Recently I have had the opportunity, more than once, to consider and explain what’s different about today’s B2B marketing. It seems the standard that exists in the mind of many outside of the marketing discipline is a lead flow where marketing played a much smaller role. In that mindset, marketing found leads and sent them all off to sales. Aside from the occasional last-ditch follow up campaign most of those leads fall dormant.
Now, that mode of operation helped grow a number of great companies, some would say. The time-honored tradition of following up on leads became a B2B pastime. So did complaining about lead quality and executing poor follow up.
For example, in the “old days” marketing would set up a trade show, do a promotion or devise a game that brought booth traffic, and then sales interacted with prospects in the booth. Out of a show came a small number of “hot leads” and a larger number of lesser quality “scanned leads” Of course the “hot leads” got entered in the system and followed up on quite quickly. The larger number of “scanned leads,” not so much. Really, marketing’s role was to instantly hand off all leads to sales.
Enter the 21st century marketer, armed with advanced marketing automation and lead nurturing tools, carefully-created content and end-to-end CRM visibility. These tools have changed the nature of the game for B2B marketing forever. Now a “lead” stays in marketing for long periods of time, being nurtured by steady and consistently-applied campaign rules dictate each email, call and question. This is the middle section of the chart.
Marketing then can “watch” the digital body language of leads and, in a lead scoring environment, can automatically move these to the sales process when they are ready. The systems can also dictate and advise when a potential customer should be called in the process. In that manner they can also feed the exact right content for the prospect’s stage of the purchase process.
Within a campaign executed by an automated marketing system, you take different paths based on feedback from the prospect; did they open the email? Did they click on any links? Have they visited the website? All of these actions can be input the lead nurturing campaign and each result can dictate different reactions.
Back in the stone ages of marketing “sales” did these tasks. Often poorly or inconsistently. Using a process that was basically untrackable. But we’re over that now. Take a deep breath. We can move on now!
Using one of these systems also allows the marketing team to work on new and creative campaigns rather than executing repetitive marketing execution tasks. It’s all good! Consider bringing it into your world!
What is the state of your marketing lead engine? Are you nurturing your leads properly?
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