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  What a Top-Notch Lead Management Program Looks Like

  

  Walk into any active sales room, and it’s easy to tell how time-intensive most sales operations are. To make the hours spent worthwhile, it’s important to ensure that your sales team is only talking to the most qualified leads. Lead management is a strategy and set of corresponding tools that help companies filter out unqualified leads and better understand the buying cycle of their good leads. When executed well, lead management makes your marketing team more effective, your sales team more precise, and your leads happier. Lead management programs vary from company to company, but here are several important components to consider. 

  Prospect Intelligence

  For B2B companies, lead management should actually begin before a lead ever fills out a form. Individual website visitors who are still in the browsing stage can actually tell you a great deal about what content is attracting them to your company. By using prospect tracking software, which reports on the IP address associated with site visitors, you can understand which types of companies are visiting your site. Connecting company activity on your site with a certain type of content or topic can help you better prepare your sales team for when a lead from that company later converts on your site.   

  Lead Intelligence

  

  When someone converts on your website by completing a form or downloading a piece of content, the relationship with that lead begins. By using analytics to keep tabs of the content leads view and the interactions they have with your company, you can build a more relevant, personalized experience for each lead. Lead intelligence begins by developing a profile for your lead with the information provided and creating a place to store all future interactions and data on that lead. After you have that profile created, you can begin to segment your leads based on their interests and send emails and other communications that are targeted and relevant to them.

  Lead Scoring

  The good news about inbound marketing is that it can attract high volumes of leads. The challenge then becomes, how do you separate the good, quality leads from the people who are just looking around? That’s where lead scoring comes in. With lead scoring, you can attach values to each of your leads based on their professional information and the behavior they’ve displayed on your website.  Get started by meeting with your sales team and coming to an agreement about what makes a quality lead. What types of pages viewed or content downloaded indicate that the lead is getting close to a decision point?  What lead activities do you want to prioritize? After you've come to an agreement on quality indicators, you can use a lead scoring app like HubSpot's Lead Grader to assign custom scores to each activity so your most qualified leads float to the top.

  Customer Relationship Management

  Another key component of successful lead management is the integration of your marketing software and your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Too often, there is a divide between marketing efforts and the revenue that those efforts drive. Connecting your marketing software to your CRM system enables you to bridge that gap and get a complete view of your marketing funnel, from the campaigns and channels that first brought customers into to your company to their most recent point of sale. Marketers call this kind of end-to-end view "closed-loop reporting." Closed-loop reporting can help you understand which marketing efforts resulted in actual purchases so you know how to invest your marketing budget more strategically. To get started, make sure you have a marketing platform and a CRM system that have the ability to integrate through APIs.  

  Lead Nurturing

  Lead nurturing is all about understanding the nuances of your leads’ timing and needs. Basic lead nurturing involves a tightly connected series of emails with a coherent purpose and an abundance of useful, relevant content. Lead nurturing campaigns are typically kicked off in a scheduled cadence after someone takes a specific action on your site, like requesting a trial or signing up for a webinar, and they reflect the action taken. Alternately, behavior-based lead nurturing, often called marketing automation, enables a company to trigger communications based on real-time customer behavior. 

  According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. Warming leads up over time through helpful, educational emails will help them get to a decision point more quickly. To set up your first lead nurturing campaign, think about the typical buying cycle of your leads. Design related emails that address the goals of each of these stages (for example: education, comparison shopping, cost-assessment). Remember, lead nurturing emails should be designed to help your leads, not push an immediate sale. Use a lead nurturing program to time these communications appropriately throughout the buying cycle. 

  The Complete Picture

  Customer relationships take time. Research from Gleanster suggests that even when it comes to qualified leads, more than 50% aren’t ready to buy on the day they first convert on your site. You’ve put a lot of work into attracting leads, and often, it's how you manage them after the conversion that will determine if your time was well spent. The power of lead management comes in adapting your communications to reflect a comprehensive understanding of your leads' needs and timeline so that when you hand them over to your sales team, all parties are informed and ready to move forward.

  To learn more about how to get started with lead management, download our free ebook, Lead Management Made Simple.

