Our last webinar on “The Complete Demand Generation Toolkit,” taken by Muzammil Ahmed, Senior Manager, Inside Sales at LeadSquared discussed the key metrics of demand generation and the importance of striking the right note to help your salesforce nail its prospecting efforts. Those of you who missed it, here’s a summary of some of the questions asked during the session.
Question 1
If a lead says he/she will contact me after some time, after showing interest in the product purchase, how long should I wait for the lead to contact me?
You should try to be in the mind of that lead. Of course, you can’t keep calling them, especially if they have asked you to wait. But you can talk/write about certain offers that are relevant to their product and that would probably bring them back. You have to reach out. How you want to take that approach really matters.
Time your timeframe. Let’s say you make your first contact attempt today then maybe you would want to wait 3-4 days before reaching out. This could be via email or a direct phone call to get an update. The first level of contact should be done as soon as possible. The second level would depend on the kind of audience you have and the relationship you have established so far. The main thing to understand here is with what element are you reaching out to them.
Question 2
If I am doing marketing for a software company which mainly provides content management system, android applications, e-commerce sites and ERP systems, how can I attract more visitors to the website or social sites?
You would need to try different things and find out what’s working for your company. In this case, you could run ads as most of you audience would be online. Blogging would also help since tech savvy people usually keep themselves up to date with the latest tech news. Share discoverable content like articles/videos on social media, Slideshare and so on, so that your audience can find out. Sharing downloadable content like Whitepapers and E-Books would also help.
Question 3
How many blogs or articles should I post for a particular product in a month?
Rather than worrying about the quantity of the articles, you should worry about the quality. If you are posting articles that are not really adding any value to your audience, then it won’t do any good. Your articles or blogs should answer prospects’ questions or have some value for them. You should aim at 8-10 articles per month but can be lesser if it’s high quality. You can post more of course.
Question 4
We are not using any CRM tool. We use excel sheets. How inefficient are we?
Your inefficiency is not proved until your performance graph goes down. If you are able to close your sales using excel, nothing like it. However, the goal is to increase the volume and grow your business.
As the volume of your business goes up, at some point, it reaches a breaking point where excel can’t handle or maybe you would be spending more time putting data in excel which tells you that there are certain things in which you need to focus on more and let a tool do the remaining work for you. Automating your process really helps you save a lot of time, get more value on ROI, generate more results on conversion, traffic, deals, etc.
Question 5
Can you deeply illustrate the processes in the customer nurturing process?
The nurturing process is very deep, and varies in different industries. It starts right from when the lead enters your system, and you send him your first auto-responder based on what he signed up for. After that, the process needs to be very relevant based on what he wants exactly, and what pages he has been looking at, etc.
For instance, we send our travel industry leads a set of auto-responders that have content perfectly relevant to travel – content marketing ideas for travel, lead gen ideas for travel, etc., and people are really engaged with them
In case of consumer industry, you should send across content based on what are they looking at, for instance, if they are looking at course cost for MBA course, send them loan options, scholarship options, etc. It’s not just limited to emails; it can be SMS messages, it can be quizzes, it can be contests on Facebook or anything that engages your prospects appropriately depending on their position in the sales cycle.
Question 6
What are the steps for customer retention, apart from mailing offers and discounts?
Good customer service and sticking to your promises. Other than that, you have to make sure that every offer that you send them, they are able to see the value in it for them.
Question 7
How to measure the lead quality between social media networks?
I’m sure you are running certain campaigns through which you can generate these leads. To actually assess the quality of these leads, you’ll have to wait and see whether they convert. You need to have some kind of a system in place to be able to track these leads, track their activities, track the complete sales cycle and then measure the lead quality.
Question 8
The process to check the lead quality is very long. Is there any shortcut to judge the lead quality initially?
You could include phone number fields in your landing pages. In other words, ask them to submit their phone numbers in the initial stages. That way, you would be able to find out the lead quality as only those who are interested would actually provide their phone numbers.
You could also share downloadable content (like Whitepapers or E-Books) in the autoresponders you send. That way, they would have to provide correct email ids in order to receive it.
Question 9
How can we allocate our total budget into different online media?
This would depend on several factors. One being, the kind of business or industry you are in. Second, the kind of online media that is working for you (as you would want to spend the most on the source that generates most conversions).
For instance, for an IT services company, we have seen that email marketing really works for them whereas, for an eCommerce business, ads on social media would generate a lot of traffic. So try different things, analyse the ROI and then decide.
