White paper. 7 key steps to a great sales pipeline. your technology, expertly marketed

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1 White paper 7 key steps to a great sales pipeline The efficiency of your sales pipeline is the key to your delivery of new business. Take these 7 steps and you are guaranteed to be on the right path to building your pipeline.

2 7 key steps to a great sales pipeline The efficiency of your sales pipeline is the key to your delivery of new business. Take these 7 steps and you are guaranteed to be on the right path to building your pipeline. 1. Value proposition Why you? Your company s value proposition is what sets you apart from your competition. The big question is, how does your customer define value? Getting to know your customer and understanding their challenges will help you make that promise of value to be delivered. Is your business s value proposition powerful enough? A clear value proposition is key in your business strategy explaining to customers why they should buy and perhaps persuading Partners to form a strategic alliance. It cannot just be faster, cheaper, smaller it needs to be addressing a need the customer has and have a clearly defined benefits. Value proposition is the promise of your brand, give great value and you will reap rewards. 2. Sourcing high quality lists and data Good quality data and accurate targeting are critical factors that drive successful direct marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, unless your data has been worked i.e. s are cleaned, bouncebacks validated etc, un-worked data degrades at approx 10% per month. A lot of marketers rent or buy lists but you need to ensure that the list has been acquired legally and is data protection compliant, especially with some of the new EU laws. Source your data from an approved supplier, who will guarantee its source. Data sourcing, validation, cleansing, verification and enhancements are now the most important activity a marketer can do to make a difference. Now in the social media space things are quite

3 different. LinkedIn is bursting with potential prospects and with LI groups it makes it easier for you to target prospects that are more relevant to your business. But how do you manage group engagement in a measurable way? There are several prospecting Social Targeting tools available that are showing real promise. 3. Targeting Targeting is the overall term for directing your marketing endeavors towards a company, department, person or group of people. Segmentation is the breaking down of the market into smaller groups with the intention of promoting your product or service differently to each of them. Segmentation allows your marketing to become more specific. Targeting and market segmentation go hand in hand when developing a sales and marketing strategy. Choosing the right market and targeting it accurately are probably the most important activities a marketer performs. Choosing the wrong segment to target or worse still not attempting to segment the market, results in lost opportunities and wasted effort. To establish target market segmentation a selection criteria should be met, including - demographics, accessibility/location, competition, strategic fit with own business strategy, size or potential growth, behaviour, price sensitivity and loyalty to brand. 4. Content This is your method of talking to your client, but not in bits and bytes, but with a clear understanding of their needs and focusing on the features / benefits of your product. Content can take many forms product brochures, copy, case studies, white papers, blogs, web etc. Content is ranked as the single most effective SEO tactic by 50+% that drives traffic to your web and therefore creates Inbound leads. Good quality, creative content is key and content marketing is now a discipline all to itself. Quality creative content can develop great propositions and causes a customer to recognize the value of its message. Content should offer information designed to be useful for a certain audience with the intention of inspiring and outcome or action. Content writing is meaningful story telling. Statistics show that 64% of B2B content marketers say their biggest challenge is producing enough content and 54% of marketers say they will increase their content marketing budgets in the next 12 months.

4 5. Methodologies there has been ongoing debate for the last 5 years or so about the merits of Inbound versus Outbound. The Inbound argument has been mainly driven by the Marketing Automation platform suppliers, mainly because it drove sales of its software. In the real world a combination of Inbound & Outbound works best, an integrated approach. Inbound marketing has been the most effective marketing method for doing business online. The Inbound methodology is the best way to turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business. No one is saying do away with traditional marketing, Inbound marketing is another strategy to enhance your marketing services and it works. Inbound marketing is about creating and sharing and it delivers content directly to those who are interested in it. So how do you enhance your marketing channels with Inbound marketing? Company websites guide decision makers with motivating content. Content marketing through multiple channels send out a compelling message, provide creative and entertaining information. Blogs reveal thought leadership through informative, useful and more personal articles. Connecting to people on an emotional level and earning trust. Exhibitions expensive but worthwhile for some. Social Media network and communicate through Social Media platforms such as LinkedIn, G+, Facebook and Twitter. Case studies convince prospects you are good. Show them you ve done it before and you can do it again. Webinars show thought leadership. Video be seen, be heard. ebooks for complex products to explain special features. enewsletter update your customers with new products/services. White papers educate and give that little bit more. Outbound marketing should be part of your integrated services. marketing The key to marketing is to reach out to your customers with relevant and engaging content that speaks to customers as individuals, not just as a demographic. The first and most important rule of all is, relavancy - making use of your data segmentation exercise to ensure the is being sent to a targeted audience. If you re promoting a marketing solution, don t send it to the IT guys. They ve got enough on their plate without you offering a service irrelevant to that individual.

