Sales Alerts best practices

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

Recently our company has started working with an external sales team for a partner product of ours. It has now become evident that their method of blindly calling random leads to try and convert them to a sale or free trial, isnt working as well as they expected! I have introduced some basic alerts to be sent to the telesales - Expression of interest alert, trial launched, half way through trial period, trial complete - and i've brought in some basic scoring metrics into the reports.

Now what am I looking for....... Blogs, whitepapers, books, ideas - elements that we can test. I know its all very different based on industries etc but worth a try.

Many thanks,
Barry

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I"ve found that the quickest way to generate some rapid click and download volume are short videos and general industry white papers with a "5 tips for... " or  "7 things to avoid..."   If you're looking to generate a sizable amount of volume and have a budget, and maybe a little bit of time, partner with a industry analyst to sponsor a report.

There is a caveat with this though, these are good for seeing who the hand-raisers are, but these hand-raisers may not be fully ready to engage in a conversation about a free trial.  But, at least they will be talking to leads who have at least expressed an interest in the general topic / industry / etc.

My humble suggestion would be to create a quick and dirty engagement program with a few easy to digest pieces like a blog post, followed up by accompanying short whitepaper, and then a free trial call to action or short video of how your product helps a specific pain point... and then use an engagement score in the program to quickly throw things over the wall into a "call ready" list.

Hope this helps.

Dave

[Anonymous]

Cheers David,

Some really nice insight you provided, instantly I can see why our nurture campaigns are too short and possibly far too direct in trying to instantly push to purchase or trial.

In line for best answer at the moment...

Thanks again,
Barry

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Barry, I second all of what David said, especially the down and dirty engagement program for nurture. You will really be able to see people's interest after a couple of emails. Also, be sure that you're constantly optimizing those emails to ensure the best results from them.

Another way you can pull out some people who might be a little further along in the funnel are looking at people who have viewed specific pages on your website. If you can designate a couple of different pages that would show real interest, then you can probably push people who view 2+ of those pages on to the external sales team with more confidence that someone is ready to talk.

[Josh_Hill13]

Barry,

It sounds like what you need are a clear Lead Lifecycle plan and content program. Sales Alerts are just there to notify the sales team to take action. Your list sounds good to me.

The next step is to decide on the lead lifecycle and if you have enough volume to hold leads back from sales while you nurture them.

While you do this, come up with a general track nurture you can send everyone:
Early,Mid, Late Stage

Use the Engagement system to run this and add content as you can.

Then, as you develop more content, push people into more product interest tracks that use the Early to Late stage or AIDA framework. This will take time and that's ok.

Review how Marketo and other firms have developed content and sign ups.

[Anonymous]

Thanks all for your input some interesting ideas here, sadly at the moment due to this being a new product of our we have to wait for volume to start coming through, but should expect that to start picking up soon as the product is awesome! Ha!

Thanks again, looking forward to updating you on what worked or what crashed and burned!

Barry