Stop Assuming Leads are Qualified: Know They Are

I had the pleasure of speaking with Genius CEO David Thompson the other day about the launch of Marketing Genius and his take on what's needed to get qualified leads to sales at the right time to close more business. I think their new tool set has a great take on enabling companies to focus on qualified leads, eliminating time wasted on leads not ready to buy.

The challenge many marketers have is the gap in credibility with sales who thinks a majority of the leads marketing hands off are not qualified and ready for sales activities.

We all know about the struggles we go through trying to get agreement from the sales team about what constitutes a qualified lead and then provide them with leads that match up with the definition. But, as buyers hold back from identifying themselves until they're far along in their purchase process, lead generation and qualification becomes even more challenging.

Marketing Genius tackles this issue from a couple of great angles.

1. The tools have taken a lot of the assumption out of the lead quality equation. Both marketing and sales can see in real time, as well as in review, how their leads respond to their email marketing. They can also monitor leads' behavior on their website as leads interact with content. Both sides can now see what's happening with leads, as it happens, getting them closer to agreement about transitions.

2. The Genius folks have included the ability for marketing or sales reps to instantly present a personalized promo overlay on the web page the lead is visiting and invite them to chat about that offer. Because they can see the lead's history, activity and exactly where they are on the website, the offers can be highly relevant and personalized.

This ability to open a dialogue and interact directly with leads at the time their attention is focused on your company is tremendous. Plus, transcripts are recorded to the lead's record providing a growing level of intelligence about the relationship developing between you and your leads.

3. One of my favorite things they did was keep the human touch for what I call a "behavioral reality check." The norm in marketing automation scoring assumes because a lead has accumulated a particular amount of "scored" activities they are qualified and automatically transitions them to sales. [that assumption thing]

Marketing Genius eliminates that (often) skewed assumption and leverages work flow to allow humans (whether marketing or sales) to evaluate a lead's behavior and make a reasoned decision about sales-readiness. This alone should contribute to closing that gap in credibility that keeps marketing and sales at arms' length.

4. Instant replay is also a huge opportunity for marketers to learn not only which content is engaging their leads, but also the manner in which their leads access and view it. This means that content can be continuously tuned and arranged in ways that work for your audience. It also helps you determine how to segment based on what they view. [If your content is strategically constructed to provide that learning.]

I've only scratched the surface of what Marketing Genius can do, but one more thing you should know is that you can apply the tools to your existing web site, which means it's easy to get started. Oh, and one more - The tools are on-demand and designed for business users.

There are a variety of tools coming online that put control of marketing programs back into the hands of marketers, eliminating the frustration that happens when marketing programs get bogged down in an IT queue. I've seen and reported on a number of them on this blog.  I hope we'll see marketers embracing the tools and gaining in their ability to pay attention to the details of relevance, personalization and interactivity.

Marketing Genius provides a tool set that will help you get there.

At the $49 per user price point of Marketing Genius, you really don't have an excuse of why marketing automation isn't in your arsenal.

If you're not convinced about the payoff of marketing automation tools, consider that CSO Insights research found that 20% of forecast wins in the sales pipeline didn't end in a purchase decision. Calculate how much time was spent in pursuit of those non-decision leads.

The good news is that CSO Insights found that marketing automation can impact your sales results rather substantially. "Simply stated, better quality leads result in easier/better quality sales cycles. And the 'booked versus forecast' results of companies that exceeded expectations in prioritizing which opportunities to pursue perform 10% better than the group needing to improve." [Improve Lead Generation and Clean Up Your Pipeline - CSO Insights whitepaper]

Some additional links:
Marketing Genius launch press release

Email Marketing that Leverages Your Website (ecommerce guide article)

Comments

[Engago team]

Still one needs to send an email first before the systems can track.
Thus you need email addresses.
Many email addresses.

What if you would only address people in companies that have shown their interest by visiting your website.

Only a few emails required as this is cold calling on warm companies.
Google: Website visitor identification for finding such services.