  

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  Facebook Timeline Likely Coming to Business Pages Near You

  

  Earlier this week, Facebook announced it will finally be rolling out Facebook Timeline to all users in the next few weeks, replacing the design of existing personal profile pages. While Timeline won't directly affect the look of your Facebook business page (yet), the rollout does have some powerful implications for marketers. You can read more about those implications here.

  Timeline Design Likely Coming to Facebook Business Pages

  But, notice how we said yet? That's right, while Facebook business pages aren't affected by the current Timeline rollout, we have good reason to believe that, in time, business pages will be clothed in a similar Timeline-esque design, too.

  In an article from Co.Create yesterday, Facebook VP of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson discusses how Facebook is seeking to better align users' personal and brand experiences:

  "The goal has always been to have your personal experience on Facebook not be so different than the brand or page experience. And right now, it is different. You have Timeline and you have a page-brand profile. So we are absolutely moving in the direction to sync those up. We believe that brands want to be able to curate how they’re represented in a more visually pleasing way, and we’re in the midst of trying to figure out how best to do that."

  The Status of Open Graph Applications and Brands

  According to Everson, Facebook is also in the early stages of bringing brands on board with Open Graph applications, emphasizing that the rollout of these branded apps has been slow so Facebook can ensure brands are building high quality application experiences for users. Facebook is encouraging brands and developers to build apps that fit and appeal to users' 'lifestyles.'

  Marketing Takeaway

  While Everson's remarks do make it sound highly likely that Facebook will eventually convert the business pages we currently use into a more Timeline-esque design that better aligns with the experience on personal profiles -- err, Timelines -- we can only speculate what future changes will mean for marketers. Or you can get a glimpse at Mashable's take on what the future Facebook business pages might look like in the mockups here and in the image above.

  The good news is that it sounds like brands will be able to achieve a more visually attractive and engaging experience for page visitors and implement a more curated and organized view of their page. For Facebook, this visual emphasis may help it compete with Google+, which is known for its ability to cater well to visual content.

  Futhermore, because Facebook is placing such a big emphasis on the impact Open Graph applications will have on Timeline, we might also assume that brands that create their own Open Graph applications will have a leg up on competitors who don't.

  Again, while we can only speculate about what's to come for marketers, the best advice we can share is to start getting comfortable with how the new Timeline design works for your own personal profile. Doing so will help you better understand how Timeline affects a user's overall Facebook experience and will enable you to be prepared for the changes for businesses on Facebook to come.

  What do you think about Facebook's new Timeline design? How do you think future changes to brand pages will impact your Facebook marketing strategy?

  Image Credit: Mockup for Mashable by Ryan Kennedy
  

  

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  12 Critical Elements Every Homepage Must Have [Infographic]

  

  If you’re considering a website redesign or are wondering how to generate more leads from your website, there are several critical elements you must never forget to include. 

  Let’s first take a look at the homepage. Ah yes, “thee page of all pages.” It’s undoubtedly one of the most important areas on a website. That’s understandable; it’s a company’s virtual front door, and, in most cases, it gets the majority of the traffic. While homepages generally get the most love, I find it surprising that so many do a poor job of generating leads or sales. With so much dedication and attention, why is the performance of these homepages so lackluster?

  The answer is simple. A homepage needs to wear many hats and serve many audiences who come from many different places. It’s unlike a dedicated landing page, where traffic from a specific channel should be given a specific message to take a specific action. Landing pages have a higher conversion rate because they are targeted and most relevant to the visitor.

  But how can you increase the conversion rate of a homepage if it’s not targeted?

  In order for a homepage to work, it needs to meet its purpose and contain key elements that attract traffic, educate your visitors, and convert browsers into buyers. The 12 critical elements I’m about to discuss will help you do just that. As an added benefit, I’d also highly recommend getting a free marketing assessment to receive a customized analysis of your website so it's more tailored to you.

  12 Critical Elements Every Homepage Must Have

   

  

   

  Does your website's homepage have all or most of these elements? Are there any I missed?