5 Send your from a person not a company - this gives the a personal touch and gives the impression the hasn t been blanketed. Keep the subject line short apparently 64% of decision makers read their s on mobiles. Many mobile devices cut the subject line off at 60 characters, so where possible, keep the subject below this. A whole subject line is preferable to read than one cut short. Use pain points in the subject line use phrases such as tired of minimal open rates on your s? suggests you have the solution, and that more information lies within the , or nicely gift wrapped on that landing page or white paper. Send on a Monday according to a recent Experian Benchmark Report, s sent on a Monday return the highest revenue per . Is the promoting a webinar? Tell them why it s worth attending! Explain the benefits of attending a webinar in the subject line getting to the point and being honest often works better than trying something clever. Send the at an appropriate time for your audience - Monday morning maybe perfect for your UK contacts, but you ve also sent it to your contacts in the USA, but it s 2am over there, - by the time they get in the office, the will be eight hours old or disregarded because the delivery time is from the middle of the night. Use the right key words in your subject line words such as new, ROI and download produce great open and click rates, but words such as innovation, newsletter and subscribe scare prospects off. Describe what the is about in the header sure this sounds like commons sense, but it doesn t always happen. Telling white lies in your headline might give a great open rate the first time, but your brand could soon be disregarded if the information in the doesn t match. Never go in for the hard sell prospects should be dealt with slowly, warming them up over time. This allows new prospects to become accustomed to the company and their ethics and learn about products and offerings they provide.

6 Don t make your sound like an advert If there s even a hint that your is trying to make your prospect sell something, they re more likely going to ignore it. Take some time writing your subject line, it s the most important line in the whole . Split test try different things. Send different subject lines to different people, and see which gets the best results. Once you ve got the stats in from an campaign, analyse them and use what works next time. Create an campaign and run blog posts in line with your blasts - so as to build more awareness of the topic of your . Tele-prospecting now with all this wonderful Inbound / Outbound activity you will have eventually have to talk to your customer, the phone is one of the most powerful tools in your armoury, don t be afraid to use it, but use it intelligently as another touch point in your engagement with your client. Choose, prepare, cleanse and refine your call list data - you hear the phrase, data is king all the time. It s true, data is so important and is often the key to a successful tele-prospecting campaign. Make sure you have the correct tools in place from the start. Have the right people, with the right skill set calling - brief and train your people well. Knowledge is important, but even more so is attitude and enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is contagious and so is a lack of it. Personality and the ability to build rapport quickly are crucial for success. Body language and tone are important. More often than not it s how we say things over what we say that s most important. Consider techniques such as peer to peer communication, this can often produce great results. Intelligently plan your calling strategy each conversation should be executed by the caller as efficiently as possible. Time is precious. Prepare. Know the proposition. Know who you re calling. Do your research. Social Media can significantly enhance your tele-prospecting activities - the likes of LinkedIn make it even easier for you to research, target and warm relevant contacts. Set realistic objectives tele-prospecting is a potentially powerful means to generate a sales pipeline for your business. It stops inertia in terms of insufficient lead generation. However, you need to work the process and give a time to deliver. If you do, you ll see the results in terms of momentum in your business and sales growth.

7 6. Clear ROI Demonstrating ROI A recent study found that the difficulty to demonstrate ROI for new projects is the real cause of a slowdown in the Tech sector. The metrics available to measure ROI include: cost per lead, total revenue, total lead volume, lead quality, closing rate %, web traffic, cost per customer acquisition, average deal size and time to close. From experience in Social Media, leads are normally measured as a download of relevant content i.e. white paper, case study or video. There are marketing ROI tools and resources to learn how to increase marketing accountability. Demonstration ROI can be done through the statistics from click thrus, downloads and SQLs. A recent article in the B2B magazine written by Joel Harrison, revealed telemarketing as the top channel for demonstrating ROI. That is a good statistic for debate. According to the State of Inbound Marketing report by Hubspot, 41% of marketers say that Inbound marketing demonstrates ROI for their company. Finding unique ways to attract people to your business/service, it s worth noting that B2B marketers with documented strategy are more effective and less challenged with every aspect of content marketing. Getting creative with content can make your business unique. With Social Media you are presented with so many opportunities to broadcast the value of your business. A webinar adds value to a customer through thought leadership, and video is a powerful broadcasting tool. In fact, video is 53 times more likely to receive an organic 1st page ranking than a traditional website according to diginomica Their article about The pros and cons of video as a B2B marketing tactic contains some really good statistics. 7. Persistence Industry practice is to have 7-8 interactions before a bite but also recognise when you are flogging a dead horse and dismount.

8 In conclusion - The best approach to generate sales pipeline is to use integrated services that best suits your target market and within your budget of course. By bringing together baseline best practices with today s marketing environment where we are embracing social and digital engagement we can create strategies to best suit everyone. It s about finding a good way to communicate with people who seem like good prospects for you. The world has changed in terms of pipeline lead generation, you have an educated savvy customer who is also extremely busy and does not want to be pestered by inappropriate engagement. The customer wants intelligent, timely, appropriate engagement ideally in response to some sort of Inbound action, but remember to generate Inbound potentially you will have to deliver some sort of Outbound activity. Marketers and their support agencies need to respond to this requirement by leveraging these new and innovative solutions for pipeline building. Written and published by: Thomas Hughes, Director Connection 2 +44(0)