What to do with leads sales doesn't want (small company size)

[Jason_Alford1]

I like coming to the board to see how other people do things, and see if someone is doing something similar

We don't want to pass leads with a small company size off to our sales team, and we'd prefer to encourage those under a certain "Num Employees" to do a self service type of deal where you can go to our website and purchase the product there. Anything above our Num Employees threshold would go through the lifecycle as normal. I'm not even sure there is a way to monitor our wins and losses from these leads if we don't want to pass them off to sales...

I'm just curious if there's anyone with a similar situation where you say: this person is from a 5 person company we'd rather have them purchase via our website then pass them on to sales and how you handle that.

[Anne_Angele1]

I'm not working on anything like this at the moment, but re: tracking - do you currently have a way of seeing in Marketo if a lead has made a self-service purchase? My first thoughts on this would be to create a small business nurture with a success status of "self-service purchase". If a lead meets the criteria (under 5 employees), put them in a separate nurture, then if they make a purchase, update the status.

[Jason_Alford1]

Anne Angele​ Floyd Alvares​

Hmm. Maybe we'll explore the this separate nurture idea. So given this idea what is the end game here? If they purchase you just attribute them success from within the nurture program?

[Spear_Marketin3]

Yes, exactly. My thought was to nurture them with the specific end goal of selling through the self-serve and being able to report on successes. You could even go a step further and have cross-sell/up-sell streams if that fits your business.

[Floyd_Alvares2]

Hi Jason,

Yes that would be correct. The end game would depend on what is your content for the nurture? are you nurturing them to get them to buy or are you engaging with customers to "buy again" depending on what your content strategy is for the nurture you would attribute the success accordingly.

but in simple terms, yes I would attribute success to the nurture if they purchased a specific product! and leverage another nurture / campaigns post sell or for upsell.

Hope this helps!

Thanks

Floyd

[Floyd_Alvares2]

Hey Jason,

There are a lot of factors that determine if customers where the number of employees are less than 5 will use the self purchase service.

1. It is entirely business specific - one industry that I worked with leveraged this system, and while it generated a lot of self made deals, having a sales rep follow up with these leads made a even bigger conversion.

2. How complex or how easy is your self purchase service

3. How do you cater for the customer who are unable to or having issues with self purchase? Which team if not sales will help them?

4. What about customers that want the personal experience with dealing with a sales rep.

These are just a few questions that come to my mind right now.

However, I believe you should definitely test out this scenario. Like Anne suggested, you could build out nurture campaigns that help enable these customers to use the self purchase setup and run conversion metrics on how many drop offs, how many have converted etc.

You may even want to consider a different "lead scoring" / "lifecycle" model for these leads if the sales rep do not intend to spend time with them.

Hope this helps

Thanks

Floyd