  
  

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  The 7 Slides You Need for an Epic Monthly Marketing Report

  

  Here's a challenge for all you marketers who are on top of your game: How do you make sure your marketing team is taken seriously within your own company?

  One important step you should take is publishing a thorough, thoughtful, quantitative monthly report on your marketing team's impact.

  For as long as there’s been marketing, marketers have struggled to show their impact. But today, there's no need to struggle. Today, it's simple to collect the data you need to show how your marketing investments are generating revenue for your business. You just have to pull together the right reports.

  At HubSpot, our marketing team creates a deck of over 200 slides each month to cover every last marketing detail. That's extreme, and it might not be necessary for all companies. But what is important for all marketers is a core set of slides that reports on inbound marketing results. (Note the word "results." We’re not showing what we did. We’re showing what we achieved.)

  So here are some of the core slides we use to report on our results. What do you think we’re missing? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

  1. Visits by Source

  This is your measure of the top of your funnel. It tells you, month-over-month, how many people are coming to your site, and how they got there. You can look at this slide quickly to see which marketing channels are driving your changes in overall traffic. (HubSpot customers can find this report in Sources.)

  

  2. Leads by Source

  This is your measure of your middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) activity. This slide answers the questions, "How many leads did we generate, and which channels did they come from?" You can use this report to track month-over-month changes in lead volume and to figure out ways to improve the results. For example, if you're generating a lot of traffic to your blog articles, but you aren't converting any leads there, you should experiment with different ways to improve blog page conversions. Maybe you need better calls-to-action (CTAs). Or maybe you need better blog offers. Whatever the root of the problem, this report can help identify its location and help you understand where to dive into the details and diagnose. (HubSpot customers can get this report in Sources.)

  

  3. Funnel Summary

  This is an overall view of your marketing funnel that shows you the five most important metrics—visits over time, leads over time, customers over time, visit-to-customer conversion over time, and lead-to-customer conversion over time. This data gives you a great overall sense of your marketing team's performance. (HubSpot customers can get this data from Sources.)

  

  4. Paid vs. Organic Leads

  This view helps you show how much of your lead flow is coming from paid campaigns and how much is coming from organic inbound marketing. If you're trying to build an inbound marketing machine and keep your paid spend down, this slide can help you track your progress.   (HubSpot customers can get this data from Sources by exporting and aggregating all their organic campaigns, then comparing that to their paid campaigns.)

  

  5. Top Blog Posts by Page View

  This slide helps you keep track of the content that's engaging your community. This knowledge should help you refine your blog articles to generate even more traffic, and to refine your overall marketing strategy to better reach your target personas. (HubSpot customers can find this data in their monthly report or Blog Analytics.)

  

  6. Top Landing Pages by Leads

  This slide shows you which offers and landing pages are generating the most leads. You should know this information and constantly be testing new offers and landing pages in order to create new leaders generating even more leads. (HubSpot customers can see this in their Landing Page Dashboard.)

  

  7. Lead Speed to Your Event

  This is a way to measure lead quality. In other words, how good are the leads that you're sending to your sales team? If there isn't much time before your leads convert into an event, the marketing team is doing a good job. If your leads take a while to convert, you need to do a better job nurturing your leads. (HubSpot customers can get this data from a CRM like Salesforce.com when it's integrated with HubSpot.)

  

  Bonus for HubSpot customers! Most of these slides are already being created for you. Keep an eye out for a personalized monthly report that gets sent to you at the beginning of each month. The report contains a link to download a PowerPoint version of your own monthly report. Make sure you're using it!

  What other marketing data do you report on for the rest of your company?

  Image Credit: SqueakyMarmot

  

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  When Lead Scoring Is a Waste of Marketers' Time

  

  There are times in a marketer's life when lead scoring can seem like the Holy Grail. According to the MarketingSherpa B2B Banchmarking Report, only 21% of B2B marketers have established lead scoring, but many more are thinking about adding it. Lead scoring can not only help your sales team prioritize leads so they focus on the best ones first, but it can also show how high in quality the leads you deliver to them are. Yes, lead scoring can be a great tool for a lot of businesses, but there are also times when implementing a lead scoring process can be a big waste of marketers' time. 

