities. Creating one report that can be easily filtered for these individual user needs is a great way to maximize information dissemination while reducing the number of reports that need to be created.
Using dynamic dashboards allows you to create one reporting dashboard and customize it so the information that displays is dependent on who is opening the dashboard, and which role is assigned to them in Salesforce. One more reason why it’s so important to define and administer user management throughout your Salesforce CRM.
Have fun implementing these tips into your Salesforce strategy. Don’t forget to share them with peers that will find them helpful, and share your tips with our community.
Want to learn more about how we can help you mine and manage your Salesforce CRM to generate and nurture leads? Contact us to schedule a free consultation.
We look forward to seeing you at the next Southern NH Salesforce Users Group event.
Special thank you and hat tip to our Salesforce user group host Scribe, organizing company Silvertech and sponsorship by Cloudbit, as well as all the presenters and attendees.
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