  If you're trying to decide whether lead scoring should be a part of your business' lead management strategy, first consider the following signs that indicate you might want to hold off a bit.

  Your Sales Team Doesn't Have Enough Leads

  Unless your sales team is overwhelmed by the number of leads you're throwing at them, you don't need to worry about lead scoring. If they have time to reach out to all the provided leads, or if they are supplementing your marketing efforts by cold calling poor, unsuspecting souls, you don't need lead scoring because you aren't providing enough leads for it to matter! Your sales team doesn't need to know which leads are the best if they don't have enough leads to begin with. Lead scoring should be used to prioritize leads when you have too many and can't reach out to them all. 

  If you aren't generating enough leads to CRUSH your sales force, you should instead focus on generating more leads! Spend some time analyzing your traffic numbers and your visitor-to-lead conversion rates. You'll find that you either need to work on generating more traffic (by creating more content, optimizing it for search engines, and promoting it in social media) or doing a better job of converting the traffic you do have into leads (by improving your calls-to-action and landing pages). 

  Your Sales Team Doesn't Call the Leads You Send Them

  If your sales team isn't calling the leads you generate, or if they spend their time complaining about how bad the leads are, it's easy to think lead scoring can help. If you had lead scores, your sales team wouldn't call the wrong leads because the lead score would point them to the best leads. Right? Not necessarily. If your sales team isn't calling any of the leads you generate, your problems probably go much deeper than what a lead score could solve. 

  If Sales doesn't like any of the leads you send them, you have internal alignment issues that need to be resolved. Instead of adding lead scoring, you need to get your sales and marketing teams on the same page. If Marketing and Sales aren't in alignment, no amount of lead scoring is going to convince sales to believe in the leads you're generating. They won't trust the score you provide any more than they like the leads you provide. It's time to sit down with the folks running Sales, have a heart to heart, and get to solving the real problems. 

  Try setting up marketing and sales service level agreements (SLAs). The marketing SLA should set expectations regarding the quantity and quality of the leads they are providing to Sales, and the sales SLA should set expectations about how deeply and frequently sales people will pursue leads Marketing provides. SLAs help encourage alignment between the two teams, which is something you'll need before you head down the path of adding lead scoring to the mix. (Learn more about how to set up SLAs in your organization here.) 

  You Don't Have Enough Data

  There is no doubt that lead scoring can be super sexy. But it can only be successfully implemented if you can back up those lead scores with super sexy data. Lead scoring is generally based on two different types of data: demographic data and lead intelligence. Demographic data is information about the company or individual you are selling to. You can generally collect this via the lead-capture forms you ask site visitors to complete in order to convert them into leads. Lead intelligence is the information you gather from a lead based on their behavior on your website. How often they visit, which pages they view, and which offers they convert on are all great examples of lead intelligence to include in your lead score. 

  If you aren't collecting the right information from your lead generation forms or aren't tracking how leads interact with your site, then you don't have the right data to start lead scoring. Figure out what are the right questions to ask on your conversion forms by working with Sales to determine which kinds of data would be most helpful to identify the best leads. In addition, test different form fields and form lengths to see how these changes impact your conversion rates. Next, make sure you are collecting detailed information about how leads interact with your site (you'll need a marketing analytics and lead management platform for this). It's not enough to know that someone was there; you also need to know which web pages and content they're interested in and what their level of engagement is. Once you have this data on a lead by lead basis, you can start thinking about adding lead scoring to your strategy. 

  Lead Scoring Might Not Suit Your Business' Needs...Yet

  There are lots of reasons why you would want to score your leads. But getting reliable, valuable lead scores in place take time. First, make sure you aren't focusing on lead scoring when you should be focusing on something else. Before you start implementing lead scoring, you want to make sure you are generating enough leads, that your relationship between Sales and Marketing is a healthy one, and that you have enough data to make your lead scores relevant. 

  Have you incorporated lead scoring into your business' lead management strategy? What other tips can you share for those who are considering it, too?

  Image Credit: Michael Pick

  

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